Mashup - Leadership Traits Learned from Others

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Reciprocity Podcast with AG. Your host is Andrew Gadomski, and the show is a compilation of shared thoughts and experiences that impact lives with grace and authenticity. AG spent 15 years residing as an interim workforce analyst for Fortune 500 employers who provide financial and or healthcare services, supply chain access, or consumer basic needs.

[00:00:23] In 2022, he swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and faithfully discharge his duties in the coveted role of a Senior Operations Research Analyst. AG is part of the mission to deploy cybersecurity and AI workforce skills and shed light on how these skills develop and benefit the American people, US citizens, its residents, and tribal nations.

[00:00:50] AG asked guests in Season 1 the same questions. One was to share a leadership trait or technique they observed which they have applied. Hear the mashup of those answers.

[00:02:56] AG years ago, one of my early stops in my career, a woman who I worked for, still to this day, probably the best listener I've ever worked with. AG, and when I say best listener, maybe I would pivot that a bit and say she was the most present person who's ever led me. Every time you were in a meeting with her, nothing else seemed to matter to her.

[00:03:22] When I first started my career, this was the first foray into worlds where emails were happening and conference calls were being scheduled. It didn't matter. You were 100% swallowed up by her and her presence. And it created a level of I'm being seen and I'm being heard. And I've used that to the best of my ability.

[00:03:46] You'd have to talk to some of my team members and former team members to determine if I'm doing it anywhere near as well as she did it. But being present with people is huge. And I think from a leadership perspective, especially in today's world where it's easy that where's the zoom link or is the teams like kind of pop or if I'm on this call someone's pinging you or could you drop for just a second to answer this emergency call. It's really easy to break away from being present. I work to not do that.

[00:04:15] I work to be as present as I can in every discussion, every meeting and every dialogue I'm having. I have actually called her in the last 10 years to thank her for this because she shaped a huge piece of my leadership style all around the idea of be present, be with people, truly be listening. Good things happen when it does. I remember there's a pyramid about learning and I remember that there's the concept of doing and then there's this concept of listening and then there's the concept of teaching.

[00:04:43] And there's other methods of learning, but that is one of the key methods is you actually amplify how you learn by listening and then by actually teaching on what you heard.

[00:04:58] And I think that is a unsung and unfortunately, probably not pointed out technique that new frontline supervisors, you know, well, this is what I was doing before. And now I'm just better at it than everybody else. So now I'm going to lead a whole team. It's like you're going to listen to a whole team.

[00:05:21] Well, it's interesting that you brought up frontline and maybe young up and comers relative to leadership roles. I've been trapped in this one and would go back and say that the listening has become so important because as we're listening, I think leaders at all levels can get trapped into wanting to listen to respond. That's a big topic now. Let's listen to understand.

[00:05:49] Let's listen to learn like you were just saying versus listening to make sure I can come over the top with the right answer. Or what if I don't know the answer? Should I know the answer? We can get into our own heads as leaders too. And so I think that concept I brought up just a minute or two ago, it really does cool things for me because it can slow my mind down a little bit. If I don't know the answer to something, we can have good dialogue and say, I don't know now. What do you think? I don't know now.

[00:06:18] Should we go break apart and find answers together and bring them back? There's so many ways you can pivot from that discussion. So yeah, the listening bar none would be the biggest thing that someone has bestowed upon me that I've picked up and run with. And it's been huge for my career. So I thought really hard about this one.

[00:06:41] And I think one of my mentors said that if you can just take the first two minutes of a conversation and really try to relate and learn about somebody personally, you'll make a lot of progress throughout that call session meeting, whatever. So I really focus on building relationships and being a relator listening and learning about people, because I feel like I get the best of people when they feel comfortable and trusted in a conversation. So I would say relator.

[00:07:09] I think probably for my father, who was an officer at Intel for 30 years, I was lucky enough to watch how he operated more than anything else. It's leading from the middle, demonstrating that you are willing and able to do the same job that anyone else is willing to do.

[00:07:25] Nothing's beneath you and that you have the emotional intelligence and empathy to support and understand these people, listen to them and manage personalities and difficult conversations in a non threatening way. Especially in today's day and age. I think we're, I'll just be honest and say it, I think we just have thinner skin now than we've ever had.

[00:07:47] And so, so communicating and managing emotions and people is more fragile and delicate now than, than maybe it ever has been. Mm hmm. And, and then around all of that, I really, in the last decade, dove in and heavily into stoicism and stoic philosophies and try to use those every day in my own life.

