1st Lead U - Leadership Development

The Counselor - Demonstrating Care and Concern as you CHART a new path to Leadership

• John Ballinger

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John Ballinger:

Self-awareness and emotional intelligence are the two critical things that if a leader will just start embracing those, these other things will actually start happening.

Announcer:

Welcome to First Lead you, a podcast dedicated to building leaders, expanding their capacity, improving their self-awareness through emotional intelligence and developing deeper understanding of selfless leadership.

John Ballinger:

Hello America and welcome to First Lead you where we believe selfless leadership is essential. America is suffering a leadership crisis. Self-awareness and emotional intelligence is the key to developing selfless leaders.

Announcer:

Now here is personal growth coach John Ballinger.

John Ballinger:

Hello leaders, welcome to First Lead U. My name is John Ballinger. I'm here with Mr Douglas Ford. John, how are you today? Good, I am good. Did you have a good weekend?

Douglas Ford:

I did. It was rainy, but it was still a good weekend.

John Ballinger:

Well, we do need rain, absolutely I have no doubt about that.

Douglas Ford:

I often think about when it Well, we need, you know, we need rain.

John Ballinger:

Absolutely, I have no doubt about that. Yeah, I often uh think about when it, when it rains, um, I think about all the water we use as a population, which is a lot. We're growing population in the world. Remember growing up that when you brushed your teeth you better turn the water off in between, you know.

Douglas Ford:

Absolutely.

John Ballinger:

And then my dad went so far as he put this little thing on the shower head, douglas, I'm not kidding. And you pop that little button and it shut the water off. Now the water's still on, you know, but you pop that button and the water went off while you soak. And if you left the water running the entire time you're in the shower, you'd hear that knock on the door. Why is that water running? You ask any of my brother? Yeah, we were all, like you know.

John Ballinger:

So as I grow, up environmentally conscious ahead of his time yeah, he was always worried about the water bill, the electric bill. Why'd you leave that light on? Yeah, but uh, when I went back years and years later and I was, uh, I was actually in the military and uh had come in between something and my gear. I was nasty and took a shower. I'm not kidding you, I'm a grown man in the military and I got the knock on the door.

Douglas Ford:

He's just trying to hold you accountable.

John Ballinger:

Yeah, he's like, yeah, so, uh. But so we are in, uh, we're going through our four C's and chart Uh, we're on our fourth C, which is what I told you in. I told you in in the kind of pre-planning the most difficult c uh to really embrace, understand, um, work toward. I mean there's a lot of of effort has to be put in this fourth c and, and for those that are just now listening, I'm going to go through the first three Cs before we get to the 4C. But we have cop, coach, commander, and now we have counselor and the goal for the chart and the 4Cs and as we go down each letter which has four uh or identifiers to them, the gopher, the four C's, is that as a leader, you never know during the day which one of those C's you're going to have to take off and on as you navigate through business.

Douglas Ford:

Yeah, We've talked about uh, kind of being hats that you wear yeah, the. Day yeah, or the week, or whatever it happens to be yeah.

John Ballinger:

so imagine and imagine if you will, if I think, uh, you see, a lot of people can stuff a baseball down you know baseball cap down their their back and just kind of put the bill down in the back of it. You've got four hats around the back side. You got to know which one to pull out based on the situation. Cause you know, I was, I was uh kind of coaching a gentleman this morning and I said you may have had somebody come in from the weekend that had something traumatic happen.

John Ballinger:

You're in the middle of planning Monday morning staff meetings things went on over the weekend at the business but then you have an employee that comes in. You're already geared up with kind of that commander mindset and now you've got to just shift gears real quick because you can't take a commander type personality into a session where you may need to be a counselor. And you got to shift that quick because now, after you do that, you got to come out of that and go back into commander because you got to move forward with whatever's going on for Monday. And uh, he said, my, that's tough, it is tough, it's absolutely tough, and we're going to be talking today of why that counselor hat is one of the most difficult hats that you will have to learn to embrace as a leader yeah, I mean kind of shifting gears between any of those hats can be difficult, uh, certainly if you're not prepared for it or not having thought about it in advance.

