In this captivating episode, Aaron sits down with Rachel Anderson, the visionary behind The Human Centric Leader, to uncover the transformative impact of prioritizing people over profits.
Dive deep into Rachel’s journey, exploring how her experiences shaped a revolutionary approach to leadership that delivers both business success and employee fulfillment.
Discover the eye-opening statistics that reveal the staggering financial costs of neglecting human-centric practices, and learn how small, intentional shifts can unlock unprecedented growth and engagement.
Whether you’re a seasoned executive or an aspiring leader, this conversation will equip you with the tools and mindset to create a thriving, purpose-driven culture that empowers your team to reach new heights.
Get ready to rethink the traditional notions of leadership and unlock your true potential as a human-centric trailblazer. Let this episode catalyze your journey towards more meaningful, impactful leadership.
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Show Outline
- 0:05 – Influence of Leadership Styles on Career Development
- 1:35 – Challenges in Leadership Preparation
- 5:45 – Evolution of Work and Leadership
- 18:28 – Human-Centric Leadership and Business Impact
- 19:02 – Rebranding and Redefining Business Focus
- 24:47 – Implementing Human-Centric Leadership
- 40:18 – The Role of Human-Centric Leadership in Business Success
- 42:13 – Future of Leadership and Career Advice
Quotes from the Show
- “65% of employees say that their manager has more impact on their mental health than their therapist or their doctor.”
- “We are not workers who go home, we are humans who go to work.”
- “If you take an average-sized company in the US, which is about 100 people, and you take an average salary, there’s about $1.2 million every year just replacing employees who leave for preventable reasons.”
- “Making sure that you’re human-centric and how you achieve those goals is really going to add to your bottom line.”
Connect with Rachel + Links
- Download the Guide to Human-Centric Leadership at https://www.thehumancentricleader.com/giveaway
- Connect with Rachel on LinkedIn
- About the Johari Window
Episode 71 – Full Transcript
Aaron Lee 0:00
All right, Rachel, we talked a little bit about our personal backgrounds and where we’ve been on our career journeys. What have you seen in your career that’s influenced you to bring what you’re bringing around human centric leadership to the table today,
Rachel Anderson 0:16
there are so many influential things in the life of an employee that really shape how they view business. And for me, one of the most impactful people as a group has been my managers, and I think that because I grew up from a very young age in a female driven leadership organization where they really focus on providing young women with skills to know how to take charge, plan things, run meetings going into the working world, the corporate tech side of private sector. You know, I had this expectation that everyone really understood how to lead and how to be a manager of people, and that just was a rude awakening for me. And so as I started really experiencing different leadership styles, different personalities, good ones, not good ones, it really started to shape my experience, my perspective on Well, then why? Why is this happening? Why don’t everybody, or all the people that get promoted into these roles have the same kind of skills and and why wouldn’t it be something that you look for when you get promoted? And so that question plagued me for so many years, but it was really influential for me to kind of decide to start coaching leaders and managers on what it really means to lead people from that real humanity perspective.
Jay Smack 1:45
Welcome to the new generation leader podcast. We’re giving you the tools you need to lead in the digital world ready to reach your true potential. This is the new generation leader podcast,
Aaron Lee 2:01
yeah, that’s so interesting that you say that because, as I look throughout my career and shifting into coaching and consulting, I started to see that issue with individual leaders who were identified as a great potential leader, promoted into that leadership position, and then their their leaders and managers said, Oh no, we didn’t do anything to prepare them. Can you come help us fix this?