[00:08:08] And in my work and impart them not through necessarily proselytizing stoicism as this great virtue or set of virtues, but just sort of in my behavior, right? When things are difficult for everyone as the leader, you need to be the one that's the most stoic and calm, right? It's easy to be a captain in smooth waters, but what's it like when the storm hits and how do you react to that?

[00:08:37] So I try to pay very close attention and be mindfully aware of how I react more than how I act. Um, hopefully that spills over to the people around me. And then I think the other thing is you genuinely have to love and care about the people you work with and they have to believe in that. I love that. I see that, you know, they'll go, they'll go a little, you know, they'll go the extra mile. That's right.

[00:09:03] When you lead through those troubled waters and you care at the same time, the reaction and the proactivity is excellent. I think a key learning of mine from a previous co-founder in my previous startup was about audacity or as we call it in Hebrew, we call it chutzpah, which is basically putting yourself out there. I'm a very polite person.

[00:09:31] Like I was also a nerdy girl. Everything is always within a framework and I'm always asking for permission. All of a sudden I've worked with someone who just knocks on doors and approaches people. And like with the motto, you know, the worst thing that can happen is a, that I will get a no. And that really affected how I'm thinking and operating in the world now as a subopreneur. So definitely audacity.

[00:10:00] I had the opportunity to work with mainly all generals, including four star generals, but mostly with a one star brigadier general. This was back in the mid 2000s. The war was underway and there's a lot of things to manage in terms of logistics. He held twice a week, 15 minutes stand ups.

[00:10:29] And I have never seen a more efficient and effective use of time. I got to watch him balance learning with decisive action. He would start those by opening up with a topic or a specific issue. He would share some context to give understanding to the facts that he knew or the circumstances. And he'd call out specific areas that he believed people would have equity and that he specifically wanted to hear from.

[00:10:58] His approach really set the stage to be succinct, but also for people to be succinct back with him. He would hear from different people and then he would also ask for recommendations. And there might be a quick discussion about that and the pros and the cons. And most times we left that meeting with a decision in hand and then actions for people to go back. And it was just a really effective and efficient use of time. I think the context is a little bit different. There was like war happening in theater.

[00:11:27] I learned a lot about senior level meetings and how to find balance with the right amount of information and how to prioritize that information and its importance. I'm a big fan of those kinds of stand ups. For years now, I really tried to keep meetings to 20 minutes. I've already seen your status report. So what obstacles can I help us remove? What are the enhancements that we need to worry about?

[00:11:53] Are you having restricted resources and what significant accomplishments do you want me to know about so I can broadcast or chime in and share with everybody? One of my favorite things to say is I'm yielding back 10 minutes to the group. I love saying you get time back because we were that efficient. I think when we transitioned to remote work, we started going from meeting to meeting to meeting with no breaks.

[00:12:21] So to really be efficient and effective with that use of time and to yield back time, I think we're getting a little bit more savvy and figuring out better time management in this virtual environment. Yeah. When it comes to leadership, I've been fortunate to work with some incredible leaders in my time and I continue to do so.

[00:12:48] I guess one of the traits that I certainly have picked up along the way and it has served me very well is a trait called intellectual empathy. What I mean by that is when you are engaging with not just leaders, but when you are engaging with anyone for that matter. It's really understanding the broader context in the world that they operate in.

[00:13:13] And if I think of a specific example when it comes to engaging with more senior leaders and kind of C-level execs, it's really about understanding them, not just in the economic and business landscape they serve in. But it's also about tuning into the unspoken realities that they are grappling with.

[00:13:38] So for example, I remember actually speaking with one C-level exec who was driving this amazing and quite high profile digital transformation in their organization and surface of it and externally looking in. It was so incredibly exciting. There was a lot to be optimistic and a lot to be, I guess, excited about.

[00:14:03] But when you are a leader going through and managing change, it's about really understanding what does this reality mean to them as individuals and from an emotional as well as a political standpoint. So it's about just really tuning into things like what does this change mean to this executive? Could it be that he or she is facing internal resistance to change, challenging stakeholders?

[00:14:29] You know, how are they thinking about empowering and engaging their teams to go on that same journey? Or it might even be balancing the pressures of short term investor expectations and the long term transformation journey.

[00:14:42] I think that has really served me well to be able to apply in my own mind whenever I'm engaging with somebody to understand not just the business and the economic context, but certainly from a personal as well as a political kind of organizational standpoint, what they are actually experiencing. And I have found that it's actually brought a lot of depth into my relationships.

