705: A Few Ways to Stay Relevant, with Steve Dennis

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
Every leader must stay relevant in order to serve well. In this episode, the mindset and tactics that will help us lead in an ever changing world. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 705. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential. Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:40]:
One of the things that I think we all want, both as leaders and also as human beings, is to be relevant, to do things that are gonna be helpful for others, to help our organizations, and to serve in a way that I know so many of us have a heart to do. And yet, it’s more challenging than ever to stay relevant, to know what’s happening, to not miss the next thing in a world where so many of us and our work is being disrupted in new ways. I’m so glad today to welcome a guest expert who’s gonna help us to really look at the perspective on this of how we can stay relevant and what we can do that will serve others more effectively. I’m so pleased to welcome Steve Dennis to the show. He’s a strategy consultant, adviser, speaker, and author focused on transformational leadership and the impact of digital disruption. He’s the president of SageBerry Consulting and host of the Remarkable Retail podcast. He’s the author of the book Remarkable Retail and his newest book, Leaders Leap: Transforming Your Company at the Speed of Disruption. Steve, what a pleasure to have you.

Steve Dennis [00:01:43]:
Well, it’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on, Dave.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:47]:
Earlier in your career, you were an executive at Sears. And you and I are of the age that we know exactly what Sears is and how relevant it was as an organization. And some people listening are gonna say, Sears? What’s that? I wondered if you could just maybe briefly paint a picture of Sears and what it was, what it is today. But I’m curious, like, what that experience was like being an executive in an organization that was becoming less relevant at the time you were there.

Steve Dennis [00:02:18]:
Yeah. Well, it’s a lot of a long strange trip it’s been, I think, in a lot of regards. But, yeah, I started my career, my retail career at Sears in 1991. And just a few years earlier, Sears was the biggest retailer on the planet, most noted for having these large department stores, mostly in regional malls, and not only being huge in general but also being really dominant in several major categories like major home appliances and home improvement. And pretty steadily starting with first with the ascent of Walmart and some of the discount mass merchant types as well as some of the, some folks will know that this term category killers, but folks like Home Depot, Lowe’s, Best Buy that were focused on particular merchandise categories largely not tied to the traditional malls. Sears started to lose pretty steadily over many, many years market share and started to have the profitability eroded. So when I joined I actually kind of went back and forth between more operating roles and more kind of strategy business development roles. But pretty much my entire time there, my 12 years there, we were really dealing with trying to figure out how to turn the business around, how to stop the leakage of market share to various competitors.

Steve Dennis [00:03:45]:
And flash forward to today, Sears is technically still in business, but, you know, has gone from being $40,000,000,000 or something in revenues 30 years ago to well, well under $1,000,000,000 and essentially not being part of the discussion anymore, I guess, in retail. In terms of your question about being there, it really affected a lot of my work since then because it was really blindingly obvious in the early nineties and ever more obvious as time went on that Sears was on a kind of slow slide to oblivion. You could argue about how how fast and how hard that fall was gonna occur. But it was pretty clear that there were things about our business model that were once quite powerful that were no longer so powerful, and that if we didn’t start to change quite dramatically and do things very differently, we were going to continue to lose market share. And yet we did really, when you look back on it, with the benefit of hindsight, we did very little that really was meaningful in terms of starting or stopping, I should say, the the dissent. So it’s affected me in terms of thinking about how is it that so many companies, because certainly Sears is not the only player that has gone from lofty heights to either being extinct or irrelevant, you know? How is it that powerful companies with all these advantages are, unable to get themselves back on the right track?

Dave Stachowiak [00:05:20]:
Yeah. Adam was really struck reading through your book on all all the names of companies you cite that it there’s certainly times when an organization something changes in regulatory environments or there’s a massive event. But those are really the minority. When you think about the organizations and so many mentioned in the book that become irrelevant, it’s often a slow decline that in a lot of ways, like, a lot of people saw coming, like, you all did in the nineties, you know, looking at Sears. Right? And, I’m quoting you now. You write in its 2023 disruption index study, AlixPartners found that 78% of the CEO surveyed indicated that their companies faced serious disruption in the past year. 98% say their business model must change in the next 3 years, but 85% say they find it hard to know where to start. Those are huge percentages.

Dave Stachowiak [00:06:17]:
This is just reality of where we are today, isn’t it?

