692: Transcend Leadership Struggles Through Your Strengths, with Lisa Cummings

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
When challenges arise, we sometimes miss what’s right in front of us. In this episode, how to transcend leadership struggles through your strengths. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 692. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:24]:
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. Part of the process of being made as a leader is understanding your own talents, your own strengths. How do you bring those to your work and also to just how you think about your productivity and places of joy each day. On the last episode, we had General Brown speaking about bringing strengths to a top job.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:05]:
Today, how we think about our strengths to utilize them in tackling some of the biggest leadership challenges in front of us. And I’m so glad to welcome back to the show Lisa Cummings. Lisa is an expert on strengths, the founder of Lead Through Strengths, a firm supporting building strengths into your team’s culture. She is also the host of the lead through strengths podcast. Lisa is a Gallup certified strengths coach and has trained over 20,000 people in 14 countries. Today, she facilitates off sites and retreats to help leaders and their teams go deep on utilizing their strengths well. Lisa, welcome back. Always a pleasure to talk to you.

Lisa Cummings [00:01:48]:
It’s fun to be back. I can’t believe it’s been a few years.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:52]:
It has been a few years, and I have learned so much about strengths from you over the years, not only in thinking about my own strengths, but thinking about how do we, as leaders, do a better job at supporting strengths inside of our teams and organizations. And as I was reflecting back on our past conversations, I realized I don’t think we’ve ever had the conversation on how we came to this and how you came to this originally and working with strengths. How did this show up originally for you where you ended up focusing your entire professional work on this?

Lisa Cummings [00:02:28]:
Well, it’s actually something that you just mentioned. You were talking about how powerful it is for teams. In 1999, I read this book, First Break All the Rules. And then in 2000, I had my first manager job. And when that happened, I wanted to not be bad at it. And I to I did strengths finder 2 point o, the book. I didn’t have a budget for team off sites or anything like that. I just scrapped together my own thing.

Lisa Cummings [00:02:56]:
We spent a half a day together learning about each other’s strengths. At the time, you couldn’t get the full 34. All I could learn were the top 5, And that changed every dynamic on the team, how I valued people on the team, things that I thought were really missing were present. Things that were probably missing from my brain were present in theirs. And I realized how a well rounded team could really shape things and how it could help me see contributions in people who I actually thought were weak performers. It really changed everything in the way I viewed people. So I started doing with every team I managed after that. And then eventually in 2014, 15, I thought I have to do this full time and make this is such an incredible leadership tool and personal development tool.

Lisa Cummings [00:03:43]:
I have to make this a full time thing. How about you? How did you get into it?

Dave Stachowiak [00:03:48]:
Well, it’s it’s funny you said 1999 because I think it was 1998 because I was a junior or senior in college. And I read the book at the at the invitation of a coach I was working with at the time, soar with your strengths. And the book changed my entire thinking on just how I thought about my own talents and strengths and approaching work in the world. And I am sure there is tons more nuance in the book than this, Lisa, but here were, like, the three sentences I remember from the book. The first one was figure out what your strengths and natural talents are. Secondly, spend as much time, especially professionally, doing those things. And then 3rd, partner with other people who do the things that you’re not good at. And those were, like, my 3 huge takeaways from that book at the time.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:46]:
And I look back now. It’s been 25, 30 years later. And as I think about those things, they seem so obvious today, but I remember at the time that that was really a shift from what I was used to thinking about because I often would think about the things that were my strengths and talents of things that I had worked the hardest to get good at. And I think this comes back to what general Brown said in the last episode as well of, you know, our tendency a lot of times is we find we identify the things that we’re really not good at as he said, like, the twos and threes on a scale of 1 to 10. And we try to get better at them. And he said, like, don’t do that. Don’t spend your time doing that. And I’ve had to go through sort of a bit of a reckoning of, okay.

Dave Stachowiak [00:05:37]:
I need to set some of those things aside and actually zero on the things I do well. And it’s still a little bit of a journey, but, boy, has it made such a difference in my professional life ever since.

Lisa Cummings [00:05:49]:
Yeah. I I really agree. The that book written as a fable, I think it in the world, we’ve heard around people talking about asking a fish to climb a tree, and I don’t wanna give away the whole book. But if you just think about that as the easiest way to describe some of the things that happened in that story, that seems so obvious. If you asked a fish, hey, climb a tree. Let’s go to tree climbing school. Let’s really work on your claws today. I mean, you could go a 1,000 ways and think about how ridiculous it is.