Douglas Ford:

And I think, uh, what you said there is key and is thinking in advance of what may be needed, versus just like show up and greet the day and whatever comes, you know, so kind of as the leader, prepping yourself in advance like hey, what could have happened? Or being aware of what did happen over the weekend and or at any point prior to you stepping into a situation, being able to address those with the, at least initially, with the proper hat on, so that you're prepared for that and you're able to lead more effectively. But, yeah, I think and you're going to get into this a little bit more but being the counselor takes a lot more mental preparation for your part. Well, before you get there, you've got to be doing your part to get yourself ready and healthy and right before you can really be an effective counselor for the team.

John Ballinger:

Yeah, we're actually going to talk about that. But if I may read the definition, this is Oxford's dictionary, the definition of counselor, and they have four pointed definitions that come up as soon as you search it A person trained to give guidance on personal, social or psychological problems. A senior officer in a diplomatic service. A trial attorney. A person who supervises children at a camp. Now, if you just took those four Douglas and just said all right, so what's the common thing between all four of those descriptives with that one word?

Douglas Ford:

Well, obviously, there's all people involved, but there's also a high degree of trust in a lot of that, all of those areas as well as responsibility.

John Ballinger:

Yeah, so, yeah, you said so trust and responsibility. When you go to a person to hopefully get some kind of relief from a personal social cycle, you have to trust that person has your best interest, because you're going to be telling them things and talking about things that you wouldn't normally talk to the average person about A senior officer in a diplomatic service, so overseas, in an embassy or whatever. I was watching a show yesterday. I was just kind of unwinding this and that came up and I turned on. I can't recall the actual name, but it was the the uh Benghazi embassy movie.

John Ballinger:

That was on at 13 hours, I believe is the name of it, and I was watching how the people in that area treated the uh ambassador. I mean there, when you're the ambassador of an embassy overseas, you call the shots and there's there's a trustedness, uh to that person. Uh, they have uh, say so over the embassy. They're like almost like the ceo of the embassy and I was watching that thinking, wow, everybody at this embassy relied on that person and the decisions that we're making and the enemy went straight to that person trying to take them out, take the head off. Now you roll into the trial lawyer. You've done something wrong or have been accused of doing something wrong. You weren't wrong. You got to trust that person, counselor. And then finally, this one's that popped up, that someone who supervisors supervises kids at camps yeah, there's a lot of responsibility there, for sure there's a ton of responsibility there.

John Ballinger:

So now, yeah, I hope the leader and the audience can hear the sense of urgency that I'm placing on learning how to be the counselor portion in those four c's, because to do that it takes work and effort. You're you're not normally predisposed to this trait. As a leader, you're more, most likely and this is just through research, research and study we've done as a leader you're more likely to be a commander or a cop, or easily, just naturally, than you are a coach or a counselor.

Douglas Ford:

And why is the counselor role important? I mean I know we've gone, we've talked about this a lot, but I mean, over the course of years we've gone through varying management philosophy, degree management philosophies, and so we moved on and we are kind of where we are today. So why does counseling as one of our C's, why is that so important?

John Ballinger:

Well, you're going to open up a can of worms. Societal the C-suite or leader has normally had two personality traits that got them to that point in their business career, and they both start with the N and their narcissistic behavior and neurotic behavior. So we've had people the lion's share of our corporate America have had leaders in it that really didn't have a care about people in it. They were driven toward. What does the board say? What does the share shareholder say? What does the profit margin say? What is my P and L?

