Loading summary
Transcript2 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:08]
Coaching for Leaders Today, a special episode that is a overview of the results and also some of the things I'm doing from our 2025 listener survey. So this is not a normal leadership episode. If you're looking for that, go one episode past the last Monday's or this coming Monday's. The the normal episode will be there. But today, four big things I'd love you to know, especially if you listen to the show regularly. On what I heard from a recent survey, some of the things I'm doing and then just some of the thinking and milestones coming up for me right away. So a little bit of background. First of all, the listener survey went out a few months ago. I try to do this somewhat regularly. It'll then been a couple years since I did a big survey. I sent out one email to everyone who receives our weekly guide and over a thousand of you responded responded to the survey and took three to four minutes to complete the survey and share your thoughts and ideas. And if you were one of those thousand plus people who did that, thank you so much for taking the time to share your thoughts with me. And now I'd love to return the favor and share what I heard from the survey and some of the key things for you to know. So four big things in this episode to share with you. First of all, I'd love you to know what people are struggling with in our listener community right now. Anytime I send out a survey, one of the questions I've learned to ask is what are you struggling with at work right now? I heard a number of themes. I'd like to share those with you so you know what folks are struggling with. You can maybe reference some of the things you're facing right now in your work so you have a sense of what our broader community is struggling with. Secondly, I'd also love to share with you some of the feedback that I received on behalf of Coaching for Leaders and for me personally that I can do that will help this to be better for you. Third is I'd love to also tell you what I'm thinking about doing and in response to some of that feedback and some of the shifts that I'm already planning, but also just some of the things I'm thinking about in the context of that. And then fourth and finally, I've got a milestone to share with you that I think is pretty cool and a little bit of gratitude to share with you as well. So let's tackle all four of those things in this episode. Okay? Number one, what are you struggling with at work right now. That is a question I asked amongst many other in the survey. Ask some demographic questions of course too. But there are that question is always foremost for me because I really do want to know what you're dealing with so I can do a better job as host of this show in order to respond to the topics that I know are important for people to hear right now, and also so we can center episodes and topics around those things that are going to be most relevant to you. So here are the Big six. Not necessarily in this order, but the big six things that you said you're struggling with at work right now. First, you Team management and Leadership transitions so leading new teams or changing teams is always a challenge. That came up very strongly in the survey. No surprise here at all. For me, one of the regular kinds of episodes we have on the show is talking about team leadership and how to lead a team, how to start a team, how to navigate team leadership effectively. That comes up all the time. Those episodes always get a lot of traction when we air them. We're going to continue to index on that, of course. Okay, second one Time management and workload. Juggling responsibilities is something folks said is a big issue for them. This one I'll say more about in a bit was a little more of a surprise for me, and I'll say why in a moment. Okay, third one Adapting to change and culture shifts, organizational transitions and disruption. No surprise there because there is so much changing in the world with AI, geopolitics, remote work, all of that. The way we work is changing in so many different ways. And of course there's so many external forces that are pushing on so many of us in new ways these days. So no surprise there. Fourth, new roles and expectations. The pressure that comes from shifting responsibilities and changing roles. Again, no surprise. One of the biggest reasons that people begin listening to this podcast is because they are at an inflection point. Often that inflection point is taking on a new project, leading a new team, getting moved into a new role, taking in taking on a very big new job. And so navigating that is always, always top of mind for so many folks who are listening to the show. Fifth, managing others and the uncertainty that comes with that. Boy, I wish that management was certain, but it is not. It is complex. Every day, complex environments are demanding. This regularly comes up in conversations with our Academy members on delegation and accountability and feedback. The core management skills. One of the reasons we keep talking about that on the podcast. And then finally, client or stakeholder Relations, navigating the external demands, and the stress that comes with that. Again, not a surprise if ever there was a time when leadership was just thinking about the people who are your direct reports and maybe the person you report to. Those