Lisa Cummings [00:06:20]:
But when it comes to humans, we do it. I was asking it of myself. I was wishing for it from my team. Why not figure out who your fish are and throw them in the river and say, do it. Swim, fish, swim. So what it just seems so obvious after you figure it out. But for some reason, we do not like being the okayest at anything because it doesn’t feel great to be okay at something or to be bad at something or to be drained by something. You think, oh, if I get better, it won’t suck the life out of me so much.

Lisa Cummings [00:06:52]:
But it really doesn’t work like that. Working out of your strengths is efficient. It’s fun. I mean, I was listening to your interview with him when he was talking about Spider Man. He just lit up. You could hear the energy in his voice. When you find things you like, that you’re aligned with, that makes sense to you, you feel alive for it. You have excellence in that area.

Lisa Cummings [00:07:11]:
It absolutely changes the way you perform and the outcomes you can get. So if we can align with those, it makes everything better in the way it feels, but also in the results you get. How perfect is that for both leaders wanting the most out of their team or or the most for their team and also for you and how you live your life. You’re talking about the joy. I mean, if you chase that and you find the areas that actually light you up when you see the spark, those are areas where excellence is going to come to you more easily.

Dave Stachowiak [00:07:43]:
And this all makes so much sense. Theoretically, I totally got there when I read that book back in 98 or 99. And yet I spent probably a good 10 years still trying to, like, you know, knock my head against the wall of doing the things that I wasn’t as naturally gifted at. And I see that in the folks I support in our academy and our members too, Lisa. And and one of the things I run into fairly regularly is we use the CliftonStrengths or it’s formally was called strengths finder framework from Gallup. And when folks come through our academy, one of the tools we use is the assessment. And for those who haven’t taken it, I know many people are familiar with it, is there’s a beautiful report that comes out of it. And Gallup does a nice job of listing from your top, highlight kind of your first top five strengths.

Dave Stachowiak [00:08:38]:
And then there’s a full report of all 34. And one of the things that you realize as you get into thinking about strengths is the key is is to 0 in on the things you do really well and to think about those and how to leverage those strengths. And there’s a subset of folks every time we do that who, even though we talk about not doing that and everyone agrees to that, will 0 in on the bottom. You know? What are numbers 31, 32, 34? Like, what’s right at the bottom? And sometimes folks even, like, zero in on that, like, say, okay. I’m gonna work on getting better at those. Even though we’ve talked about don’t do that, don’t spend time there, and they understand that intellectually, but there’s just something so inherently human about looking to, like, what we’re not good at and wanting to get better at that versus thinking about the things we’re naturally good at. I I’m sure you run into this and see this with people too.

Lisa Cummings [00:09:34]:
I see it always. And I don’t think it’s exaggerated language. Every time I do an event with full 34, the quote is something like this. Yeah. But I need you to know what I suck at because I don’t want to have that vulnerability. But if you think about it logically like this, there are 34 natural talents. And if you look at those like your preferences or your instincts, number 1, it seems ridiculous to think I’m gonna get someone else’s instincts because we know that our instincts are there. Right? And you think, oh, but if I practice long enough, hard enough, I could change my instincts.

Lisa Cummings [00:10:12]:
And, sure, I mean, we have neuroplasticity, like, we can grow in things. But look, if you have a list of 1 through 34, you will always have a bottom. So why would you spend your energy chasing the bottom? Because you’re just going to have a new bottom 5 if you raise some things up. So that part of it doesn’t make logical sense, but we do love to go there. Now I love to go there if they want to know what approaches might drain the life out of them. It’s a great thing to go look at because you might be realizing, oh, I’m doing this job this certain way because it seems to be what happens in the culture of the company. It seems to be how people act here or get things done here, and I’ve been trying to be like them and no wonder that activity or that responsibility or that meeting really drains me, it’s because I haven’t really been doing it as me. So instead, if you look at this list of your top 5 or 10, like your easy buttons because that’s truly what this is.