John Ballinger:

If you're a business owner, the people part of that wasn't really what was concerned about or even taught about. Didn't you didn't learn it in MBA school or go to Wharton business school or anything like that? You didn't say there was nothing in there. It said this is one of the traits that you need to learn. To be a leader in an organization is one of the traits that you need to learn to be a leader in an organization. Uh, I was thinking about last week when we were in Atlanta and there was a guy, a private equity. He came in the door and he said all I care is about, all I care about is the money. I'm not worried about anything. I'm worried about the money. Well, what did he just say? People didn't matter, people aren't important. Yeah, I just't important. Yeah, I just care about the money.

John Ballinger:

Well, if we go back to when we started this podcast, we talked about the great resignation and why people left companies. I told you some of the research I did this weekend that mental health is actually on the increase. People's lack of mental health is on the increase, still because of social problems, financial problems. They're still not finding the place where they feel like they fit. The leader's still not leading the way they feel like they want to be led, and so people are still having really they're really struggling with it. And so the for us to be able to take leadership and say that you can be all for these, you have to work at it.

John Ballinger:

It's not easy, but, as I said on the podcast before, if you're in a leadership position and you think it's going to be easy and you don't want to work at it and get out of it, just don't do it, because you're not only damaging yourself, you're damaging your people and there has to be a stopping point in society where we've said we've damaged the people long enough and we need. They deserve. People deserve to be led well, and you can take somebody that has a narcissistic bend or even a neurotic bend and if they choose to expand their capabilities and their leadership styles into being able to be well-rounded. You still need a little bit of that. I told you that.

John Ballinger:

You know, when we've talked, I said you got to have a little twinge of being able to walk that line, take risk, make quick decisions and, at the same time, care about the people that those decisions are impacting. You can't just be blindly saying I'm going to do this. You have to think about the cause and effect behind that. But I think that the challenge we're faced today is still all of our business schools don't address this, and it may be creeping in a little bit somewhere. But but the professors that are teaching this? What do they? What do they know about it? It may be just a curriculum book and maybe they've got some articles out of some of these big consulting firms that said you know you need to read this, but how do you actually coach and and teach to counselors, being one of the character traits that you need to embrace as a, as a leader?

Douglas Ford:

yeah, but, and for clarity, we're not talking about being a counselor to, like you know, putting somebody on the proverbial couch and like diving into the deep sea. It's, it's an awareness thing. It's like you're you're approaching it, you know, just from a sense of, oh, something's going on there, something's changed. We should see. Is it something that we've done internally that's caused this, or is it something that's outside? It's you, as the leader, being able to recognize that, not so much provide counseling to someone, it is your awareness that something's happening. So what do we need to do to help this team member, given the fact that identified something to happen?

John Ballinger:

it's. It's that important, uh, from an awareness standpoint, which is one of our a's in chart um, a lot of health care plans have eap employee assistant program. It's being aware enough to know was it something internal or external? We talk about in prior podcast about the uh, the amount of outside influence that takes place inside the business every day. If you're not a business leader that understands how to be aware of that through a counseling type of lens, it'll just blow right past you or you won't even care about it either. I mean, there's, there's some. Yeah, that's that's. That's something that happened outside. Hang it at the door Right.

Douglas Ford:

So, yeah, I think that's just a key differentiator that we need as we talk about this, because we just don't want people to feel confused about that in terms of what that word counselor means in their day-to-day interactions with their team, because not everybody's equipped to provide counseling, not everyone's equipped to be a quote-unquote true counselor. It is again just that awareness that something happens because you're like, even amongst your team, like there's a shift in the attitude, there's a shift in morale oh, you mean, those three people we laid off last week actually is impacting you guys. Well, you guys still have a job. It's like no, the counselor. Part of that is like recognizing, like, oh, when we do something over here, perhaps even in another part of the organization, it can very well negatively impact people mentally, emotionally, and we need to be aware of that and sensitive of that as we kind of work through those things so yeah hopefully, I'm trying to kind of make sure we put the right guardrails up for everybody and we don't.

John Ballinger:

They don't think we're asking them to be counsel no, and and yeah, very clear, we're not asking, it's the awareness, and it's uh no more than we're asking a trial attorney to be a counselor.