Rachel Anderson 2:30
Yeah, isn’t it kind of funny? I mean, one of the first things that I talk to leaders about when I when I work with them, typically, is just like, What does it even mean to be a leader? What does it mean to actually do the practical skills of being a manager on your team, because you’re right. I mean, we look at, or at least the companies I worked with, look at who’s a really incredible individual contributor, and that is a great indication that they can understand business strategy, or they understand how to do good job. They know how to put things together, right? There’s definitely skills there that allow you to be a good manager, but being a manager is inherently a different job than being a good producer, and I think we forget that when we look at promoting employees up and up and up is, is your question exactly which I think was perfect. Have we really prepared them for this entirely new role? And often the answer is no, yeah, and
Aaron Lee 3:22
then work gets so hard because No, we haven’t prepared them, and then they’re a bad manager, and all of these things we hear about employee engagement and the number one factor of employees leaving a role is not a bad role fit, but it’s about a manager, and the manager’s influence on on each individual contributor and team member. And wouldn’t it be better if we just prepared people? Yeah,
Rachel Anderson 3:46
I know. I wish there was a whole separate like standard in industries of training individuals that wanted to be managers into managers, right, regardless of their role, type or department. But I thought it was so interesting because the other day I saw this statistic that said 65% of employees say that their manager has more impact on their mental health than their therapist or their doctor. I laughed a little bit because I was like, this is either the saddest they have that much influence or the most enlightening, depending on, you know, which way you want to really look at it, but it makes sense. Like, where else do you spend 40 plus hours every week? I don’t know, sleeping like, but you’re not like, you’re not engaging with anyone when you’re doing that right? And so, of course, the people in that context will have the most significant impact. So it was just, it was really fascinating.
Aaron Lee 4:39
Well, there’s a lot of power with the know how the education, the experience that we bring to the table. But like you mentioned, the powerful individual contributor, who’s the expert at whatever your business does, doesn’t necessarily translate now. It used to. It used. Translate when it was a more industrial, hierarchical world, where just because we gave you the title meant, oh, well, I was granted authority, and people were pushed to respect me because, well, I have the title, so you must respect me. That’s just not the world we live in anymore. And so this old model of let’s teach you to be an expert in your craft, without teaching you to be a people oriented leader, a human centric leader, means we’re missing a significant gap, which probably keeps you and I both very busy. It
Rachel Anderson 5:37
definitely keeps me employed, which I like. That’s a definitely good thing. Yeah, you know, one of the things that I’ve really done a lot of research on is the evolution of work and how that parallels the evolution of leading, and so you’re tapping into some of that in the industrial revolution. So we go all the way back to like, the 1700s and that’s a really important milestone for our working life, because so much of the practices that we have today started from that moment in time, like, for example, the fact that we work eight to five generally, like that was established back in the Industrial Revolution. Like these, incredible longevity of these policies, anyway. So in that time period, they really believed that leaders were leaders because they were smarter than everybody else, and that was it. That was how you became a leader. You were just so smart. And as time goes on, that belief of how you become a leader really changes you you know, go into behavioral theories and and other things, and people decide, oh, it’s a trait. No, it’s a way you act. No, it’s, you know, situational leadership and on we go. But there’s kind of this turning point, I feel like, with leaders in the early to mid 1900s because at this point, we still have this mentality that if you’re seeing you’re working, right, if I can see you sitting in your chair, that I know you’re working, I can interact with you, and it’s true, you have to physically be present in order to hand off a document or write a letter to a customer or file something into a drawer, or whatever that kind of thing looks like. But as soon as we start getting remote work possible with Wi Fi technology, starts to speed up the rate of typing that letter or sending it. You don’t have to find a stamp, put it in the mailbox, have someone pick up and deliver it right? All of a sudden, admin start to leave because there’s less responsibility that the company thinks they need to do in order to help the leader do their job. And people start leaving jobs more because now there’s more mobility in general, Mark access to information and opportunities in other places. And so this all starts to compound. And now you don’t have these 20 year careers, you start seeing people come and go because of the opportunities presented to them, or maybe it’s a better job somewhere else. And so even that learned behavior, so you know, if you watch modeling from the manager of what does it actually mean to do this task? What is the functionality day by day? How do I grow a member through mentorship over several years? All of that starts to change. And so to your point. I mean, not only is the way we think about leaders and assume that you know they have these skills changing. The nature of work is changing, and that’s also changing our ability to connect with people and understand how to do these roles. And it’s just it’s so much more complicated. And so, of course, we don’t keep up with this change because it’s so rapid. It’s much, I mean, technology changes things so much faster than we as humans are able to evolve, or at least historically, have been able to evolve. And so, yeah, there’s, you know, there’s a different way that we have to think about it. Now, do we have the skills inherently, and are we teaching them to our team members, or do we need to hire support, because we want them to be successful, and we know that they’re not going to have it when they come to the table with that. You know, they’re good questions that you as an executive or a business leader should really be asking.