Lisa Cummings [00:11:10]:
It’s not a personality assessment. It was designed to be your easy performance factors. So if these are your and I just call them easy buttons. If these are your easy buttons, why would you go press your difficult button? Yeah. But we love doing it. So go press your easy button and first ask yourself, how could I lead through the ones that come really naturally to me? I think that’s why people discount them as valuable or they’re not hard won because they’re they feel natural and easy. So they think, well, those aren’t a big deal. So those aren’t special.

Lisa Cummings [00:11:41]:
So, therefore, I should focus on some other things. But in fact, they are special to other people. They just don’t feel like much to you because they came so easily to you.

Dave Stachowiak [00:11:50]:
Yeah. And isn’t it interesting how I mean, this is true for me, and I’ve seen it for a lot of folks. And I think it’s there’s something just very human about this. Like, we tend to value the things we have to work hardest at. And it’s not that there’s not value in working really hard at getting better at something because there is. It’s just that we sometimes completely then skip over the things that come so naturally well to us that we don’t even think about them as our strengths. And I haven’t figured out for myself, and I certainly haven’t figured out for others, and I’m curious if you have. Like, how do in the moment when things actually come up to, like, shift that a bit and actually keep that in the proper perspective.

Dave Stachowiak [00:12:39]:
And have you found something that’s helpful, Lisa, when you think about getting a little bit of elevation and distance from the bottom talents and thinking about them in the proper perspective that helps people to do that?

Lisa Cummings [00:12:51]:
A couple of things. One is the easy button metaphor, actually, if you can remember it because it’s such a visual, if you’re going through something hard, if you could actually just think, if there were an easy button for this, what would it look like? And when I do retreats with people, I give them a personalized frame. They walk away with a list so that if they decide to put it on their desk, they might just decide to glance over and see they have this tool set that is easier to call on. Because it really just isn’t something your brain is going to tend to do. You have to ask your brain to go there. But if you do ask your brain to go there, usually, it’s pretty simple. If you say, alright. I have this huge challenge.

Lisa Cummings [00:13:32]:
Big things are coming up. Like, if I give you an example, I was working with a team and they had an increase in the number of escalations from customers. They were getting irate customer calls. They found some defects in their projects or products rather. And if you just asked yourself as the leader, what am I going to do about these escalations? This is going to blow up our business. We’re getting bad PR for it. I’m gonna lose my job over it. You can go down the doomsday thing because out of protection, you’re going to be thinking that as well, but also your responsibility.

Dave Stachowiak [00:14:02]:
Right.

Lisa Cummings [00:14:03]:
I had a team I was working on with something like this, and this guy, in the room said, I love escalation calls, by the way. And the whole room, like, head on a swivel. They’re like, what? Why? And he said, I lead through intellection. I’ll I think deeply about things. I’ve thought deeply about the problem. I am a subject matter expert. I lead through restorative. I love fixing problems.

Lisa Cummings [00:14:31]:
I lead through competition. It’s like a competition on every call. Can I win? Can I turn this person around so they love us again? Can I fix their problems so that it’s done? And he just got a jolt out of every one of them, and he’s like, it it’s my mission to make this call their last call. You know? They’ve already been through 4 or 5 other people to get to me. So in one little conversation like that in a team summit, they were able to take a bunch of things off of his plate that he didn’t like to make room for him to take the escalation calls that no one else wanted. So it didn’t fix the root cause. But even then, just being in the moment where we said, okay. We’re in a challenge.

Lisa Cummings [00:15:12]:
What’s going on in the room? What talents do we have that could support this issue? And one guy’s hand raise changed everything about their orientation toward it. Now think about how that freed up the mental space of other people on the team to figure out the root cause, to do other things related to it. And he was actually having a great time, and he got to get rid of work he didn’t like.

Dave Stachowiak [00:15:36]:
Yeah. It’s such a great example of the distinction of the tendency many of us have to chase the bottom versus aiming our top strengths at a new issue that’s come up. Right? Whether it’s ours, ourselves as an individual or an individual leader or thinking about that from the lens of the team and thinking about how do I refine and apply my top strengths in a new situation. And that’s the part that to me makes a ton of sense. It seems so wise. And yet, when I’m in the middle of, like, a tough situation, I don’t think to do for myself or for others always. And I’m wondering if you’ve seen people develop a practice of when they run into a new obstacle of really going to and thinking about how do I aim the strengths I already have, the talents I already have at this. Have you seen people do that? And if so, what gets them there? What’s the mindset that they show up with that actually helps them to start to do that more?