days are certainly over because so many of the roles many of us have these days are, the stressors that come from them are sometimes not even as much inside the organization. They are from customers, clients, suppliers, external stakeholders, associations, so many of the other folks that we all need to navigate and handle relationships with regularly. So that's a, that's a very common thing that comes up with our members and our listeners as well. So of these six things, I didn't know what order they were going to fall in and which six would show up, but there's none of them that surprised me. But the one that did a little bit is time management and workload. The second one, and it doesn't surprise me because it's on the list, but I looked at it and I thought, huh, we haven't done as many episodes on that in the recent past. We did years ago do more episodes on time management. And I just sort of realized looking at this list, that that's a bit of a blind spot for me. Of the other five are things I can think of multiple episodes we've had in the last year or two on those, but time management, not as much. So that's one thing already that I looked at and said, hmm, that's something I need to index on a little bit more in the months and year or two ahead. So more on that in a bit. But that's one area that I'm indexing on. And also I'm thinking about, of course, all aspects of leadership, but especially these six going forward as I plan out episodes coming in the next year or two. Okay, the second area, feedback. Feedback for coaching for leaders and feedback for me. In addition to some of the other questions, I also asked two questions inviting feedback and they were, what's one thing holding back coaching for leaders from being more useful to you? And I also asked what's one wish you have for how coaching for leaders could support you better? And there were four big things. One really big thing, but four big things that I heard from these two questions. The first one, the biggest thing by far in a way was the most common response was keep going, keep doing what you're doing. In fact, it was really, it's very affirming and very heartwarming, as you would expect. We took this whole survey, used AI to do analysis. It was very objective in the, in the old days, we'd have a person analyze it and it always comes with some, you know, some bias whenever an individual analyzes a survey. And so. But I also went through and looked through just verbatim and read a whole bunch of the comments that folks had written. And so many of you mentioned some version of like, hey, keep going, I love it, I appreciate the show. And if you said some version of that, thank you, I really appreciate it. And I'll say more about that in just a bit. So the other things, though, there were three other areas that came out as themes and feedback. So one of them was overwhelm of ideas. And people said various versions of that. Sometimes folks said too many episodes. Sometimes folks said too long in length. Some folks said just too many other things to listen to. Just kind of overwhelmed generally of ideas, content. And by the way, I get that. I run into that too in my own listening, my own consumption of content. But specifically folks said, hey, that's something that you should look at addressing. Okay, the second thing that I heard is helpful feedback was streamline options, people inviting me to think about that differently. Hey, is there a way to do a shorter format or more concise or some recaps or some summaries, some way to work that more into your work? So that was, that was the theme. And then finally folks said, it's hard to remember and find everything that's been discussed on the podcast. And I've been thinking about that a bunch. And in fact, just this morning we had a live event with a number of our academy and pro members and we were talking about a layoff situation that had happened with someone and one of our long term members said, hey, Dave did this great episode with Scott Barlow talking about, talking about layoffs. And here's the episode and you should go listen to it. Here's how it's helpful. And I had totally forgotten that I had done the episode. And she knew the conversation way better than me. If I'm having a hard time remembering all the things I've done, I can't imagine how hard it is sometimes for folks listening to find what's relevant. And that's the blessing and a curse of having been doing this since 2011 is there's a whole bunch of conversations that I had years ago I don't even remember anymore. And so being able to find and surface those things is a challenge. And so I totally get that too. So those are the, those are the pieces of feedback I heard, the big ones. Keep, keep Going was the number one, biggest one. But then overwhelm of ideas. What are the opportunities maybe to streamline a bit. And then third, okay, how do I, like, remember and define the things that have been talked about on the podcast? All right, with the context of that feedback now the third big area, how am I thinking about the feedback and what are some things that I'm considering for what this looks like ahead and how I integrate some of the feedback? So, first of all, one thing that I'd love to mention is just the overwhelm which so many of us face on so much, so much content. There's so much on the Internet, right, like YouTube podcasts, and that the feedback