[00:15:07] I really like this. It's almost like a set of questions, a set of conditions, a set of considerations that leaders may not think of. It's almost like a framework. I remember years ago there was a project manager who I worked with right after 9-11 in rebuilding the utility grid, the electrical and the gas grid in lower Manhattan after the towers fell.

[00:15:35] He had introduced a very particular framework around project management. And it kind of systematically went through a number of factors and a number of considerations managers wouldn't have considered. And to identify these yellow flags and these influences that could come in.

[00:15:57] And I found it to be fascinating. He actually had a cool little tool and it went through a hundred different ways of thinking because it was things that you just mentioned. Let's say, don't forget this or what about this. And sometimes I think we're so quick and under pressure for decisions that we forget what factors could actually impact the decisions that we made. We didn't consider before we made them.

[00:16:27] Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's where the empathy piece actually comes in as well. Oftentimes we expect leaders to know it all, but actually it's also understanding and appreciating their humanity as well. They are people just like us. They have the same dreams and the same desires and the same ambitions.

[00:16:48] And it's just kind of, I suppose, looking at them as a whole individual and not just a leader or an exec who's there to serve one purpose. I think the context in my answer is, I have an opinion that followership and leadership are mostly learned in the formative years.

[00:17:14] And I'll say middle school through halfway through high school. And so it really takes me back to when I learned leadership from a phenomenal man and human being that I call grandpa. During the summers, I worked with him and for him at a concrete plant. And he was the manager and he was the first in, the first off.

[00:17:37] And by being the first in, it allowed him to wait for the rest of the crew to show up and clock in in his office. And by observing him, it was never jumping right into the orders of the day or, you know, what are the things that they need to be thinking about with work? It always started with how, how'd your son do in the football game Friday night? You know, how's your, your dog doing?

[00:18:03] It was always personal, uh, extend with, with the work. And I feel like I've always, uh, strived to follow that phenomenal example throughout my career, uh, especially as a human resource officer.

[00:18:20] As the host of this series, I have to obviously reflect upon what the different guests offer as advice and insight. But it also makes me think more about each of these questions and how I would apply it to myself, how I would answer it myself.

[00:18:47] And as I think about this one, I want to reflect all the way back over 20 years ago. I was doing work with New York university.

[00:19:04] And at some point I became, uh, an adjunct professor, but at the same time, I also was studying to be a project management professional, get my certification and so on. Um, one of the instructors was a wildly competent expert in project management. And he was very data focused.

[00:19:33] Uh, he had this really great system, which I've applied to dozens of projects over the last, uh, 17 years of me being an analyst and a professional related to workforce. And it was a way to understand the risks associated with the execution and success of a project.

[00:19:59] So I had learned early on that you have to have proof and evidence. And his experiences were really intense.

[00:20:15] After 9-11, the utility grid in the southern part of Manhattan in the financial district was just an absolute disaster in that the infrastructure of electric and gas and water and sewer. And the power had been destroyed. Had been destroyed as much as the buildings and the many lives that were associated and part of that tragedy.

[00:20:45] So as New York was coming out of that, there was this infrastructure related need to not only to get the services that people required. And that required getting the electrical and the gas and the water and the sewer grids moving again.

[00:21:05] And he was charged with the electrical grid redesign and restructure and the implementation of that as a project manager. One of the traits that he talked about was the difference between work, effort and duration. And it was a very data focused concept in that there are things that you need to do in terms of tasks. That's the work.

[00:21:31] And then there's the intensity of the work that you have to execute, which is the effort. And then there was the idea of duration, meaning that how long would it take for you to do the work at the level of effort that you had?

[00:21:46] And I thought that that distinction and applying data to it was a tremendous learning to the point where now I think about work, effort and duration and use data in almost every decision that I make for. For someone else.

[00:22:07] In that if I can't hold myself accountable to understanding the work and understanding the effort and understanding the duration of the time or even the targets or the intention of when it's done, then how do I provide evidence that it can be done or it can't be done?

[00:22:24] So I really want to thank that gentleman who's probably listening on how that has impacted the work that I've done throughout my entire career. And I think that that's where leadership and taking a trait or technique from somebody else can be very sustainable.

[00:22:47] And it's important to realize that what you learn in those moments, you don't quite realize that they may carry with you for a very long time. So I feel very grateful that I was able to take stock of that early and then apply it for a very long time. Thanks for listening to the Reciprocity with AG podcast.

[00:23:14] You can enjoy more episodes by favoriting the podcast at leading podcast platforms. On behalf of Andrew Godomsky and all our guests, we enjoyed the time spent with you and ask you to consider reciprocating powerful learnings to and from all you meet.