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- [00:01]
A
Strong leaders prioritize efficiency. But leadership isn't just about performance. It's about making tough decisions, listening well and showing empathy, being human. The best leaders do both by leveraging the power of AI tools with the intuition, judgment and humanity only a real person can provide. Of course, easier said than done, implementing AI systems comes with its own workload, like researching, integrating and verifying accuracy. And that's on top of all your other responsibilities. So where do you even start? Our friends at Belay help busy leaders by pairing them with AI fluent assistants. They handle the admin with a human touch and you focus on leading well. And Belay is offering free downloads of the future of executive why AI isn't enough. This resource shows you exactly what AI can do, its limitations, and how an AI supported assistant can elevate your productivity. Text exec to 55123 for your free copy today. That's exec to 55123 learn how to lead better with AI.
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Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast where our goal is to help you increase your reputation as a increase your ability to influence others and increase your ability to fully engage your team to deliver remarkable results. Hi, I'm Perry Holley, a Maxwell Leadership facilitator and coach.
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C
And I'm Chris Cody, Executive Vice President with Maxwell Leadership. Welcome and thank you for joining. Today we're going to talk about should you be more of a hands on leader? Perry, I thought we were working on is how do we lighten our leader's load, how do we do less? Right. It gets easier as we go up all those things. But we're going to talk about this today. It really has sparked a lot of debate around what do you mean by that? Should I be more hands on? I thought we were trying to empower and develop, especially when we're at the executive level. And so we're going to talk about that in just a minute. Before we do, I want to encourage you to go to maxwellleadership.comexecutive podcast. There you can download the Learner Guide. We got a spot for you in the upper right hand side. You can click on that learner's guide. You can ask questions. What we would love is hey, what are some leadership things that you're dealing with that topics content that we can help you with? Maybe, maybe you have actually a story you want to share of something you took from the podcast and how it developed your team or you individually? We would love to hear that as well. So many leaders have told us, I think we would agree that the higher you Go. As you get older, the more you should stay out of the weeds. You should kind of stay above, above the work. But a recent HBR article, Harvard Business Review article entitled the Surprising Success of Hands On Leaders by Scott Cook and Nitin Noria challenges that assumption. So this is not about micromanaging. So don't turn off right now and say, I'm not going to get in the weeds and micromanage. They really describe something quite a bit different. It gave me a different perspective and it's pretty powerful.
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B
I thought so too. And this actually came up through a coaching call. I was on with a senior executive who has several divisions that he manages with. They each have senior leaders. And he began one of the. One of, they've always had really great success. So I'm guessing nobody really paid attention to how they're doing it because they're.
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C
Doing great, it's working.
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B
All of a sudden, business got a little tighter, expenses went up, revenue came down, whatever was going on. And so this leader positioned himself at their location, one of them, and he began working with the junior leader and asking, how do you do things? And all that. And he realized, he goes, they're not making. They don't see things the way they should be seeing. They're not asking the right questions. They're just going through the motions of what we are processed and they don't even question it. And I need to hear how they think to do that. So what does hands on really mean? That the leaders they described, the authors here in the HBR article, they looked at Amazon, they looked at Toyota, they looked at some others. And it's really fascinating. I would recommend it to anybody. But these leaders, high level leaders, were not inserting themselves in every decision. They were not displacing the teams. They were not hovering over the teams. But I love this, is that they were acting as teachers and system builders. Teachers and system builders. And when I saw that, I go, that's exactly what this leader I'm working with is doing and needs to be doing. He needs to be working with his leaders to make sure that he's teaching them how to think a little bit more and building systems that they can implement. So they're present in the work, but they don't control the work. They model the standards, they sharpen the problem solving, they establish behavioral norms. They do kind of these big picture like building the system types of things. They don't meddle, they coach.
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C
I like that.
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B
They don't override, they elevate, hoard the decision rights. They're not trying to make those take the decisions away from these folks. They want to help them make their own decisions, but help coach them in those decisions. And the goal they said was clear, to build systems that perform even when the leader isn't in the room. And that really got my attention because I said, we teach this all the time. Are you the kind of leader that wants to see things work because of you, or can you be the kind of leader that wants to see things work without you? And with this leader I'm working with, he has so many divisions, he can't be but in one place at a time. And what he's finding is when he's not watching or he's not there, it's not working.
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C
It's not working.
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B
So I wonder how many others of us struggle with that, is that you can't be everywhere. Are you building systems and teams that can make these decisions? Are you coaching? Are you elevating their ability to operate in your absence?
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C
Love that. Well, the authors describe five principles, by the way. We haven't talked about that.
- [06:18]
B
We were coached out of that, of.