of like, oh, you, maybe there's too many episodes or maybe they're a little bit too long in length. And by the way, there's a minority of folks in our listening community that have mentioned to me over years of saying, hey, you know, could coaching for leaders be a 15 or 20 minute episode? And the answer to that is no. At least it's not going to be coming from me. Because the nature of what this podcast is is about leadership and the complexity that comes with navigating inflection points and people and behavior and the nuance that comes with that. And that is not something that you can capture in a 7 or 10 or a 12 minute sound bite to be able to articulate well. And going back to that first piece of feedback of the keep going message, so many people have told me over the years, time and time again, how much they appreciate the depth, the preparation, the time that I spend with experts of really zeroing in depth on their work and finding things that will be most helpful. And so as a result, I'm going to keep going on that. And when I look around the space as far as other leadership and management and career podcasts out there, and I look at shows that are regularly airing episodes that are substantially shorter than ours, I can only think about two, maybe three shows that fall into that category. And none of them are exactly focused on leadership, at least not that I'm thinking about. And so the nuance of this just requires more depth of conversation. And by the way, we do have a hard and fast rule, our editor, Andrew and I, that we never air an episode that's more than 40 minutes. And that's so that we can really respect commute time and make sure that we get a message to you while still in depth and nuanced to be able to do it in a time that works in many of our Listeners, schedules, and by and large I hear that that's a good format for folks. So we're going to keep going on that. Now, what I do think that there's an opportunity to do and thinking about that message of like, hey, is there a way to make things more concise or streamline for those who would want that format? I think there'd be some interesting things to explore on that. And this is the one area that I'm a little fuzzy on. I don't know exactly what this is going to look like yet, but I want you to know this is something I'm thinking about, of thinking like, what might I do that's adjunct to the Coaching for Leaders main podcast that might provide that format for those who want that in addition to or instead of the main podcast. And so I'm doing some thinking about that and what that medium would look like. And I've been talking to a few of our members and asking for feedback on that. So I don't have anything to announce on that because I don't know what I'm thinking yet entirely on that. But I want you to know I'm considering that feedback and maybe in the months ahead we'll have something new that I consider on that. Now the other two things that I'd love to share with you are much more further along and things I'm actually planning to move on in one case in the next couple weeks and in another one, certainly in the coming months. The first one is that I've been thinking of where else are there places where things are maybe more lengthy than they need to be, or they could be more concise or streamline or have a much clearer, crisp message. And one of the things that's come up on my radar screen in the last couple months and thinking about this feedback and talking to some of our members is the weekly Guide, the weekly message that many of you receive. If you've ever signed up for a free membership or joined in on our weekly guide, you get a once a week message from me that says weekly Guide and it is a summary of the podcast episode that aired that week. It's usually some other links and resources and I've talked to people about that because it's kind of lengthy and I notice that it's lengthy when I do it each week. And so I've talked to a few of our members and by and large when I talk to people about the weekly guide, folks say, well, you know, it's useful and sometimes I get in there and I look at Some links, but a lot of times I scroll through it because I've listened to the episode that week and I sort of already know what you talked about and I know it's just going to be a summary of that. Or I didn't listen to the episode because it wasn't relevant to me. And so I skipped over that one. But I've heard. No one said this explicitly, but I've heard, like, the Weekly Guide isn't as useful as it could be. And as a result, I'm changing the format entirely of the Weekly Guide. In the coming weeks, we are going to be moving to a new format, a new weekly message that's called Focus 5, rather than a weekly guide that summarizes the episode each week. The Focus 5 message each week is going to be very simple and streamlined. It's going to be five things that will help you and whether you have listened to the episode that week or not, it's going to be five things that'll be on around a specific topic. And one of the regular things I hear again and again from folks is they say, hey, what you do at the end of episodes where you talk about three related episodes that you should listen to around this topic, that is so helpful, could you do more of that? Could you actually surface more things each week that would be useful? That's part of what we're planning with Focus 5. So sometimes