Steve Dennis [00:06:20]:
Well, it is. And I think part of the motivation for writing leaders lead was there’s I’m sure some folks listening will be familiar with Clayton Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma. And this idea and his book came out in the nineties, but this idea that big successful companies are often slow to change because they spend so much doing protecting the core business and that allows disruptor type companies to come up and start to steal market share away, and then over time sometimes these disruptors become more powerful than the so called legacy players or incumbent players. So this is this is not a new idea. What I think is really scary and part of the reasons why those CEOs feel that way is the pace of change is only accelerating. If you look at Sears’ downfall or Blockbuster’s downfall or any number of of retailers that were once really powerful, it’s not so much because of Amazon or e commerce. In many cases it was because of brick and mortar competitors. And when you’re building stores like Home Depot has been doing for 30 years, that takes a long time to go from, you know, a 100 stores to 300 stores to 500 stores to a 1000 stores.

Steve Dennis [00:07:39]:
So in some cases, you know, I often say that Sears was a slow motion crisis. You know, if you could see this coming for quite a long ways away, and yet we mostly watched over 20 plus years as this happened to us. If you think about today where certain business models that aren’t relying on brick and mortar stores largely using technology, you can go from a relatively small business to a quite substantial business in a year or 2. I mean, just look at the spread of social media networks. Look at the spread of AI. Look at I don’t know how many of your listeners will be familiar with TEMU and Shein, these these Chinese direct from factory models which have grown from basically nothing to tens of 1,000,000,000 of dollars in revenue in just 2 or 3 years. So I think that really puts extra pressure on companies needing to really pay attention to what’s happening and find ways to respond much more quickly and powerfully than than I would say we had to even 4 or 5 years ago.

Dave Stachowiak [00:08:43]:
So much of leading well or leading poorly comes down to mindset, right, of the people who have the responsibility to guide the organization forward, whatever that organization is. And and you point out some of the obstacles in the book that tend to get leaders in trouble a bit. And one of them you point out is self sufficiency. And I think a lot of us think about self sufficiency as a virtue in many ways, and, of course, it is. But it also can get us in trouble, can’t it?

Steve Dennis [00:09:15]:
Sure. I I think, you know, the risk of stating the obvious, I think almost any behavior or attitude taken to the extreme can be harmful. But I know I grew up in a in an era where at least most of the companies I worked for or have worked with, there’s kind of a command and control structure where the leader, whether we’re talking about a team leader or VP or ultimately the CEO, is supposed to have all the answers. And that to be vulnerable, to ask for help is sometimes seen as a sign of weakness. And so I think in an era I mean, I don’t know that that was ever really a great way to run businesses or organizations, but I think in this era we’re in where disruption is unrelenting often comes out of unexpected places, to think that any one person no matter how gifted is going to be able to cope, and respond to everything that’s going on. I think that’s really very much a dysfunctional kind of ego. So I think we have to really be not only open to see how business is evolving and how new business models can disrupt us or, you know, at the same time I think sometimes I frame things too much in the negative because certainly you wanna try to avoid going out of business or, you know, being in endless years of struggle. But the other thing is the more agile you more are, the more open you are to see things in different ways, the more you can seize opportunities and perhaps get ahead of the competition in a powerful way.

Dave Stachowiak [00:10:55]:
I came across a video online not that long ago of Jensen Huang, who’s the CEO of NVIDIA. And he was giving a presentation at Stanford, and he made the point that people with high expectations tend to have very low resilience. And he said, and I’m quoting him, I hope suffering happens to you. And the context of that might seem that might sound a little blunt, but the context of it was he’s not advocating for people to, like, suffer for suffering sake, but he made the point. I don’t know how to, like, help you to have more resilience and to to do that in a way where you don’t suffer somewhat. And Right. There’s a part of this which is the attitude sometimes that I deserve this. I’ve gotten a good degree.

Dave Stachowiak [00:11:45]:
I’ve gotten a lot of training. I have a certain title. I have a certain number of years of experience. And I sense that that is an obstacle oftentimes for us, like, being able to stay relevant.