Aaron Lee 9:06
I think that’s a great point to think about, how do we get that outside expertise if it needs to be outside, or bring that expertise inside to meet that very relevant, real need that business leaders are facing, and the trickle down effect is significant, turnover, productivity, engagement, all of those factors. There’s a very real bottom line dollar figure attached to all of that. It might be hard to directly trace, but it’s definitely there. Yeah, thinking about your work, you have just made a pivot. We’ll talk about the pivot itself in a few minutes, but you are making a pivot into adding this focus on human centric leadership. What’s your platform that you are presenting to clients? Science around this idea of being human centric in how you lead.
Rachel Anderson 10:04
So when I talk about human centric leadership, I usually define it as the prioritization of the well being and development of the individual over the organization while on the path to achievement. So breaking that down, we’re saying that the well being and development that could be mentorship, growth, etc, opportunities of the individual should trump the organization when you’re choosing how to accomplish the goals of the organization. And so as you put that together, there is a business quantifiable revenue number that comes back to you by doing that, my research has allowed me to put together some of those numbers, and I am talking about it now with some of the stuff that we’re doing as part of the human centric leader. And to sum up, all the things that sort of go into that, if you take an average sized company in the US, which is about 100 people, and you take an average salary, so this is going to be widely different based on where you live and what role you have. But right now, according to Glassdoor, that’s about 63k and you factor in all the different reasons employees leave, like burnout and distracted work, half engaged, sick days, things like that, and the consequences of them leaving the job because of that, there’s recruitment costs, there’s training costs for a new person, there’s benefits that you have to put together, and that’s extra cost for them, right? There’s all these replacement costs that go into it. A business ends up spending about $1.2 million every year just replacing employees who leave for preventable reasons. And that’s a staggering statistic. Even if you just prevented 50% of those people leaving, you can save your company and add extra half a million dollar revenue to your bottom line every year. And so even if you don’t look at this and you think, yes, like, I want to prioritize humans, because that’s how I’m wired, and that’s great, there is a business reason for you to think that this is important, and so that’s really the platform that we stand on, that you as a manager, have the ability to make the decision that this is important. But even if you don’t feel like you can, you can make a business case to the organization that they should support you in that decision, and so really making the choice that while you look at your leadership styles, while you’re learning the role, all the things that we help coach people through, making sure that you’re human centric and how you achieve those goals is really going to add to your bottom line.
Aaron Lee 12:36
One of my other stops on my career before emergency management, was in a nonprofit focused on strengthening families. And while I was there, Dr Brad Wilcox at the University of Virginia published a study on why strong families were, in fact, a business problem because the impact of your family the health and well being of the people you theoretically care the most about, though, as we talked about time wise, you may not spend as much time with them as you do with your work colleagues. It still weighs on you more, and you bring that to work. So a healthy family and a healthy home life translates directly to being a business challenge, and so I think that speaks to what you were describing, that it’s about people who humans who are going to work, not just work being, you know, the core identity of who we are. That’s right,
Rachel Anderson 13:33
I typically say a lot, we are not workers, or, excuse me, humans who go to work. We are, nope, I definitely have that background. Why? Usually say we are not workers who go home, we are humans who go to work, right? As a business, we kind of mix that up, thinking that this is everything, because it is. When you’re in that moment, right? You’re all consumed and focused on the goals and objectives you have right there. But when you scale out and look the totality of things, people just want to be able to know that they’re contributing, that they matter, that they’re able to enjoy what they do, and work is just a means towards that end. For some people, they have all those things at work, and that’s incredible, but truly the family unit, whatever that looks like for an individual, typically Trumps whatever is happening inside that organization and as a manager, if we don’t embrace that and really look at that and and provide tools for our employees to be able to kind of really put those two things together, they’re much more likely to leave face burnout honestly do less work or less quality work. There’s a huge trickle down effect that really interdependence on their thriving inside and outside of work.
Aaron Lee 14:44
I had coffee with a friend this morning, and I was unpacking the college students that I interact with and teach and the journey that they are on. The undergraduate business students, primarily they have. This idea and this vision of where they want to go and what they want to accomplish, and it’s about the role the company. The title may be tied into prestige or accomplishment, but their educational journey isn’t focused on much beyond that, and they aren’t focused much beyond that. And so I think we see this play out when it used to be your midlife crisis, was that point in time where things changed. And now I hear a lot about quarter life crisis, that there’s just a transition. There’s a change that’s happening inside people’s minds wondering, is this really all there is to work? Isn’t there more to what I’m doing? Nine to five, and the prestige of that title, that role, wherever they’ve ended up, probably doesn’t align quite as well as they maybe thought it was going to.