Lisa Cummings [00:16:45]:
The people who do this are the people who have meaningful conversations about their strengths over time, and it’s a regular practice. And it’s not just because it’s the challenge. I mean, obviously, if you hire a coach and your coach is a student enough to bring this up, great. That’s a good way to get it raised. But the thing is, the teams that don’t take the assessment and then do it as an off-site and then forget about it forever after, the ones who would have that result you were just talking about, they’re the ones who talk about their strengths regularly, so they talk about them in all the situations. And then it’s not on the leader. It’s not just the leader of the team saying, well, hey. How would you because you’ve become a great coach with it too, and you start to say, well, what would it look like if you turned on your strengths for this? And you start to do it with your team.

Lisa Cummings [00:17:35]:
But in order to get there so that you’re not the only one doing that, you’re not the only one talking easy buttons or the coach isn’t the only one talking easy buttons, it’s when everybody is thinking through a lens of a strength regularly and they have enough insight into each other that they could do this. And it might be sometimes it’s just having conversation that is guided by someone. Like, for example, after our events, we always have these 12 week activation courses where we give them some question prompts so they can ask different things about strengths in different environments so that they start to see you can hit from all these angles. Like, I might look at your report, Dave, and say, alright. I see a couple of things at your top and at your bottom that seemingly look opposite each other. Futuristic context is 1. Your futuristic is number 1. Your context is number 32.

Lisa Cummings [00:18:28]:
So maybe you have a preference to look ahead versus looking back as your instinct. Or maybe your relator number 4, those 1 on one relationships, same with connectedness, can really understand the effect that one conversation has on the person and the ripple effect of that after versus your woo being number 33, which might be more like woo is more, I’ve never met a stranger. I love social situations. I love being around all the people. Have you ever seen some of those opposites come into play where you actually felt the challenge and could feel the difference in when you used one or the other?

Dave Stachowiak [00:19:07]:
Oh my gosh. Yes. I almost ended my career at Dale Carnegie because I totally missed this distinction in my life, out of my work. So the

Lisa Cummings [00:19:18]:
Tell us more.

Dave Stachowiak [00:19:19]:
Yeah. Well, the the distinction you’re mentioning between relator and woo. And for those not familiar with this terminology and tell me how well I’m framing this because when I think about the 2, relator is someone who has the kind of the strength of talent of I really love connecting with people deeply, having really deep meaningful relationships, but not necessarily at quantity. It’s a much more of a, I think about it much more of, like, quality, depth of relationship. Whereas someone who has that strength of woo is a little bit more like, hey. I like to be out there and have lots of different kinds of relationships and, like, quantity of relation and depth of relationships too, but also more quantit and a little more extroverted whereas relate relators a little more introverted. And when I went to work for Dale Carnegie, Carnegie as a culture tends to be a little more woo and which I don’t think would surprise anyone. And so a lot of the people I work with tended to either either have that as one of their top talents or somewhere higher up.

Dave Stachowiak [00:20:24]:
And mine, as you mentioned, is not dead last, but pretty close. And I tried doing a lot of those woo type things for the 1st year I worked at Carnegie, and I failed so badly that I actually offered my resignation to my boss after the 1st year because I didn’t even get, like, halfway on my goal of my 1st year as far as how much business I was supposed to do and all these things. And thankfully, he talked me out of it. But that’s when I got serious about I need to do this a different way. Like, I could be the fish climbing up the tree for the next several years in this work, or I could figure out what could I do differently that would work would still get the same results. And, actually, that’s when I started writing, Lisa, like, professionally and thinking about doing things online and thinking about doing things that played more to my talents, and it changed everything. But I but it was because of that distinction, it was still a focus on being really well connected with people, but it was the environment that I chose and the lens I was looking through it, and it really did change everything.

Lisa Cummings [00:21:41]:
Well, I’m so glad you made the change and for what it’s done for you today.

Dave Stachowiak [00:21:46]:
Yeah. And I’ve I’ve built the coaching for leaders business around my strengths, which is one of the reasons I don’t do speaking, and I don’t do a lot of travel. I can do those things, but they take a ton of energy for me to do well. And so I’ve really tried to focus on the things I do well, which is working with people in small groups and personal connections and interviewing. And that’s been huge. But it it came for me understanding the distinction between were later in woo. And I didn’t I wasn’t using that language at the time, but that’s really what it was is being able to appreciate and focus in on that distinction.

