Newleaf Training and Development’s Post

Transcript

Welcome to Take 5A podcast, brought to you by New Leaf Training and Development. Each edition is an inspiring interview with a leader worth listening to. Enjoy. Hey, I'm Paul Butler and what are the client partners at New Leaf Training and Development? And I'm so delighted to be joined today by Tom Henschel, who is the President at Essential Communications. Tom, for 18 years now, here at New Leaf Training and Development, we focus on our core purpose of just simply helping people and organizations better manage themselves, lead others, and grow business acumen. I just wondered, what are your recommended best practices to help people and organisations be their best? But please do start. There by telling us a little bit more about your organization, what you do, and who you serve. So over to you, Tom, and I'll wrap it up when you're done. I'm an executive coach and I'm known for the look and sound of leadership. I help leaders appear the way they want to appear. I coach mostly in Fortune 500 companies, vice presidents and above. So if you were going to say to me like, what's the one thing that I think makes a difference for these senior leaders over time over their careers, my answer would be feedback. That they're good at giving feedback and they're good at receiving feedback. And the people who have climbed over a career, they've gotten helpful feedback and been able to address it. That self management thing that you talked about, right? So the ability to give and receive means you can grow yourself as a leader. You can elevate the people around you. You I think positively impact the culture of the company around you. It's a, I think a core critical skill. I was talking. I thought of you, Paul, because I was talking to a client yesterday. This is a woman named Helen. She works for a big multinational. She's on a really interesting project that touches all parts of the organization. She has a direct report named Irene. And she was talking to me about Irene and she said, you know. We had such high hopes for Irene when we hired her. She had so much potential and she's never quite lived up to her potential. And I said, has she heard that from you? And Helen was like, no, you know, I don't want to demotivate her. And we're so busy and, you know, I just, I don't know what the right time is. And I thought, like, how is it benefiting anybody to withhold this feedback, Right? And a minute later, still talking about Irene, she said. Irene had given a a presentation to the senior team and had a lot of upspeak where you end your sentences with it like it's a question. And Helen said, which I thought was a great observation, she said, you know it, It didn't make her sound mature. And the senior leaders didn't respond to her. And I said. Has she heard that from you? Well, I don't want to hurt her feelings, I know she tried her best. That part of us, all of us, that's like, I don't want to be the bad guy. I don't want to hurt people's feelings. I, you know, I don't want to upset people. All that. I think that is something that as you grow as a leader, you, you got to get over it. And one way to get over it is to get some tools because it's learnable. Look, I often say as an executive coach, I live in a sea of feedback. That's like what I do for a living. I didn't learn it, you know, in my family of origin. I learned it as a skill. And so I have 3 quick resources for folks. One again, this is not new. So many people I know are already a fan of a book called Radical Candor, which has the framework of being direct and caring. It's a great framework for giving feedback. Radical Candor, another one for being able to. Receive feedback. Is. Thanks for the feedback. Wonderful book, It's friendly, it's funny, but it has such a great kind of mindset shift about how to receive feedback. And then the third resource is our website. We have a lot of free resources, a lot of PDFs, a lot of the episodes of our podcast are about feedback. You can search for them and pull them up. So I want to say to your folks as they want to kind of grow themselves. Get better at feedback, it'll make a difference for you. So that's where I'm at. Really appreciate that, Tom. And it's so clear on what you've just communicated. They're really do appreciate that. And just a message out to the subscribers to keep an eye on the website. As we always say on the events page, there's some activities that we undertake throughout the course of the year, most of which are available for free for subscribers. And Tom, could ioffer you a virtual High 5? You could. Thank you, Tom. It's so great to spend a few minutes with you today. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I hope you found that interview useful, and if you did, feel free to rate, review, and share this podcast. We'll be back next week with another episode, and we also invite you to check out our other weekly podcast, Going the Extra Mile, which assured to lift your spirit and encourage you in today's working world. Bye for now.