Steve Dennis [00:11:57]:
Well, I think, you know, there’s a lot, I think, potentially to unpack there. One of the things I talk about in the book, which is not an original idea, it’s really very much stolen from Ryan Holiday and some others about how ego gets in the way a lot of times. And I think, you know, if either we’ve had certain kind of education or we’ve had certain kind of jobs, and I can speak from my own experience, I think you start to believe your own press and you start to think that you can do no wrong and that that often causes you to miss things or to lean too heavily into a particular set of skills that have always served you well. And one of the things I say in the book is that, and I’ve been saying this for many years, it wasn’t particular to this book, is that what got you here is not likely to get you there. In fact, if you think or you’re really locked in on a certain set of skills or kind of a playbook of how you’ve done things that have brought you incredible success, it often may make you blind and get in the way of you making the changes you need to. I can give many examples, many of them firsthand, where we kept doing the same thing, hoping it would work better. But in fact, we were just really optimizing a losing business model, kind of doubling down on a losing hand. But it was very comfortable for us culturally or in the case of some particular leaders to go back to that thing that had made them successful in the past.

Steve Dennis [00:13:25]:
But it just turned out that that set of skills, that perspective was not super helpful in the way the world was evolving.

Dave Stachowiak [00:13:32]:
Yeah. And it’s so hard to- it’s sometimes really easy for someone who’s not in the middle of it to see the distinction. And yet it is so hard when we’re either us or a team are in the middle of that to notice when are we doubling down on an idea, a path, a strategy that is maybe not the right thing long term, and when is it that we’re finding something that’s that’s new and different? And I was struck by something you wrote in the book. You say, in the months before I began writing the book in earnest, I lost count of the number of times I heard someone put forth what they thought was a keen insight when it really was something that just about anyone who’d been immersed in the necessary work has known for years. And I think about how many times I have had that thought. Like, I’ve read someone’s book or been in conversation or someone, like, said something. I’m like, oh, wow. You know, I’ve been here in that point for, like, 7 or 8 years somewhere.

Dave Stachowiak [00:14:31]:
And then I also think about, like, how many times I’ve been that person. Right? You know, the other side. And it’s part of this is, like, I’m off like, we we all should be for discovering new things and coming to things for the first time, and yet we can easily miss stuff that we really should be paying attention to. And I don’t know if I have a clear question here, Steve, but I wonder, like, how do we, like, get out of that path of, you know, missing stuff that is really so obvious to the people around us?

Steve Dennis [00:15:02]:
Well, I think a lot of this is just what you choose to focus on and what practices, habits, processes, what have you, you develop. One of the things which I don’t exactly phrase this way in the book, but I found myself saying this often when I’ve been speaking about the book or working with clients is if the world has changed so much because I think everybody will agree- and obviously, I spend a lot of time in retail- but I’ve talked to plenty of other people in other industries. And I think most people’s experience is that the competitive environment, the technology environment, the customer environments continue to evolve quite dramatically. I’m sure there’s a few people listening where their businesses are relatively stable. But for the most part, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of disruption in just about every aspect of society and business. So if the world has changed so much, why have you or your organization changed so little? And when I speak about that, it oftentimes makes people uncomfortable because they all not all, but many recognize that, yeah, why have we changed so little? And I think that gets to a lot of things. One is you have to and I talk about this in one of the chapters.

Steve Dennis [00:16:16]:
I think you have to open the aperture. And by that, I mean cast a wider view in terms of the inputs you’re bringing into your decision making. And so that that will play out differently for different organizations. But I can say for sure in retail, that’s taking a look at a wider set of competitors in many cases. It’s looking at impact of new technology. So, you know, a lot of companies and definitely my experience for a good chunk of my career, kind of going back to what I was saying about Sears, things didn’t really change all that quickly for a long time. So if you’re trying to understand, I don’t know, a new point of sales system or system or a new marketing strategy or something, it wasn’t necessarily that complex. Now today, if you just wanna talk about marketing and you can see how a TikTok video can have huge impact on sales or start to change what consumers are interested in.

Steve Dennis [00:17:14]:
You know, it’s just a different environment. So you have to be willing to let go of many things that served you well in the past. You have to open the aperture to bring more data, more perspectives in. And that could mean working with different people. You know, it’s very self serving as a consultant. You should bring in different perspectives. But, but things people that are gonna challenge the status quo make you see things in different ways. But the other thing I think is really important is just how different you know, like when I was first doing strategic planning and we would talk about things like best practices or whatever and benchmarking, you know, those kinds of things.

