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Coach:
Coaching Transcript:
There is so much value in these sessions and I just want to start by acknowledging you and saying congratulations for being selected to be one of the four principals in Transform PM 2016. It’s a real honour to be a contribution in joining the other coaches and facilitators to support you in your journey.
Would it be fair to say that Transform PM has accelerated that process? Like, you’ve now potentially got more to do than when you started the program? Yeah, for sure.
That’s the beauty of fantastic content and incredible value. A great quote that I heard, I think it was in November last year, was if you ever feel overwhelmed, just know that’s the universe giving you everything you asked for, just all at once. That’s my context for Transform PM, [it] is the universe giving you everything you ask for all at once. The key is, as Sophie beautifully said, chunk it down so it’s really digestible.
However, the worst thing you could do is not implement anything. Don’t try and do it all at once. Pick one thing at a time and do it really strategically and make sure you’re going back and reviewing the value that you’re getting out of that action.
We’re going to look at knowing your client, who actually is your client as leaders. We’re going to briefly unpack the 3 Principles of Leadership and we’re also going to reveal the 3 Steps to Success and unpack the Empowered Leadership Framework. It sounds like a lot and it will be a lot.
Then as leaders, it can be lonely at the top. Who here finds that it is lonely at the top sometimes? You don’t often get the thanks. Just a little raise of hands if you feel sometimes it’s a little lonely at the top.
80% of your time is spent navigating the people, performance, and productivity issues. This means your focus is of recruiting if that’s your strategy, of delivering your strategy, of growing your business and of increasing market share. I know from the individual conversations and interviews and assessments we did together leading up to today, this particular group of four are anywhere between 25% and 90% of your time is pooper-scooping, reacting and putting out fires, versus building the business.
98% of humanity is stuck and oscillating in their business and life. Meaning we get up, we dress up, we show up, we do stuff but at the end of the day, we’re really not going home satisfied and fulfilled. Often, we’re not present, so that means we’re at work worried about the kids and not spending time with them and missing the basketball games or soccer training or ballet tutorials. Then, we go home and we’re thinking about everything we didn’t get done and we’re with our kids and we’re not present.
…the worst thing you could do is not implement anything. Don’t try and do it all at once. Pick one thing at a time and do it really strategically and make sure you’re going back and reviewing the value that you’re getting out of that action
I really set the intention that you get something for yourself today, even if it’s one thing, that will help you bridge that gap between where you are, where you feel stuck on, where you’re oscillating and what’s possible for yourself and feeling that satisfaction and fulfillment and really growing your business so you can get on and do your property development or whatever it is you want to achieve for yourself and your own personal life.
I know that some of you have defined yourself in terms of leadership as an easy leader, a lazy leader. This is not 100% of the time but you’ve been honest, not necessarily fully productive, procrastinate at times, “I’m not a good leader.” However you define yourself is exactly how you will show up. No matter what education, learning, or training you embark on, including the rest of Transform PM, please begin by getting responsible for any disempowered definitions that you have of yourself as a leader.
By the way, if you do and we all do at times, it’s just stuff that’s happened in the past. Maybe you’ve had a colleague leave and it didn’t go so well. Maybe you went for something and you didn’t get the results you were expecting. Maybe someone else is taking your market share that you’re working really hard to create. But let me tell you that it is not what happens to you that defines you, it’s what you decide as a result. It’s what you say to yourself after it.
From a mindset perspective, the number one thing that will get in the way of you achieving your success is when you collapse what happened with what you make it mean, and you merge them. Amazing leaders and professionals – here’s the distinguishing factor and by the way, here’s what I reckon is the 1% as to why some agents particularly are making the million plus and the majority aren’t.
Top performing individuals in any industry, they don’t collapse what happened with what they make it mean. They don’t collapse failure with “I’m a failure.” They just go, “Oops, failed at that,” or “learned a lesson.” But what we human beings do is, “Oh, failed at that. I’m a failure. I’m not good at that. She’s better than me. He’s better than me.” Anyone said any of that to themselves in the past? Compared yourself to others? Fellas, have you done that? Feels like, “Yeah.”
Look at Thomas Edison, for example. He took 1,000 attempts to create the light bulb. When a journalist said to him, “Now, Thomas, you’ve tried this thing around 176 times. You’ve failed 176 times. Why don’t you just quit?” Thomas is like, and listen to his perspective, he’s like, “Failed? I haven’t failed 176 times. I am actually 176 steps closer to the light bulb. I actually have eliminated 176 ways it won’t work.” Imagine if we looked at everything in our business through Thomas Edison’s eyes. We’d be inventing miraculous things.
If you take one thing from today’s session, take a look at what is your current definition of yourself as a leader and create something that’s really way more empowering for yourself. When you do that, you open your mind up to really receive the riches of any training above and beyond this session. You also are programming your subconscious mind to actively look for tools and resources to enable you to really step into being that leader you’ve defined yourself as.
Consider that these two human drivers, two things that us as human beings we intrinsically want. Number one is connection. We want to feel like we’re part of a tribe. We want to feel like we belong, that we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. That’s the number one thing we want. Second to that is we want to grow. We want to know that tomorrow or next year is more of a brighter future than it is today, and I really see that it’s a leader’s role is to build deep connection through our culture and community and to create a space where people can actually rise and shine and really grow and thrive. That’s our job, I truly believe.