Lisa Cummings [00:22:25]:
Yes. And so many people do that thing that just that happened to you back then. I would explain it like pain to purpose. So many people have that thing happen where they’re going through extraordinary pain and you, to the extent that you are going to change careers and quit. And whether that’s emotional pain someone’s enduring, or they’re going to quit their job, or they’re just hating life because they feel like they’re living in the dregs, and they probably are if they’re living out of their lesser talents all day every day. It’s like using if you took the easy button metaphor and said, I’m just gonna hit that easy button over and over and over, but it’s not mine. It’s not the one programmed to me. It’s programmed to someone else.

Lisa Cummings [00:23:09]:
And it’s not working for me. And I’m like, why aren’t you working? So you yeah. You figured it out through some pain, and I would say that is a typical path where people are like, this just isn’t working. Why is this so terrible? Why do I lack so much energy? Why is it not going well? Why am I feeling so much challenge? And that is a trigger clue to say, oop, I’m the fish climbing the tree right now. What could be going on? How else could I get this done? How else could I approach this? What if I looked at my strengths instead? And I think that your podcast is a huge service because now people could catch it at the earlier signs, or maybe even at the beginning of the challenge when it’s still just a big goal and it doesn’t feel like pain or something going wrong, and they could say, what if I approach this through my strengths? What if my team also approached it through their strengths? What would we do that looks different from the way we’ve done it in the past? How will we step into this new big space? How will we change our beliefs? There are so many things it can do to serve you, and some people turn on to it more quickly. But if you’re in that place where you’re feeling the major challenge or the major heaviness of something, it is a beautiful time to prompt you to say, maybe I should go back and look at that report again and just look at the top 5 or 10 and see if something pops up for me that gives me guidance in a couple of approaches I could take that I haven’t been taking yet or that I could delegate or a sign or regroup with my team on theirs, and there is incredible strength. I mean, it’s no surprise that your strengths strengthen your performance.

Dave Stachowiak [00:24:48]:
And one of the things I’m hearing you say not only in this conversation, but all of our past ones is the importance of consistency of, I think a lot of people have been through an experience where whether it was the strengths finder assessment or another assessment where you do the, you know, couple hour meeting and you do the debrief and everyone comes away with some perspective, and you never have a conversation about it again. And the power I hear in this is coming back to that conversation both in a leadership capacity, a team capacity, but also when new things come up, then coming back to that lens. And it’s fascinating to me, Lisa, like, what you just said when one of the reasons we introduced the strengths finder model in our academy cohorts is when new issues come up, then we’ll come back and talk about the strengths lens. And almost always, when we think about a new situation that comes up and we go back and think about, okay. Where in your talents, the things you do really well, where is the opportunity here? There’s almost always something that comes up that’s like, that’s kind of an obvious thing that I didn’t even think about utilizing in order to address the situation. But it does require you to come back to it and to think about it and to have that consistency of conversation like you’ve been inviting us to do.

Lisa Cummings [00:26:06]:
Yeah. It is absolutely about that consistency of conversation. It’s an easy thing to come back to if you ask yourself to, but it seems almost silly. Well, you know, when you first do it, you’re like, what do I do? Bring every conversation through it? And in some ways, you you could because it is like wearing a different pair of glasses. I, sometimes I’m like, yes. It’s like the Forrest Gump of strengths. You’re like strengths based feedback, strengths based conflict resolution, strengths based goals, strengths based challenges, strengths based situational fluency. You could just keep on going, but there it really is endless.

Lisa Cummings [00:26:38]:
Yeah. And you don’t wanna beat it to death where it gets old, but it is amazing if you keep it on your mind as a leader, how many situations it serves.

