Welcome to Slingshot25 Shotcast, a series of bite-sized podcasts that’ll feel like an expresso shot to your brain. I’m Courtney and I’m Jackie.
Something we’ve been thinking about is what we help leaders with. Yeah, we do think about that from time to time. Leaders need a lot of things. They do.
We’re a leadership development company that helps leaders. And sometimes we’re like, Hey, what do you all do? Like my mom and my dad, hi, hi out there. I’m sure they’re listening. I don’t throw this thing. I’m going to send this to them and they’re going to listen. What do you guys do? And so I thought it’d be really good.
What we were thinking about is sharing with you kind of a framework for the kind of things that we love to help leaders with. So, the first one is that all of our work centers around a leader. So just in your mind’s eye, just put the leaders in the middle of it. And my area of interest always is how leaders are responsible for making decisions. That for, that means they’re also responsible for the impact that those decisions, the impact that change has on their people. So we spend a lot of time helping leaders, helping their organizations manage change. Right? Because they, you make a decision and you got to be responsible for the consequences of that.
So that’s the first thing we do. What’s another thing we do, Jack? To help leaders. Well, that’s a big one. I mean, I feel like you just sum that up in like 15 seconds and there’s so much involved in that. Um, so in addition to just dealing with the impacts of when change is swirling about through all the decisions that get made, we also help leaders, what we say, just like a leader with others.
Like, you know, to be a leader, you don’t get to come into the office and just hide in your office all day with the lights low and you’re working on code or something. You just disappointed some people. I know. I’m sure I did. Louder for the people in the really dark rooms. Yes. Um, but leaders get their job done by having conversations with others.
And so we teach, uh, it sounds like maybe kind of, I don’t know, not very interesting, except I think it’s fascinating, is we teach conversation skills. We teach how to actually have a conversation with another person. I don’t care who that other person is, it could be your direct reports, that’s a, that’s a pretty big one.
Um, but it could be your boss, it could be your peers, it could be a supplier, it could be a client. We teach the skills of how to have a conversation. Really good, effective, outcome-based, you know, deep connection kind of conversations. The conversations that help you get things done and move things forward.
That’s a big deal. And you know, what’s an interesting fact, I think that we’ve always sort of known this about leaders, it’s actually a big deal. pretty obvious element of leadership, but what was interesting was when we recently read some statistics that 69 percent of leaders are actually uncomfortable having any communication with their team.
Not just the tough conversations, like that’s a whole nother ball of wax. The numbers even go higher, I imagine, but just any conversation. Yeah. So we remedy that. We get that. I mean, I can actually feel that I can understand that we are empathetic to that fear, and we help leaders just really get that stuff right.
Yeah, the whole conversation that it’s profoundly simple that as a leader, the only way people experience is with your conversations. So it’s worth your time. And what we spend our time doing is helping you get really good at that. It’s important. It’s the only thing you got. Right. So that’s the second thing we do.
The other thing that leaders need a lot of help with is others. With others, like these people are not getting along. This team doesn’t have a clear goal. There’s chaos. There’s political struggle, like others with others, like team dynamics. We call it team health and team health. When you have a team that has so much potential, so much brightness, so much good people.
And they’re just, they don’t like each other. They’re not being transparent. They’re not working together. They’re not seeing the results that you know, they could get. That’s an area that we like to help because, and we do that with a little bit of teaching, right? There are skills in working together and a whole lot of workshopping, an open environment for discussion, getting things out at the table, building trust, um, breaking down assumptions, and all these kinds of connective, messy things.
Like we love to help others work with others and help leaders who just, it’s a hard place to be a leader when your people aren’t getting along. And having some outside support to say, what can we do to move this team forward? I know there’s goodness there. We have important things to get done, but we’re in our own way.
And we help you get, we love to help leaders get out, you know, help you get out of your way so you can get some stuff done, which is what we want, right? That’s what your employees want. That’s what you want. We love to do that. And sometimes, uh, I’m like moving my fingers and you can’t see it. Like it’s, it’s not easy.
No. It’s not perfect. We don’t have a cookie cutter for that stuff. It’s very messy on our side too, but we help you figure it out. Yeah. Because employees don’t just bring their talents and, you know, their knowledge and skills to the job. They also bring their petty grievances and their dysfunctions and their drama and so we confront all of that in You know, we work with people we meet them where they are We are not free of our own petty grievances and trauma in our own team speaking of which I was gonna tell you something No, just kidding.
Oh, yeah. Well, let’s do it here. That’s a great. That’s a great place to just air our grievances I just had a great idea for a shot cast Okay, let’s keep this thing moving along before it, it completely goes down the tubes. Um, the final thing that I’ll say about what we provide for leaders is, it’s really a product, but I, I want to, I think we should call it out uniquely, it’s called The Truth of Leading Others and it’s a, it’s a, it’s a foundational, um, program for leaders that really covers all of the above, all of those things.
But it does it in a foundational way that we take leaders through a full experience that we ask them to not just focus on a particular skill, but really on a way of being. Um, and which is why we end up calling it the truth of leading others, which always sounds a little presumptuous like we have the truth.
There’s a lot of truth involved in working with other people and bringing out the best in them. And we have built this course to sort of wrap all that up and help leaders become truly aware of themselves in that journey. And Really get in connection with what kind of leader do you really want to be we talk about legacy a lot in that class like how do you want to be remembered and What are the ways of showing up in any interaction whether it’s with the team one on one working with your boss communicating messages of change whatever it might be We help you really think about that from um, I’d like it more I guess a deep foundational way and we do that for teams and organizations Right.
We have companies come to us and say, our whole, like, we have new leaders coming in and they don’t have the foundational skills. So we can help you with your new hire program. Or a lot of times like, yeah, all of our leaders could use a little refresher. Right. And so we have a Company-wide need to upskill our leadership.
So we start with truth and leading others. That’s what we, that’s what we bring and that’s, that’s where we go. So whether the need is an individual person or an organization, that’s where how that’s what we help with. And it’s, um, it’s kind of interesting cause the needs can come in like, as you’re listening to this, like you probably see needs of your own and then you see needs on your team and you may see needs of your company.
Like it’s all, it’s all the same, same to us, because everybody needs these skills. We use coaching, we use training. We use workshops, we’ll have a talk, like the, the mechanism for helping in those areas, whether it’s to understand the impact of change or working with better conversations or having other people work together better, just raising our leadership skillset.
We had a lot of different levels to push, right? Coaching, training, workshops. So that’s all for this episode of our Shotcast, but we always have much more to say. If you want more, drop us a line at slingshot25.com. Until next time.