J: Welcome, everyone, to Slingshot25’s Shotcast. It’s a series of bite-sized podcasts that will feel like an espresso shot to your brain. I’m Jackie.
C: I’m Courtney.
J: And you might notice that you can see us. Um, we’re trying something new with our Shotcast today, so you can actually see us in this episode. And I feel like I want to say, Courtney, sorry about your luck.
C: Limited. What’s in the movie is like limited showings. We’ll see.
J: We’ll see how this goes. But as usual, we’ve got something we’ve been thinking about. So something that we’ve been thinking about is this idea that leadership is a thing.
C: Yes, it is.
J: That’s profound, Courtney. Profound. And that’s it. That’s all we’ve got for today. So I feel like we could just do a mic drop at that at this point. Um, but I feel like we should probably unpack this a little bit, unwind this, say, you know, that’s, it sounds like a pretty crazy statement. Leadership is a thing. It seems kind of obvious. Let me, um, let me tell a bit of a story here, maybe just a little vignette that will.
I never talk about what happens inside of coaching sessions, I will describe, though, I once had a coaching client who, you know, I do a lot of leadership coaching and, at some point throughout this, you know, this coaching engagement, um, this client said something to me along the lines of, you know, I’m starting to realize that like leadership is like a thing. Like you can get better at it. He had started like reading some books and getting really excited about it. Like it was just, it was fascinating to watch this, this client just, um, sort of light up by this idea, almost like he had discovered something fascinating and new. I mean, this is someone who’d been in the workforce for quite some time doing, you know, highly professional things, um, very accomplished person.
And then, of course, was now sitting in a leadership spot and really kind of struggling with that. It was really fantastic just to see that happen. And I’ll tell you, I, I kind of had to, uh, you know, I guess from that moment realize that, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve known this forever, but just to, to watch that on, on, you know, kind of play out that way was fascinating to me.
C: Well, and then I think you probably immediately crossed the hall and came and talked to me and were like, yeah, of course it’s a thing. And we ended up having, the additional conversation of why is this such a novel idea? And it’s like, of course it’s a thing. It’s, it’s different than what you were doing.
Leadership’s a thing. We wouldn’t sit here doing what we do for a living if it wasn’t. Um, one of the things that gets away with that, and we talk about it a lot is like, What do people think leadership is? Yeah, that’s right. What do they actually think it is? And I think it’s kind of useful to think about some of the things we believe that it’s not because the things that people believe it is that it’s actually not confuse what leadership is.
One of them is personality assessments. Personality assessments are personality assessments. They are for helping you understand yourself and creating awareness of who you are and how you are in the world. And when they’re used well, they help you build awareness of yourself and awareness of others, and that can build connection that can build trust that can build relationships, but in and of themselves, personality assessments.
Almost have nothing to do with leadership. Yeah,
what I hear you saying
there, Courtney, is there is no leadership personality. Right. That’s another way to say it. So you can have any personality type. Think about it this way. Regardless of your personality type, regardless of the people that you’ve worked with, they’ve been all sorts of personality types.
You’ve seen some personality types that are excellent leaders, and you have some personality types that are horrible leaders. Because it comes down to the leadership, not the personality type.
J: So true. So true. Um, another one that comes up for me is, and, and, you know, because I spent a lot of time in a classroom as, as do you teaching leadership is it’s not a bunch of.
Tips and tricks and tactics and models and acronyms and, and we, I think we’ve said that before in our conversations here, like we, that’s kind of a thing with us. Like we, we like to create, um, learning moments with leaders that are not really centered around those models and techniques and tricks and all of that kind of stuff.
Because although, you know, some of those things are helpful. And useful, um, they don’t constitute leadership, you know, leadership is a way of thinking. Um, so anyone who’s trying to, as we say, like acts of their way through leadership is at some point, you know, it like the, what did they say? The, the, the gig will be up, right?
It will eventually sort of not work for you because you haven’t come into the space and to come into leadership with a, you know, with the, with the habits and the thinking that are actually required to be a leader. Right.
C: The next five minutes, who you are all the time. Right. Yeah. And then probably the last one, there’s probably more, more, more, more, more, more, but the last one I wanted to pick apart and share with you today is leadership is also.
Although it’s a title, it’s not a title, like you do not get bestowed any leadership skill by having a title and the reverse is true. Like I’ve had some conversations recently where I know people who are being considered for greater titles and they’re nervous that they’re not worthy of those titles.
I’m like, but you’re a leader. So because you’re a good leader is why you’re being offered that opportunity. Don’t be afraid of it. Once you step into it with your. Leadership skills, you can handle the title and you have other people who have the title and they think that gives them some kind of power that people will follow them and your title does not do that.
It doesn’t make you a leader caring about people being humble in their midst, preparing them for success. That makes you a leader. So we get kind of all tangled up about what we think leadership is and what it’s not. And yeah, leadership’s a thing.
J: It is a thing. Um, and I like what you’re saying there, Courtney, about there are certain jobs, like if you think of an org chart structure, there’s boxes on it.
They get three times fast. No, no, don’t make me do that. Then this video thing will be a complete flop. Um, so, you know, there are boxes on that org chart that if you don’t have leadership skills and you’re sitting in that box, that’s going to be a real problem. I mean, we want to see leadership skills in every box.
That would be great because of course, leadership is a thing. It’s about showing up in a way and caring and nurturing and all of that stuff. Right. That empathy and curiosity and all of, all of those things. So that can, that’s great to have that in every box on the arc chart. There are some, and of course.
You know which boxes I’m talking about, they’re the ones that have lines coming out of the bottom that box, meaning you have direct reports, meaning you have the ability to crush some souls if you don’t actually have these kinds of skills. So that’s important, um, for certain jobs on that org chart. Um, but it’s not, it doesn’t, that org chart, So it’s that weird, like, you know, one thing has to be both things, but yeah, you know, you know, I mean, like, so it’s kind of, and I think people intuitively..
C: All bourbons or whiskey, but not all whiskey is bourbon.
J: Hey, that’s what I was trying to think of. Well done. I don’t know if that’s true. It’s just this idea that leadership is a thing. And I, I sometimes at the beginning of training classes, I will go around and, you know, during the introduction phase, and I will say, so tell me your line, you know, tell me, tell me your name and how long you’ve been here, whatever you want to tell me some fun fact about yourself and tell me what you do.
Like, what do you do? Like, what’s your job? And everyone goes around. They all answer the question with like, you know, I’m Joe, and I’m in sales, or I’m Sarah, and I’m in engineering or something like this. And and I always tell them, Oh my gosh, you all got the first question wrong. You’ve got the first question wrong.
And we, you know, have to do some head scratching on it for a little while until they get to the point of you’re not in that business. You’re not in sales or engineering or operations or whatever it may be. You’re in the people business. And that, to me, is what really defines leadership. So now I just realized, having told that story, I’ll never be able to do this party trick again in the classroom.
If people listen to this, so with that said, let’s call it, let’s call it for this, this episode of our shot cast. But as you all know, we always have much more to say. So if you want to hear more, uh, drop us a line at Slingshot25.com.