- [06:20]
C
Effective hands on leadership. So number one, and I love this point, they obsess over the metrics that customers value. Now when I read this I thought, oh well that makes sense. But, well, why don't we do that, right? Because most of us as leaders as we begin to look at our business and we track, we track the things that benefit the company, right? When you think about it, for us, it's, we think about, you know, the retention and the value of a client. We look at the transaction size, we look at the revenue that's driving. But the leaders in this study, they, they obsessed over the metrics that reflect how the company benefits the customer, right? So what does that look like? So these leaders started by deeply understanding what the customer value was. And then they build systems around the customer value, not systems around what they were looking for to see as a value in the organization, as we all do as business owners and P and L owners. And you think about the financials, but if you get focused on that, that's not the value that is driving that number, by the way. It's the value that the customer's receiving that's driving that number. It's actually a byproduct of that number. So I love this point right here. Is that is the team focused on the right thing? Are they obsessed over the metrics that the customers value, not that the organization does?
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B
How many of the folks you work with, you think Knows what customer.
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C
Oh, I guarantee you it is low, low, low, maybe less than 15%. Yeah, they may be able to, let's put it this way, they may be able to articulate it, but they're not measuring it or thinking about it. You know, I actually made a note in preparation for this going I need to think on that for a little bit.
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B
I did the same thing. I go, ah, do we do this?
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C
Yeah, I think we do it a.
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B
Level but can we be more intentional?
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C
100%.
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B
Second thing the authors talk about is that these hands on leaders, from a senior perspective, they architect the way work gets done. I really like this, is that this is where hands on really comes into play. That it's really not about the org chart and where they sit in the org chart, it's about decision rights and workflows. How is the work happening and who's deciding what's getting done. The leaders then they're trying to push decisions closer to where they need to be made, closer to the front lines and equipping teams with tools and frameworks and processes that can help provide clarity for what, for what they're doing that remains. You know, they talked about the removing unnecessary approvals, reducing friction, giving people what they need to act with confidence and thinking. You know, if you're, let's think if you can't, you have a lot of people that are working under you. But if you can't, you can't be in all those places at one time. But if everybody knew if you had gone through giving them the ability to make the decisions to reduce the friction of getting things done, they don't have to come to you, they don't have to come back through you. They acknowledge that it's hard work because is the leader is giving up control. You're actually giving up by being more hands on. I'm giving up control. Why? Because I'm teaching, I'm coaching, I'm setting up systems that work, building up process to do that.
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C
Well listen, that is hard, giving up control. I recently had somebody say why do you feel like you need to control so many things, right? And then you begin to self reflect and you slowly let yourself begin to leak into that. And I love that word architect and how we get that around systems and processes. The third thing that they bring up is they use experiments to make decisions. What I love about this is that they don't want to micromanage. It's not what they're, they don't want to get into the weeds and manage that. They don't rely on hierarchy. They just, they want to rely on data and experimentation. They test new ideas instead of judging them. And authority or movement of these ideas actually comes from evidence, not opinion. And so then everybody can get on the same page when it comes to that. And that kind of just elevates everybody involved, maybe. Think about, I was just, while you were talking a minute ago, I wasn't paying attention and I was actually thinking about Elon Musk, his book, and how he will walk through, you know, factories. And it's like, okay, what if we did this and they're making decisions? Because then they experimented with doing it a little bit differently or, hey, tell me, why are we doing this? Or why is that in place? And you're going through and experimenting. And so John Maxwell says that good leaders ask great questions and they then let what they are learning lead the way from there. And so I love this. They use experiments to make decisions.
- [11:08]
B
I love that. And thinking about the examples again, I can't remember all four of them, but I know Amazon, Jeff Bezos and Toyota were big in there. Two others. But that was exactly like you said, the Toyota walking the line and being where the work happens. So that was number four of their strategies, was they lead by teaching the toolkit. They said. So one of the leaders that he was quoted as saying that hands on work isn't a phase that you outgrow. And that's what you were saying at the top of the broadcast here is that, yeah, we are kind of taught the higher we go, the further we are away from where the work actually happens. And many leaders, now what these guys were learning in this study was that they treat frontline involvement as developmental, something you do early in your career and then you leave it to other people as you climb the ladder. But these best leaders, they stayed rooted in the real work of the organization. So like you said, walking the line and being a part of that, they spend time, they said, where the value is actually created, so what's actually facing the customer. They get involved with that even when other demands, maybe they said loud and urgent. They try to focus their time on being in places where they can teach the toolkit, where the work really matters, where it's going to have the most effect and get these frontline leaders operating on their own and thinking strategically the way they like them thinking. Instead of these leaders staying in the ivory tower, they get down and get involved with how the work actually happens.