the Focus 5 message in a week will be, hey, here's a very specific topic on how to delegate more effectively. And here are five episodes you should listen to. Sometimes it will be five questions that you should ask that will help you to lead and coach better. Sometimes it'll be five articles on a specific topic that I think that you should get into and look at. Sometimes it'll be five books that I've been thinking about that are on my radar screen. And I'm thinking about some fun things too. Like what would be movies that you might listen to that would inspire you, or TV shows that would inspire you to be a better leader. What are five recommendations on that? All kinds of ideas. I think it's going to be really fun. I can't wait to start experimenting with this format. It's going to be called Focus 5, and each one's going to be different, but it's going to be short, concise, and I hope that it's really helpful to you. Now, if you already get the Weekly Guide each week, that is going to come to you automatically here in a few weeks, I'll be sharing an update or two in your inbox shortly. So watch for that. There's nothing you need to do if you do not get the weekly guides. Or maybe you subscribe to the or joined in on the free membership while back, but you don't get the weekly guides anymore. Go over to coaching4leaders.com if you set up your free membership again or for the first time, that will give you access to the Focus 5 message each week when we begin it, or if you're listening to this after it has started, that will give you access to it right away. So watch for that. Okay, now the last area that folks mentioned on Feedback is, well, it's kind of hard to find and remember everything that's been discussed on the podcast. As I mentioned, I run into that too. And one of the things that has been so interesting to watch all this AI stuff, it's fascinating, isn't it? And when it first came out and the LLMs and ChatGPT and Claude and all these tools came out, one of the first thoughts I had was, wow, wouldn't it be cool if we could take a tool like that and aim it at every episode, every word we've ever talked about on the podcast over the years, all my writing, if we could aim at that and give people access to that. And you know, we have of course, these huge LLM models, ChatGPT, all these things that have indexed the entire Internet. And then there's wonderful tools that will allow you to index your own personal library and look at things like that. And many of us use that. I use one of those tools for looking at our own library. But the thing that I think would be really cool is to be able to have a tool, a resource that I could make available to all of our members and to say, hey, we've actually taken this tool and we've aimed it at the entire library of coaching for Leaders. But just that library over the last 15 years of everything we've done and could be a starting point for every responding to questions, for finding resources, to recommending the right episode. And I think that goes a step beyond just having our free membership, which is, you know, you can of course look for episodes by topic inside of our free membership, but sometimes you might pull up 15 or 20 episodes and you don't necessarily know which one to start with. And so I think a tool like that is going to be a next step that will be really helpful for us. And I think we'll address the challenge that all of us have is finding things in the library. So I'M glad to tell you that we are testing that tool right now with we're working on it. A number of our members have already tested it, given us some great feedback. My plan is that in the start of 2026 that we'll have more to say on that and be able to give broader access to that tool for our members. So more on that coming. So those are the big things I'm thinking about that. What does that more concise, streamlined format look like? Again, that's kind of fuzzy. Secondly, the Focus 5 message is coming weekly. Nothing you need to do. If you get the weekly guide already, that's going to be coming in the coming weeks. And then watch for more on a search tool coming in the the start of 2026. Okay, so there we go. Finally, the fourth area. A couple of milestones I'd love to share with you and a bit of gratitude. My dad worked for the McDonald's corporation for more than 30 years. He started off as an accountant for McDonald's, worked his way up as the organization grew in ways no one had anticipated, and eventually retired as an executive from McDonald's. And as a result, as you'd imagine, when we were kids, anytime we would stop for fast food or we were on a road trip, we would always stop at a McDonald's. And so I spent more time in McDonald's restaurants probably than the average person in my lifetime, especially early on. And I remember when I was a kid, maybe 10, 11 years old, like in the late 80s, I would go to a restaurant and you'd see the marquee out front, the McDonald's golden arches. And at the bottom of the sign it would say how many billions McDonald's had served. And there was a two digit placeholder and it said 40 billion served. And then it would say 47 billion served. And then it would Say 60 billion served. And as the years went on, you would see the numbers go up and up. And I was looking at one of those signs one day when I was probably 10, 11, 12 years old, and I remember asking my dad, dad, what