Dave Stachowiak [00:26:50]:
I think I have 3 invitations coming out of this conversation for folks to take Lisa. And, one of them is for those who have not taken the CliftonStrengths assessment before or used to be called Strengths Finder, people call it both names, is actually to go and do that. We’ve got a link in the episode notes to a link that Lisa’s provided. By the way, if you go through Lisa’s link, it helps support her organization. So thanks in advance if you decide to do that. So we’re gonna link all that up in the episode notes. Go take the assessment. If you haven’t done it before, it’s a great starting point to start thinking about this.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:24]:
The other place that I go for many, and I know we have many who have taken the assessment before. Lisa, you have a page on the Internet that Bonni and I obsess over, and we both go to at least I go to multiple times a week because this is to our point. Strengths is a conversation we should keep having with people we’re supporting for ourselves. You have this beautiful page at leadthroughstrengths.com/talents, and it is all of the 34 talents from the assessment. And when you click on them, it opens up this beautiful set of resources with videos, with the yays and the yaks around the different talents. I’ve anytime I send someone there, folks are just so impressed by how much you’ve put together. I mean, it’s really an incredible resource, so I think it’s a great starting point for people to be able to really utilize it well. And it’s I know it’s one of your favorite resources too.

Lisa Cummings [00:28:21]:
It is. It’s the one I love telling people to bookmark because they’re just so much there related to your own growth, looking at collaborating with someone else, leading someone with those talents, and we keep those in our main menu. So that first one you mentioned, we have buy codes under the main menu, and that that one we also have as 34 strengths in the main menu. So they can find those if they, well, of course, in the show notes, but also easily navigatable right from the top because they are such important resources. You have to start at the start and get to know yourself more deeply, so we wanted to provide some rich resources for that.

Dave Stachowiak [00:28:59]:
And the final invitation I’d have is if you are thinking about this through the lens of a team and you’d like to go a lot deeper, Lisa, of course, does tremendous work with off sites and retreats with leaders on really getting to the depth of these conversations. If that’s something that you’re looking for expert support on now, Lisa is a wonderful person to reach out to. And at the end of the episode today I’ll link to one of our prior conversations where we talked a little bit more about that but I’d certainly suggest her as a resource as well Lisa, as we wrap up our conversation, you know, I, often ask people what they’ve changed their minds on. As you think about being a practitioner of strengths and all the work you’ve done in talking to teams and leading retreats in the last few years, You’re many years into this. In the last, maybe a year or 2, what, if anything, have you changed your mind on in how you think about strengths?

Lisa Cummings [00:29:56]:
The topic of delegation really comes to me. I’ve done a lot of delegating over the last couple of years. And as I applied strengths to the beginning of that let’s see. You would think 20 something years in, I would have figured this out so deeply already, but it just unveils itself in layers. And the first thing that was really obvious to me about delegation was I should if I assign work, I should talk to the person about how I think their strengths tie into that task. And that worked really great, and I still do that, and I think it’s important. It also probably ties to my individualization talent that I love making those connections and helping people see how I think it’s a good match for them or why they might like it. But really getting into the detail of asking myself per task, per responsibility, and understanding, hey, why am I low energy on this? Or why do I still do this task just because I think it’s fast or easy when I could be withholding someone’s development? I could be allowing someone to really be developing in their strengths.

Lisa Cummings [00:31:04]:
May meanwhile, I’m thinking about it as a math equation. Like, if I do this task only once per month over the course of a year, does it really make sense to go through the ramp up process of teaching someone to do it? And now I think of it much less like that logical math equation, and I think about it so much more in their human development evolution and all of the pathways that could open for them. So now I view it like, if I’m withholding this from them and I’m not allowing them to develop their strengths because it’s so aligned with theirs compared to mine that it’s a selfish act to continue to hold on to it. So it’s really changing my view on delegation as I get deeper into it with that element. It almost felt like I was taking myself away from logic, but it’s not. It’s just not what was coming naturally to me in the way that I viewed that topic.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:00]:
Lisa Cummings is the founder of Lead Through Strengths and host of the podcast of the same name. Lisa, thank you so much for your work and your friendship. Really grateful.