If you want to know the three reasons we get upset as leaders, and you want to know this for your people, and also teach your people this so then they can be listening from this framework for when they’re dealing with navigating upset clients or stakeholders. Three reasons we get upset. Unmet expectations. We’re expecting a result and someone hasn’t delivered it. The only way we can bridge that gap is communications. You have to communicate so people are clear what you’re expecting and by when.
The second reason we get upset is withheld communication. Something happens and we don’t speak our truth. We don’t complete it or we don’t get it off our chest. You suppress that and swallow that over time, there’s no space left. It’s really important especially as a leadership team that you have someone that you can just ‘park your funk’ with and get stuff off your chest because as I said before, it can be lonely at the top. My invitation is keep in contact with each other post-Transform PM and share what are you bumping up against in this journey. Just have a buddy or an accountability partner to be able to get stuff off your chest or definitely create a person in your life that you can do that with.
The third reason we get upset is when we have an interrupted intention, meaning we were going for something externally and something happens that stops us in our tracks and it’s out of our control. For example, in property management, maybe you get a phone call, the oven is not working. You go, “No, problem. We’re on to it.” You get the electrician to go in at 4 o’clock, the tenant knocks off work early, gets there and the electrician is late. Then, you’ve got the tenant calling you. You couldn’t control that. You did all your due diligence. You’ve done all of your selection criteria to ensure you’re engaging service providers with a lot of integrity but something outside of their control impacted you achieving a result.
You’ve got an upset tenant. You’ve got a stressed out service provider, and you’re dealing with it. And as leaders, you’re going to be dealing with upset all the time and people’s emotions. Just thought I’d throw that in there. If you want to increase your capacity to be an empowered leader, you have to share and make sure you’re really clear in your expectations of your people and give them deadlines.
One of the things I invite you to do is, when you’re actually making requests of people, saying something like this, and I do this with my kids because it can be really unfair at times to make requests and not check in. You say, “Kelley-Ann, I’d like you to have that report to me by 4 o’clock and I need it in an Excel spreadsheet.” It’s really helpful to check in and go, “So, Kelley-Ann, so I know I was clear,” not, “Kelley-Ann, what did I just say?” because it seems like I don’t trust her ability to listen. You’re taking the responsibility to make sure that you’re communicating effectively. You say, “So I know I was clear, can you just repeat back to me what I’ve said?”
When she repeats it back to you or they repeat it back to you, you can see how clear was your communication but you’re also looking, how are they listening to you? What are the filters they’re listening from? Did they hear the timeline or did they just hear, “I need a report”? Did they pick up what was on Excel? Sometimes, we’re so busy doing that we just spurt off stuff to do, and it’s clear in our head but when the words come out, it gets lost in translation and then I’ve got all my priorities in front of me, so I’m only taking a few bits of information. Clarity is king.
Responsibility is a key distinction of leadership. It’s a really big one and it’s actually our responsibility to be responsible. The true distinction of responsible means that you relate to yourself as able to respond. Responsibility equals you are able to respond. It doesn’t mean I have all the answers. However, it means I am responsible for being resourceful enough to find the answers or cultivate them from within my team or seek them from external resources. As leaders, you must stand and you are responsible. In fact, not only are you responsible, you’re 100% responsible for what’s happening in your business, with your people and your life.
A great leader’s definition that I like to look at is you have to be the eagle. The eagle, if you didn’t know, is the only bird who, when a storm is coming, has the intuitive intelligence to rise above the clouds and fly out there until the storm ends. But what happens in leadership or management is we get stuck under the clouds when the storm is happening and we’re acting and reacting and getting blown around like the house in Wizard of Oz. “Not in Kansas anymore,” it’s tossed around and we’ve come out and we go, “I don’t know where I am. I’ve got to get back into our KPIs to get direction.”
Leaders must not drop into the business too much. We have to work on the business, so adopt an eagle eye and be more proactive and less reactive. But let’s look at why we hang out in the storm of business sometimes, and here’s something that’s become very obvious to me as I’ve been spending more and more time with leaders. We talked about this in our conversations. Leaders often want to be liked rather than lead.
Our greatest currency as human beings is connection. We as leaders often won’t talk straight, won’t give feedback, won’t do and say what we need to say for the benefit of our clients, our service standards, our profit, because I don’t want to impact you liking me. We avoid that stuff because we want to be liked, we want connection. That is one of the biggest ways to be inefficient and ineffective with your time.
By the way, it’s counterproductive to what you really want, because what I know for sure is when leaders aren’t managing their people and things that aren’t really working well in their business and they don’t do anything about it, it’s a really quick way to lose respect from other members in your team.
The leaders that I work with have become comfortable with being uncomfortable and really aren’t there to be liked, they’re there to lead, but what happens as a by-product is you are loved because people can see the position you are taking and the level of responsibility and that, perhaps, you are willing to speak your truth, even if your voice shakes. Even if you don’t feel confident.
I’m going to give you some skills a little later on to help you have those straight talk conversations, but please don’t be deluded by the fact that when you’re avoiding giving specific feedback, I promise you, you’re human like me and it’s because you want to be liked rather than lead.
If you can get responsible around that and start to practice having those conversations, watch what happens in your business.
Continue to Part 2 of Tanja’s Coaching Session by clicking here.