are they going to do when they get to 100 billion? Because there's only two digits built in on all these signs. And my dad thought about it for a second and I remember him saying, I don't know what they're going to do. It's a good question. And sure enough, at some point, McDonald's hit 99 billion or 100 billion. And the sign said 99 billion. And then it said that for a long time on a Bunch of the restaurants. And eventually they just replace the signs. And the signs today and the ones I've seen that say it, say billions and billions served. The numbers became so big, it became pointless to keep updating them anymore. Now I hesitate in any way to compare myself with an organization the size of McDonald's, because unlike McDonald's, we're a long way away from anything not being able to be counted. But I think in a way like McDonald's back in the 80s, I don't think anyone at McDonald's ever even thought that they would get to 100 billion. It had never crossed their mind when they put all those signs up initially. And I relate with that a lot because when I started hosting this podcast in 2011, this was supposed to be a tiny side project. It was going to be a transition to making a move into academia someday. Obviously, I've entirely set aside those plans, but it never occurred to me that the numbers would get as big as they've become. And we've hit two big milestones recently on numbers. One of them is in the last couple of months, we passed 50 million downloads of this episode. Since it's of this podcast, rather, since it started airing in 2011. That is an extraordinarily large number to me when I think about 50 million and what that means now. It's a hard number to conceptualize too, because of course, many of us listen to podcasts. It's not people. We download lots of episodes, Sometimes we listen to things multiple times, Sometimes we download an episode, we don't listen to it. So it's a hard number to kind of gauge around people. But 50 million, still a massive number number. That seems extraordinary. I remember when we got to a million and they could like, wow, that was huge. Never occurred to me we'd make it this far to 50 million. But the number I watch more these days is a number that didn't exist when I started. When we started doing this, you didn't know how many people followed you. On all the podcast apps, that kind of information didn't exist. But in more recent years, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, now show us how many people follow the podcast, and I can tell you in the last month or two, we've passed a big milestone. If you look at the three largest platforms people listen to, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube, over 300,000 people now follow coaching for leaders on one of their apps. That is a huge number. It's really hard for me to conceptualize when I think of, like, the size of the amount of people that is. And I wanted to share that with you, especially you've been listening to the show for a while, but also to be able to take a moment to say thank you. And I'd like to thank two kinds of people specifically. One is those of you who have placed your trust in me to be able to support you formally through the Coaching for Leaders Academy, through Coaching for Leaders Pro and through Coaching for Leaders plus, who, in addition to listening to the show, have joined our membership, have received so many benefits, but also as a result of that, have been able to support us. That's one of the reasons we've been able to keep this show going so strongly for now, almost 15 years, we've, we've done it without sponsors or third party advertising or investors, but this show has been from day one, entirely member supported. And those of you who have jumped in and allowed us to support you have continued to drive that. And so whether you have been a member previously or are today, thank you so much for continuing to support us and the efforts to support you. And the other person I'd like to thank is if you've ever passed along this show to anybody else. I hear so many stories regularly of managers who have passed along at episode to a direct reporter, in some cases an entire team. We have so many teams out there that the whole team listens to the podcast regularly, which is so cool. I hear from coaches and consultants who pass along episodes to their clients. I hear from mentors who utilize the podcast helping support their mentees. And one of the fun things I hear about often is spouses and partners who listen to the show together. In fact, I have had many, gosh, I think a whole bunch of people who have come to the Academy over the years whose their spouse or partner actually started listening the podcast recommended to them, they started listening and they ended up applying to our Academy. It's been really fun to see so much of that happen. And so I wanted to say thank you. I think that I have the very best job in the world, as I tell people all the time. And I am so privileged to be able to be here and to be speaking to you each week and being supporting you in your work. We are hitting 15 years in 2026. I have intention to be going another 15 years and beyond that, there's so much ahead, so much I'm excited to be able to do to continue to support you. So thank you for the privilege to do that. And as always, the very next episode is coming this Monday. Hope you have a great day. Take care.