John Ballinger:

Right, but they need to be aware of the situation and be able to defend uh or prosecute or whatever it is that they're doing. There needs to be an awareness of what's going on, that that person that's with that at the kids camp they're not giving them psychological advice. They're probably doing a lot more listening than they do anything, and part of the counseling is just being able to listen. Most people that have a neurotic or a narcissistic bent to them aren't good listeners. This portion if all you do is slow down and learn to listen and that's the most important piece that you take away from the counseling hat that's great, because you need to learn to stop as a leader and listen to your people. When we get back, uh, I'm going to talk just a little bit more about the what you don't want to be as a counselor uh, from a trait standpoint, and then we're going to actually talk about, if you learn how to wear those four hats as a leader, what the top 10 things that you're going to get out of that.

Douglas Ford:

Hello First Lead Youth listeners, douglas Ford here. I want to take just a few seconds during this break to say thank you for spending a few moments with us as we discuss the challenges and opportunities of being a leader. We hope that in every episode you find some bit of information that will help you on your own personal leadership journey. Thank you, or any other platform where you listen to First Lead you, we would really appreciate you clicking on the subscribe button to help us reach more people and expand the message of First Lead you. And please take time to visit the First Lead you website. That's the number one S-T, the word lead and the letter U dot com. First Lead you dot com. Number one S-T, the word lead and the letter Ucom. I hope you have a great day as you continue to learn to first lead you. Welcome back to Firstly Jew.

Douglas Ford:

Today we are talking about the fourth C in our chart and we've already covered in previous podcast episodes we've done the coach, the cop and the commander.

Douglas Ford:

Today we're talking about counselor and we're going to spend a little bit more time talking about that, but one of the things that we are really trying to do is to help you see that with these four separate Cs, you're really we call them hats, you could call them lenses.

Douglas Ford:

It's how do you view your leadership and how do you look at different situations that come at you throughout a day or a week or a month, and which one of those kind of traits are you going to pull up and use, depending on the situation? And the idea behind that is that not every situation can be approached in the exact same way. Every situation can be approached in the exact same way, and so we're using these Cs to try to give you some lenses, some hats, that you can look at, look through as you approach these situations. So it gives you an idea of like how do I kind of need to be operating at this exact moment or in this exact situation? And so, john, you've helped us kind of understand the counselor part a little bit more today. We're going to continue to dig in that. And then you've got a list of things that if someone really embraces all four of the C's in the chart acrostic, that it will help them in their leadership and what they can expect from that.

John Ballinger:

That right so, um, as we go into, uh, what I would say the normal leadership traits, I want to read the five habits of a leader that has a narcissistic bento. They have a constant need of admiration, a lack of empathy, a strong sense of self-entitlement, they manipulate others to get what they want and they have an inflated sense of self-importance.

John Ballinger:

Those are probably worth repeating a leader that has a narcissistic bin, which we said earlier. Statistically, leaders are three times more likely than the average person to have these traits Three times more likely. A constant need for admiration. A lack of empathy, a strong sense of self-entitlement. Manipulation of others to get what they want and an inflated sense of self entitlement. Manipulation of others to get what they want and an inflated sense of self importance. Now the second uh, remember the second trait for CEOs neuroticism. These are the top two traits for CEOs.

Douglas Ford:

So they're either neurotic or narcissists.

John Ballinger:

Narcissist mood swings, emotional instability, sensitive to stress, easily overwhelmed, pessimistic and self-doubting. It pains me to look at people. We go into companies knowing that there's a strong likelihood that the person sitting in the lead position is one of those two people. And you know what I can say, mr Ford, that's true, that's a true statement. I see it all the time.

Douglas Ford:

We probably need to come up with a top five list of CEOs who, at least from the outside looking in, appear to be doing a good job of carrying out the four C's, or some version thereof.