Steve Dennis [00:17:53]:
The field of companies we would talk about for benchmarking purposes was usually pretty narrow. We were looking at our direct competitors or people with relatively similar business models. Well, I think today consumers, customers are often comparing what we do to their last rate experience. And that may be an experience that has nothing to do with the exact business model we’re in. So an example of this that I mentioned in the book is if you can check out super easily on Amazon, why can’t you do that anywhere? You know, if you can check into a room in a hotel on your mobile phone, why can’t you complete the same kind of activity in a doctor’s office or whatever? Because people are experiencing leading edge customer experience and technology solutions. And I think this is very common to apply it to our own situation. So you really have to have a practice of looking much more widely at how consumer behavior is changing, how technology can be used, and and at least consider how that applies to your business.

Dave Stachowiak [00:19:01]:
And this is what you’re saying for me is is sounding way beyond. You know, I may have looked at 3 or 4 benchmark competitors before. It’s not that I’m adding a 4th or a 5th. It’s that I’m vastly expanding how I think about just what’s going on in the world and getting inspiration from different experiences, other industries, leaders who are in disciplines that are totally different than mine. And the people you see who do that well, who you have that conversation with or on that path, and they sorta get it. And they start looking elsewhere and seeing diverse perspectives. What is it that you hear from them? What’s the language they’re using? What’s the mindset they have that others don’t?

Steve Dennis [00:19:44]:
Well, I I think they, first of all, just buy into this this it just becomes a principle that they need to seek insight everywhere. Or not everywhere, but you know, in a very wide from a very wide range of perspectives. But the other thing, and I think this is really critical, is just because of the way most at least bigger organizations tend to operate is you have to budget for exploration. You know, whether you call it an R and D budget or what have you. But I think companies that don’t do this well, they tend to be very locked in on processes that don’t have a lot of agility and getting money or getting resources to go explore is tough to do. So you have to make a proactive decision and set up mechanisms to have enough time. And you know, the amount of time you need to do will certainly vary by competitive situations and your particular industry dynamics. But if it’s like for example, I talk about a company I worked with a few years ago when they were working to or starting to really look at a different way of going to market or at least be open to pretty significant change in the way they go to market.

Steve Dennis [00:20:58]:
When they started that process, they spent a bunch of money with consultants, but they also spent a bunch of money and time going around the world and visiting and speaking to people that were innovating in customer experience quite broadly. So even though they are a primarily manufacturer of apparel, athletic wear, and so forth and have some of their own stores, they were visiting, bakeries, they were visiting hotels, they were talking to universities about some of the early stage work and looking at different membership programs and things like that because they were really opening the aperture to the range of possibilities and trying to say, Okay, well, can we adapt perhaps something that we’re seeing that’s going on in Brazil maybe and start to stand up some experiments or proof of concepts for our own business? But, you know, you have to have the openness to allow your top 30 executives or whatever exactly it was to go around the world for 2 or 3 weeks to devote time to these meetings, to spend money that’s not going to pay off for 3, 4, 5 years, maybe longer. So if you don’t have the resource allocation mechanism and you don’t have mechanisms to test more stuff and you don’t have skill sets of people that know how to experiment and you don’t put that agility in your system, it’s very unlikely you’re gonna do anything substantive. Then it’s just kind of like a hobby project.

Dave Stachowiak [00:22:31]:
1 of our pastors years ago made the point that if you wanna know what’s important to a person, look at their bank statement and their calendar. And the distinction I’m hearing from you in which you’ve just said is that, you know, a lot of people espouse innovation. A lot people espouse, like, wanting to get insight from different sources. A big difference maker is, though, the people who are really doing that are actually making the time in their schedule and they’re putting budget behind it. And if that’s happening, that’s a that’s an indicator that you’re on the right path.

Steve Dennis [00:23:02]:
In my experience, it is for sure. The other thing going back to what you’re saying earlier about what I wrote about people getting up in in conferences and and saying stuff that was years old, it’s also revealing that they haven’t been doing the work to stay current. Because it’s not possible because this is what I do for a living, you know, looking at trends and seeing patterns. You know, I mean, we we can have different interpretations and different insights will apply to different organizations in different ways for sure. But some things are just not possible to have missed if you were doing the work. So part of what I mean by that is, and it gets back to what we’re just talking about, is, you know, if you’re going to be serious about the work of transformation, it’s important that you understand what you’re signing up for. Not only are you signing up for being courageous and being willing to take more risk and things like that, but you’re also signing up for doing the work. And doing the work often means investing in research, hiring people in a different way, putting money against things that perhaps you haven’t because you’re just not going to get a really different outcome without I mean it’s very unlikely.