Lisa Cummings [00:32:08]:
Likewise. Always a pleasure and so grateful to know you, Dave.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:18]:
If this conversation was helpful to you, 3 related episodes I’d also recommend. Episode 293 is the first one. How teams use StrengthsFinder results. Lisa and I talked in that episode about the other side of the conversation. How do you utilize CliftonStrengths strengths finder with your team? Or maybe you have started that. Maybe you’ve actually had the assessment utilized with your whole team. Maybe you’ve even sat down, had a meeting, and a debrief on the results, but you’ve wondered, what do I do next? In episode 293, we talk about, okay, once you’ve utilized the assessment, now what? How do you keep that conversation going to help people to continually utilize their strengths, but also to see the strengths in others from the team aspect? A great compliment to this conversation. Again, that’s episode 293.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:03]:
Also recommended episode 424. Scott Barlow is a mutual friends of Lisa and I. He has been heading up an organization called Happen to Your Career for many years, hosts a podcast of the same name. We had a conversation back on episode 424 on crafting a career to fit your strengths. Scott, also a big believer in strengths and also lining up our work in a way that honors our strengths so we can utilize them well. In episode 424, we walked through how he worked him and his team work with clients to support identifying strengths, aligning them up with the right role and career and the tactics and strategies, and most importantly, the mindset for doing that well. Episode 424 for that. And, of course, Lisa and I referenced the conversation last week on episode 691 with General CQ Brown, bringing your strengths to a big job.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:55]:
General Brown, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff here in the United States, we had a conversation about his strengths and how he utilizes his strengths to lead one of the largest organizations in the world, the United States military, and how he also utilizes his strengths to bring in conversation and listen well. All of that in episode 691. All of those episodes you can find on the coaching for leaders.com website as well as every app we can find out there to be able to populate the show too. And I mentioned that because one of those apps disappeared not that long ago, Google announced they would no longer be supporting Google Podcasts, the app that’s been available on iOS and Android. I know some of you’ve used that in the past. That’s the bad news. The good news is Google announced that they would now natively support audio podcasts on YouTube and YouTube music. As of now, we now have the podcast fully available on YouTube, so you can find the full catalog there.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:51]:
If you happen to use YouTube for your listening, that’s another resource for you now. I have always been a big believer that you should be able to listen to this podcast and any other podcast on whatever platform is right for you, whether that’s YouTube or Apple Podcasts or Spotify or any of the apps out there that are all excellent. Whatever works for you is always our intention. And if you have an app or a service that you don’t see the podcast on, I would love to know. Send me a note, and we’ll do our very best to make the podcast available there. And wherever you listen, if you take a moment to rate or review or give some feedback for the show, it’s always appreciated. Now that we’re on YouTube, if you click, like, if you see an episode, you like apple podcasts and Spotify. If you leave a rating or review, it’s always appreciated.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:35]:
I always notice those. Thank you for those who have done those that’s so much in the past. And if you use my favorite podcast app that I use for my own listening, Overcast, You can actually leave a little star next to an episode that you like. It helps folks on the Overcast platform know that it’s been a helpful episode to you wherever you listen. The feedback you give us, so helpful. Thank you so much for continuing to engage with the show. And, next step for you, if you’re looking for more is to go over to coachingforleaders.com, set up your free membership. Because unlike on all of those apps as great as they are for listening on the go, they are not so great at being able to find exactly what you need right now by topic.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:17]:
Yes. You can search for the exact keywords if you know exactly what you’re looking for. But oftentimes, most of us, we come to a situation about leadership, and we’re thinking about conflict or we’re thinking about how do I hold people accountable or handling the difficult conversation. We’re thinking about a broad topic, and then we’re looking for what are the resources that will help us there. That is what the free membership is for on the website. If you go to coachingforleaders.com, we have organized the entire library of episodes since 2011 searchable by topics. You can zero in on the topic that’s most relevant to you. Find the episode that is going to be as helpful as possible or maybe series of episodes and begin there.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:57]:
It’s one of the many benefits inside of free membership. And if you’re looking for a bit more beyond that, I’d invite you to learn about Coaching for Leaders Plus. Coaching for Leaders Plus opens up another suite of benefits, including a weekly journal entry from me delivered to your inbox. 1 of our members asked this week that they were having a conversation coming up, a lunch meeting with a potential employer and wanted to try and figure out a way in just a short period of time, 45 minutes to an hour of getting insights on another person’s values and making a decision. Do I move forward with this organization based on this person’s values? It’s a hard thing to do in 45 minutes, but there are some key questions you can ask that give you a bit more insight than just the normal questions. That was the topic of my journal entry just a week or so ago. And one of the many entries that’s now inside of the library for all our Coaching for Leaders Plus members. If you’d like to find out more, go over to coachingforleaders.plus.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:02]:
You’ll find all of the details there. Coaching for leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next Monday, I’m glad to welcome James Reed to the podcast. We have an invitation for you for kindness in leadership. Join me for that conversation with James, and I’ll see you back on Monday.