John Ballinger:

I think that's a good job of carrying out the four C's or some version thereof. I think that's a good idea. One was brought to mind the other day on a conversation we were having, that I really, I am really wanting to talk to this person if at all possible, because I think it's so important that we can't let what happened at COVID and the great resignation just die because we, it was too tough to figure out how to fix it and so we just went back into the same old rut. And people are back in that same old rut. Here we are. Here we are five years post COVID and I sense we're getting back into that rut because we didn't.

John Ballinger:

We talked about it. Remember, remember, 21, 22,. Buddy, I'm telling you, McKenzie was on it. Uh, some of these big consulting firms were on it. Forbes was, you know, pressing on it, Harvard business review and I see it just kind of wafting away now, Like, yeah, we want to do that, we need to do that, but yeah, that's too big for us to even tackle and let's just throw AI and maybe I, I will take care of it. If you're working for either two of those leaders, what kind of life review you have as a as a team member as a team member, you're probably stressed out all the time in either situation.

Douglas Ford:

Right, so from the narcissist standpoint, you're probably stressed out because it's like nothing you ever do is good enough, ever can please them. Even if you do well, then you don't want to do too well because you don't want to upstage the CEO or whoever your leader is. And from the neurotic standpoint, it's like they're probably doing things very erratically. There could be changing their mind on a regular basis and everything you do constantly punching holes in it because they want it to be better or they want to feel better in front of the board or whatever it is like as a team member, you're just on edge all the time so what kind of productivity do you have out of that kind of thing?

John Ballinger:

Very low, yeah, and we've been in companies before where we saw very low productivity. We saw low morale, almost a fidgetiness or edginess to the team.

Douglas Ford:

Yeah, at some point you just kind of give up. You're like I'll just wait until they tell me exactly what to do, and then I may even wait, because I know they're going to change their mind in 10 minutes.

John Ballinger:

Yeah, Can a leader be put in a position to lead large organizations and care about people?

Douglas Ford:

Yes.

John Ballinger:

Is it difficult?

Douglas Ford:

Yes, Is that why it doesn't happen as often? Yeah, just think about in your own personal life. I mean, it's difficult to care appropriately for everybody that you have in your life, right? Um, and start multiplying that across, you know hundreds or thousands of people in some cases. It's like at some point you have little capacity to care about. You know the person that's the furthest away from you geographically and and even personally, because they're just part of the machine and you're trying to take care of the machine and it's like so, yeah, it is a rare person.

Douglas Ford:

That's when I say, well, babe, we should kind of do our own research and figure out you know who we think they, these top five people are that best represent this. Because you know you at some point you're going to turn back to like the board is pushing me. The At some point you're going to turn back to like the board is pushing me. The pressure of the stock market is pushing me Getting this next big project done so we can keep the company afloat. If I don't do this, then some of the people you know we're going to have more layoffs if we don't make these moves, and so it all just becomes part of the machine if you're trying to keep things moving forward and maybe you're not afforded the opportunity to take the time to care for people in the way they need to be cared for totally agree with that.

John Ballinger:

And, uh, I normally don't read verbatim because I'm very good at at um, what do you call that? Uh, when you can, you can read something and prepare for it, but then you don't need your notes and you can just ad lib or you know, I can use this. I want to read because I wrote it this weekend after I did this research, and this is this is reading verbatim. If a leader doesn't learn how to embrace what we've talked about with the four C's and you don't get perfect at it I'm not saying you're going to get perfect at it, just embrace it and learn how to wear those four hats, depending on the situation If they can't do that and they don't self-reflect and assess their personal traits and behaviors that could possibly be jeopardizing their ability to embrace those fours, they will, in fact, most likely damage their team worse than they can even imagine. Self-awareness and emotional intelligence is critical for that to take place. When the when the head header music was coming on the announcement, we say self-awareness, emotional intelligence. I don't want us to stray away from that. Those are so important and we can get so deep in the weeds and we can talk about chart or C's and you know the four H's we're going into next, all those things. But, man, I tell you, those two words, that's self-awareness and emotional intelligence, are the two critical thing that if a leader will just start embracing those, these other things will actually start happening.

John Ballinger:

I really think that once you sit down and you say, all right, would I want to be led by me. Is there something I could do better as a leader? Those are the things. That's at self-awareness moment, journaling I reacted this way. This is what impact it made on the organization. I need to really modify my behavior and to do that you've got to be honest with yourself. You talk about gaining the trust of the organization. I need to really modify my behavior and to do that you've got to be honest with yourself. You talk about gaining the trust of the team. What about yourself? So I want to. I want the leader, I want you to really self-reflect and assess your personal traits and behavior and make sure you're not jeopardizing your team, because when you jeopardize your team and you're reading the P and L statement to end of the quarter, you're upset about it. You may have to just look in the mirror a little bit. Could be that productivity issue those sales declines could be because your leadership challenges that you bring in.

Douglas Ford:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean what you said about self-awareness and emotional intelligence and being the byproduct, or sorry, chart, the traits of chart being the byproduct of those two elements are really essential for people to understand. It's like you know, we come up, you came up with this idea of chart to try to help people kind of easily remember and kind of access these different points about leadership. But it really does boil down to, as you said, the emotional intelligence and self-awareness.

Douglas Ford:

If you do those things, a lot of these things will kind of naturally start occurring and then you can lean into different parts of developing them and growing them and becoming better at how you execute different things. But if you focus on those two things self-awareness, emotional intelligence you start to get a lot of these things just naturally occurring because you are asking yourself those questions. You are seeing, oh well, when I'm aware of what's going on, my team, if I, if I am, I'm aware what's going on with me and how something's impacting me, and I can kind of step back for a quick second and say, okay, I'm, I feel anxious or I feel upset, or oh yeah, this is actually I like where this is going, because the team's showing improvement and they're doing that, like as you assess your own emotions around situations, you're better to able to lead your team, help them kind of walk through their own emotions with that, because they're being impacted every day with their own emotions just like you are.

John Ballinger:

So I'm going to read the top 10 list. So if, if a leader embraces the four C's and learns how to take those hats off and own, this is what you're going to become for your team. And keep in mind that self-awareness and emotional intelligence is attached to that right. It's attached to chart right. You're going to learn to speak honestly, even when it's uncomfortable. You're going to listen more than you talk. You're going to admit when you're wrong. You're not going to try to impress. You're going to keep promises. You can show vulnerability without shame. You can celebrate success of others without envy. You will stay true to your values that you're developing through this process and, lastly, you will learn to offer help without expecting anything in return.

Douglas Ford:

Yeah, those are pretty solid offer help without expecting anything in return.

John Ballinger:

Yeah, those are pretty solid. Now imagine if that's the leaders that were leading organizations. Today we would say most people. If you read and said that's the leader you're going to work for, thumbs up, line up. Where'd I start at when?

Douglas Ford:

Oh yeah, absolutely, I mean. I mean that's, that's what you would want in in whoever's leading you for sure yeah, so leaders we, we are truly.

John Ballinger:

When we started this show three seasons ago, you know, through my own personal journeys, my own leadership journeys, the evolution that it's taken for us to really I mean, it's almost burrow into why, in the last 80 to a hundred years, has our leadership gone so far downhill that we're in this divisive, angry, dumb, lethargic state, angry, numb, lethargic state. And then you start uncovering the leadership that's been inside organizations and been trained and taught in organizations, even out of institutional education. It's no wonder that 83% of the people, when surveyed after it, said you know what? I'm out, they stink and I'm not doing this anymore. And, as I've said to every leader, once you lose your team, you have no reason to be here as a leader. You've lost them, so they don't need you.

Douglas Ford:

Yep, there's no one following you. You just don't want to walk by yourself.

John Ballinger:

That's exactly right. So remember, in order to lead your team, well, you must first lead you. We'll see you next time.

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John Ballinger

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Douglas Ford

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