Steve Dennis [00:24:09]:
You might get lucky, but I would say in general you’re not gonna get very good outcomes if you don’t do something fundamentally different and do so in a serious manner. And that typically means changing processes, changing resources, devoting energy and dollars to it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:24:25]:
Yeah, indeed. And you point out as well, by the way, there’s there’s a whole bunch of mind leaps that you invite us to take of being better at handling disruption and and innovation. And, you know, we’re zeroing on mostly one of them, but one of the themes that comes out clearly in your work is being able to ask for help and the willingness to do that. And you talk about your own journey on getting better at this. What work to get better at asking for help? Because I think a lot of us struggle with that.

Steve Dennis [00:24:58]:
Well, in my case, it turns out I guess for better, but I wish it had been easier, is things had to get pretty bad for me to really ask for help. And and I, you know, and I think this happens with a lot of people. If we talk about it kind of like in the the context of addiction where people hit bottom or they get arrested or something awful happens, and then suddenly they wake up and realize they gotta do something much more dramatically or people get fired or whatever. I mean, something bad, some consequence, significant consequence has to happen before people make changes. And I think, you know, we see that individually as well as with companies. Unfortunately, particularly for companies, but sometimes for people, they may wake up too late, right, where things have gotten too bad and you can’t recover from it. But I think for me, you know, I just had to see evidence that what I was doing was not working as well as I wanted it to. And I was making, I would say incremental changes in the way I was leading, in the way I was approaching my life, and then I just kind of set off, I should say, on a path to look at trying something fundamentally different.

Steve Dennis [00:26:10]:
And I think the take away message whether we’re talking about an organization or we’re talking about our individual leadership as business people or our own personal life is if what you’re doing- I mean, it sounds super obvious, I almost hesitate to say it, but if what you’re doing isn’t working, why not try something else? Like I think that’s the kind of takeaway message, particularly if you’ve been trying doing things in a like I’ll put it just in a business context. I’m sure most listeners will know the at least in the United States, the department store business has been suffering for 20 plus years, not just Sears but Macy’s and JCPenney and a bunch of others. And yet, mostly what they’ve done is a slightly better version of what they’ve always done. And none of that has made any meaningful difference. So I think you have to ask yourself the question, well, is a slightly better version of what you’ve been doing for 20 years the answer? Or is there something radically different? And to tie it back to the radical acceptance idea is to see if the world is very different. If different things are important to consumers, if different technology is working, whatever that might be, you have to accept that as the truth and then take action against it as opposed to kind of living in this kind of zone of denial where you’re just kind of talking yourself into this is going to be fine. When I think, you know, if we’re really open and honest with ourselves, then you’ll see like, you know, there’s really no chance or very little chance that what I’m doing is going to result in the kind of success I want. So I mean, I think that it takes a lot of courage to be willing to both see your situation in a different light, to maybe realize that the things you’ve been doing are not really working, and then to really try something which could be pretty radically different.

Steve Dennis [00:28:10]:
Again, it depends a little bit on your situation, how radical the change has to be. But in my case, personally, the way I was doing things, you know, I felt like I really had to do things in a pretty different way. You know, keep things that were working well, but but let go of things that weren’t.

Dave Stachowiak [00:28:25]:
You’ve had your workout in the world in so many substantial ways. You host a podcast. You do a ton of speaking. I know you’ve been talking to so many people about your work. And I’m curious as you put this book together and have now shared it with others and folks are interacting with these ideas. What, if anything, have you changed your mind on?

Steve Dennis [00:28:45]:
Well, I don’t know if this is a complete change. It’s been a little bit of an evolution. But one of the struggles I’ve had, and I guess it’s just inherent to the choice I’ve made about doing what I do is there’s a lot of being a consultant, of being quote unquote a thought leader, content creator, whatever. That is a lot around look at me, look how good my ideas are, you know, pay attention to me. Very kind of ego, affirming as well as just kind of shameless self promotion. And I started to really reframe the way I share things, which is very much a work in progress I will say. But, in terms of thinking about it as a gift or an act of generosity, as opposed to more the ego driven kind of like, I have a bunch of good ideas and you should listen to them and I need to convince you that I’m right. Like I said, that’s been an evolution for me in a lot of respects.