- [12:36]
C
I love, throughout our session today, we talked about, we've used the word teaching a Ton, right. It is that level four, it's that reproducing things, learning something new, but then reproducing and continuing to do that. The fifth one they talk about is they strive to be better, faster, cheaper every year, forever, Forever. It's this continuous improvement. It's this infinite progress that we can make as an organization and be able to build systems and norms around that so that we buy into improving every day. I was in a meeting with Mark Cole yesterday with our leadership team and we were talking about, hey, as we begin this journey, we're going to be looking at the plus one effect, the 1% better. Last year, this month, where were you? What were the KPIs, what were the metrics, what were the whatever? And then did we plus one it? Did it get a little bit better? Are we, did we get a little bit faster? Did we do it a little bit cheaper? Were we able to make it a little bit better? Those things are questions that we are internally reflecting on and using. And I love that they talked about this here because leaders, if you can figure out how to operationalize daily growth in your team as they're doing what they are there to do and they begin to catch on to that growth mindset and that continuous improvement, I think that your organization is heading in the right direction. If you don't, well then we've seen a lot of organizations have gone the other way and that's painful. And so number five, they talk about how do you strive to be better, faster, cheaper every single year?
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B
Yeah, that's what Toyota calls Kaizen and types of things that they put in there. Well, the authors, as we start to wrap up or thinking about this makes so much sense. Why is it hard to copy? And they found out that it's not a secret by the way that Toyota opens its factories. Bezos shares openly what they do. Donahuer was another one that teaches at Harvard. They actually teach these methods as what they do. But very few companies have ever replicated what they do. So as you hear us think about how we could do more of this, many executives, CEOs especially, are expected to stay above the fray and to stay out of, of the operations. And it's kind of the way we've been trained. But this moving to a hands on system architect model requires really an identity shift in how you see leadership, maybe redefining how leadership is. And I gotta tell you, because I have this executive right now who's dealing with my junior executive team across all these divisions, are not executing the way that I would be that I've learned he is actually having to get more hands on. And he told me, I feel, you know, like you feel like he's micromanaging. You're not micromanaging. You're actually training, teaching, coaching and helping to move them along.
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C
And the micromanaging would come in if they stayed in it. Right? The goal is not for them to stay in it, it's to get in, roll up their sleeves, like you said.
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B
Or if you had to make every decision. So if you were micromanaging me, you say, perry, what do you know? I want you to do this. What do you do? No, I want you to do that.
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C
Yeah.
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B
They're not, this is not what this article says they're doing that says that they're, you know, coaching their thinking and asking them what they would do and letting them moving that decision out the locus of control away from the tower and out to the people. But that requires a lot of work, intentionality to teach and train and coach.
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C
Yeah, I think it makes me think about, they know when to zoom in.
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B
That's a great one.
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C
Right. And then when to kind of to step out. If they go into the, the, the details and the nitty gritty of it, they're going in with a purpose. And the purpose is not, well, hey, let me show you what I know and you don't. It's, it's through questioning, answering and teaching in a way to be able to get them to understand it. And the other thing is you got to be able to do this without disrupting the current flow and the momentum as a leader. Because as, as you give an example, you know, leader moves into a factory and then all of a sudden, you know, we're starting to look at everything and production is going down because now things are being disrupted in a way and momentum is being impacted. And so how do you go about doing this and know when to zoom in and when to zoom out? So as I wrap up, this is not about, we're not talking about micromanaging as Perry. We want you to be more of a hands on leader, but it is caring deeply about how the work gets done. And so we're going to get in, help with how it's getting done and then get back out. How do we architect a new process, a new system? How do we help them be able to do that? How do we help them think a little bit differently and make decisions and approve so that you can't be there and you can't be at every factory. You can't be in every team. You can't be in every conversation on the phone. So the goal is to be able to set that up so that it continues. And when that happens, then it won't. The performance and the production of your team, it's not going to depend on your presence. And that's hard for some leaders to hear and think that to your point, it actually is going to happen because of my presence. If not, if I'm not here, it's not going to happen. That's not true leadership and influence. So back to your point. A great article and highly worth the read if you haven't read it yet.
- [18:04]
B
Perfect. Well, thank you Chris. And as a reminder, if you'd like the Learner guide for this episode, if you'd like to learn about our offerings, five levels of leadership, or our other podcasts in the podcast family, you can do all of that@maxwellleadership.com executive podcast. You can also leave us a comment or a question. We love hearing from you. Very grateful you spend this time with us. That's all today from the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast.