Lessons - Do You Need To Be Charismatic To Lead? | Stephen M. R. Covey, Leadership Expert

Welcome to the lessons episodes of Success Story. These lessons episodes will be shorter clips from past guests, accomplished value community members, and myself. In each short episode, we'll feature concise and insightful actionable conversations and tactics, providing you with real-world strategies and tips to help you achieve your personal and professional goals. If you're seeking a no-nonsense approach to growth and progress, you've come to the right spot. Settle in, take notes, and enjoy. Sometimes some of the points that you're bringing up, it's not just for a leader who is a charismatic evangelical first class on stage public speaker. When you're talking, the things that you're talking about, if we unpack them a step further, there's sort of two things that I pulled out from that. You have an organization that has clear purpose, mission, culture, and they actually focus on making sure that the mission statement on the website is more than just a mission statement on the website. It's something that the whole company believes in, buys into, maybe even adds into. Then you also have, at a leadership level and individual level, you have people that are just being very high EQ empathetic individuals caring for each other. That's something that permeates all the way throughout the entire organization, and that's what I guess you're saying. When somebody's living and breathing that every single day, that's what actually gets them to go to whatever the 125% or whatever that number was. Yeah. Is that correct? Okay. Absolutely. That's it. It's that simple and that difficult. Yes. But I love, you know, your point is this is not just for the charismatic. I think too often we've equated inspiration with charisma, thinking you've got to be this charismatic soul to inspire people, but think about it. Scott, I bet you're like me and I bet our listeners and viewers feel the same. I know people, some people who are very charismatic, but who aren't necessarily inspiring because it's all about them. And you know, they might be charismatic, but I don't know if that inspires me. I know other people who no one would necessarily describe as charismatic, but who are extremely inspiring because of who they are, how they care, how they connect, how what they do matters. So let's separate charisma and inspiration and everyone can inspire and you named it. You inspire when you connect with people through caring, through a sense belonging, and then you inspire when you connect people to purpose, to meaning and to contribution like Pepperdine University is doing and others are doing. And we can learn to do that as leaders in both fronts. And if all you do as a leader, if all you do is focus on caring for others, caring for people, caring for those that you serve, empathy, compassion, showing that, that actually will inspire them when they sense that you care for them. And I like how Maya Angelou put it, the great poet, so the right advocate champion. She said people, I've learned that people will forget what you say, they'll even forget what you do, but they'll never forget how you made them feel. And when you have a sense of caring, that people feel, in a sense of belonging, that inspires like almost nothing else, and that will move the needle and we can learn to do that. Does the perfect trust culture organization look like? You see it manifest in the behaviors, people, they talk straight in a way that also demonstrates respect. So it's kind of a rare balance, a unique balance, straight talk with respect, because you can be too much straight talk where it's offensive, too much respect where no one wants to tell the truth because they don't want to offend. So you've got to be high in straight talk and high in demonstrating respect. You see, transparency everywhere. If people make a mistake, they own it, they write it wrong. People are loyal to each other, meaning they speak about people as if they were present. So they have a concern or issue, they go to the person instead of going behind their back. You see people taking responsibility and owning results. You see people confronting the reality and take things head on versus kind of scourging it or evading that kicking the can down the road. People are always clarifying expectations and then holding themselves accountable to those expectations. They hold themselves accountable first, so they can hold others accountable second. You see people listening first and then demonstrating respect for what they hear. You see people keeping the commitments that they make. And then you see people also extending the trust, not only being trustworthy, but being trusting. Now, I just went through a series of behaviors, 13 of them, that you see manifest in high-trust teams, high-trust cultures. And low-trust teams, low-trust cultures is kind of the contrast, the opposite of or the counterfeit where people rather than talking straight, they're spinning everything. And rather than demonstrating respect to everyone, they show respect to some, but not to others. Rather than being transparent, they operate with hidden agendas. So they either partly open, but they have another agenda behind it. And they often sweet-talk people to their face, but then that nothing behind their back. And they often get trapped in activity traps of producing the activity, but not necessarily the result. Maybe they confront issues, but then they're only giving lip service to it, because they're still kicking the can down the road, or maybe they're pointing the finger and blaming people instead of practicing the kind of voting only at taking responsibility. Maybe they listen, but not with the intent to understand they listen instead with the intent to reply. And they often over-promise and then under-deliver. And then the trust that they extend maybe isn't a deep trust. And so it feels shallow and circumstantial. And so, you know, variety of different counterfeit things that get in the way of a high-trust culture. And so I think you really look at the behavior that gets manifested. And I find, you know, I'll just take practicing accountability, only that, and leaders only and at versus finger pointing and, you know, playing the blame game. And I can go into a culture, and if I see, I can almost tell by that behavior alone, how much blame game is going on, how much finger pointing, and tell you a lot about the level of trust inside of that team, inside of that culture. So look at the behavior that's, you know, what the fly on the wall would see. Not just what they say, but what they do. This is going to be a two-part question. So the first part, and then I'll go into the second. The first part is how do you hire? When you're hiring these people, how do you figure out that this is the person that has all of these traits? And then I'm going to ask, if you already have a team, what are the things that somebody could do to maybe move in the right direction and try and be a slightly better person? But say you're a founder, you're early stage CEO, you're hiring a team from the ground up. Yeah. What you're going to do is you're trying to hire for both a combination of competence, which we're pretty good at, but also a character, which we're not quite as good at doing, so that you can, you know, you want to make sure we hire people of both competence and character. We become very good at hiring for competence, looking at the skills needed in the like, but we need to become equally good at hiring for character. So that has kind of two halves, the integrity, half, the intent, half. So on the integrity half, you know, we're looking for people that demonstrate integrity even when it's difficult. So you might ask questions like, can you describe a situation where maybe you were in an environment or a circumstance where you're trying to get a result in an outcome, but it required to get that result or outcome to achieve what you needed to do. It required you to maybe either violate or go to the very extreme of the, you know, values that you believed in that you stood for where you felt really kind of maybe close to becoming compromised or maybe actually becoming compromised if you ever had that type of opportunity and maybe no one has, but maybe someone has where they, where they ultimately decided that they were going to be true to the value, even if it didn't, it meant that they didn't deliver their result. And so that you can kind of see when there's a test of integrity, do you still do the right thing or do you kind of go along with the flow and, you know, everyone else is doing it. So, you know, like Warren Buffett said, the five most dangerous words in business, everybody else is doing it, but you might be violating principles or values or, you know, what, your standards or ethics of some sort, just because everyone else is, doesn't mean you should. So you're trying to assess some measure of that. Another on the, on the, on the intent side is, is, is maybe describe a situation where, where you're trying to see how they work together with others, you know, plays well with others and, and works well so that you can see, is there a focus of me, I mean mine, or is it of we, the team and mutual benefit and, and, and bringing people together, teams together and, you know, it's we, not I, and it's mutual benefit, not self-serving. And if I look for a leader who's vulnerable, who's authentic, who's real, yeah, who has shortcomings and weaknesses, then they need to build a team around to bring strength to them because that's a leader who others will follow. And the person that comes in and acts perfect, I usually will eliminate early on and recognize that no one's going to follow them. I look for a leader who's authentic and real, vulnerable, transparent, look, that doesn't mean they don't have strengths and competencies and, and that, you know, you, you can go too far with vulnerability to, Renee Brown herself, the, who talks about vulnerability all the time, says vulnerability without boundaries isn't vulnerability. So that doesn't mean there aren't some boundaries. It just means that you're real, you're authentic because when you're, when you're appropriately vulnerable, people see you as real, they tend to trust you, they respond back with equal vulnerability and then together you can create things that you couldn't do otherwise.