Steve Dennis [00:29:46]:
But I think really with this book I’ve kind of flipped the script a little bit to say here is my experience. Here are things that I’ve found. I’m not trying to have it be a PhD level thesis, an exhaustive survey of all the thinking in the world. It’s not that kind of book and I’m trying not to speak about it in that way. But really think about it as a gift that some people will receive and get benefit out of it and others won’t for whatever reason. And I can be okay with that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:16]:
Steve Dennis is the author of Leaders Leap: Transforming Your Company at the Speed of Disruption. Steve, thank you so much for your time and your work.

Steve Dennis [00:30:25]:
Oh, thank you. I really appreciate the the opportunity.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:34]:
If this conversation was helpful to you, 3 related episodes I’d recommend. 1 of them is episode 550. How to win the long game when the short term seems bleak. Dorie Clark was my guest on that episode, and we talked about the reality that all of us run into in our careers. Maybe you are right now where, you know, where you’re heading big picture, but short term, things aren’t working. Maybe it was a position that didn’t work out. Maybe it it’s a career path that you thought was right, but turns out is not. Or maybe it was waiting on a prospect or a donor to come through and they didn’t for whatever reason for you or your organization.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:12]:
How do you respond in those moments? How do you win even when you lose? That was part of our conversation, and we went into great detail on how to actually have the right mindset and strategies. We’ll help you through some of those most difficult times. Episode 550 for that. Also recommended the conversation with Whitney Johnson on episode 576. How to help people engage in growth. Almost all of us in our roles are charged with helping others to grow. Whitney and I talked about the s curve in that conversation and especially at the early stages of growth, how we can help set others up for success, and, yes, how we can do that better for ourselves too. Episode 576 for that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:51]:
And then, of course, I’d recommend the recent conversation with Maurice Ashley, episode 697. How to keep improving. Maurice is chess’s first black grand master. He talked in that conversation about how he has worked to keep improving in his work. And, of course, so much of his work as a grand master is supporting other players and really working at the highest levels of competitive chess and how he thinks about improving, how he helps other people to do that. A fascinating conversation. Episode 697 for that. All of those episodes you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:28]:
If you have not yet set up your free membership, I am inviting you to do that today. Your free membership opens up access to you for all of the episodes in the library since 2011, searchable by topic. We have this filed under personal leadership, this conversation today with Steve. So many other conversations we’ve had along with dozens and dozens of other topics inside of the library. It is a great starting point for you if you’re looking for what’s most relevant to you right now. You know, relevance is so key to this. Right? It’s why we’ve designed the free membership the way we have. All of the podcast apps.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:05]:
You can scroll through and see all of the episodes there, but you can’t search by topic. And that’s why we’ve set up the website so you can find what’s relevant to you right now and drive your learning forward for what’s gonna help most in this moment- coachingforleaders.com to set up your free membership, and you’ll be off and running with us. And if you have your free membership, I would invite you to consider Coaching for Leaders Plus. Coaching for Leaders Plus opens up an entirely next set of benefits for you, and one of those is my weekly journal entry. I write a weekly entry every single week. I send it out on email to all of our plus members. And one of my recent entries, I talked about the trap of defying or demonizing.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:50]:
A lot of times when we work for someone or we work with someone, we have a tendency to put people into boxes. Either this person’s great. I love them. They’ve supported my career. And sometimes that we don’t see some of the struggles, the blind spots. And then demonizing. We all tend to do that too. Well, someone wronged me or I didn’t like the way they gave me feedback.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:09]:
And I discount much of what they say in the future. In that journal entry, I talk about how in most situations, it’s actually helpful to land somewhere in between. What are the good things we can find in everyone? What are the things that we see from others that we don’t care for ourselves and that we use as learning opportunities for us? That’s one of the recent journal entries. Every single week, I’m publishing another journal entry coming to you on email. It’s one of the benefits inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus. To go find out more, go over to coachingforleaders.plus to find more details. Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:49]:
This next week, 2 additional episodes coming your way. One of them is this Saturday, a Saturday cast coming with one of our Coaching for Leaders fellows, Shandy Welch. We are talking about how to talk to people who intimidate you, a reality we all face in our careers. And then next Monday, our next regular episode is with Steven M.R. Covey on the beliefs of inspirational leaders. Join me for both of those conversations in the next week. Have a great week, and see you on Friday, for the conversation with Shandy. Take care.