Rachel Anderson 15:50
Yeah, I see a lot of young professionals that get into the workplace and just really struggle in the first few years because of the expectations that they have and then the realities of the situation. I think about my own college experience quite frequently in this context, because the person who was training me, my parents, right? They gave me the vision for going to college. I was lucky enough to be able to do that. And so they understood from their world that if you go to college, you have opportunities. And so that translated to me as when I go to college, I then will have my job, and off we go. But I graduated, and then the whole economy fell. And so that pivotal moment really redefined work in general, and the way that we get jobs. I mean, it was such a huge turning point in the working world. And so now you have a lot of students or young adults who are sort of in that same spot that I used to be, right because there’s enough of an age gap now that our my generation, at least, is sort of sending off their kids to college, and they’re starting to get into the work world, and they have this slightly different perspective, where maybe it’s not enough, like a confirmed for real job, but because we still have a narrow path or idea of the kinds of jobs there are when we talk to students and really educate younger generations on like, what can you do with your life? There’s, you know, who talks about, like you could go work for the assistant to the project manager, or, like you could be this, like, niche role that nobody’s ever heard of, and trains Right? Like, there’s so many more opportunities. There are paths. And so I think that when we still are, at least when I still work with them, they just, they really flounder to figure out, like, how do I work here? How do I get the dream job? How do I see the path? How do I have the tools, even, which is a whole nother candidate I could go on with. Like, the way that, you know, social media has really changed our ability to problem solve and think through stuff, and also given us incredible other tools. So it’s not, you know, all bad, but I think it’s a really important thing to consider as well, from both the business perspective, do these new young professionals need extra help to be the best version of themselves for my job as possible, or my company as possible, or for the actual young professional graduating student to also say, Do I have the skills I need to actually thrive within the industry I want to go into, even if I’m not sure what that is or what that looks like, as far as purpose goes. And those are also things that you can get help for. You can get help there for conflict resolution, which sounds like, you know, such a weird thing to prioritize in business. Or, you know, what does it mean to be able to report on my activities. What does it look like for me to think critically about, you know, the tasks that are being assigned to me, things like that. It’s tough.
Aaron Lee 18:50
It is tough, and it’s a tough, complicated world with lots of layers and around every corner, every side of the human experience looks a little bit different, and sometimes unintended. Here you need to make a pivot. So you are in the midst of making a pivot, adding this platform around human centric leadership. Walk me through the ideation and, you know, go back on this roadmap of change and transition. Because I think a lot of times we look at the output and the end of what we see the finished product, but a lot of times we don’t think about the messy middle. What was the beginning of this transition like for you? So
Rachel Anderson 19:36
when I first started my business, it was back in 2016 and I have tried to go full time, or I’ve gone full time with this business multiple times since then, always having it as a consultancy, whether I was in a tech company or not, depending on what the situation called for. And so the brand at the time was much more focused on communications. Do we help people with change management, communication strategies and marketing? And it wasn’t very specific about the kind of marketing. I just knew that my personal career journey had gotten me to a point where I knew that I wanted marketing to be my future, so I could merge some of those communication skills, marketing skills, and put this together. And so as I morphed and changed as worker, as an expertise, as a leader, and then finally going back into consulting full time as a fractional CMO. This was about two years ago. Now, I knew that there needed to be a shift in the business itself. It didn’t fully reflect what I was actually offering and what I wanted to do long term. And so I made those changes pretty easily, pretty quickly, on the website and in my my offerings with clients and things. But it wasn’t until this last January ish that I really took a critical look at the journey and said, you know, if I really want to work with small to medium sized businesses, I need to make sure that my presence, of how the website reflects them, is matching I’m no longer the kind of business that this other brand serve. So what does that look like for me? And before, I was really focused primarily on strategy work, and so in early this year, I decided that the first critical step for me was changing the name of my company to make it a little bit more broad, because now I was doing executive functions for companies as that, like, you know, part time CMO. I was doing leadership coaching, and then I was also still doing the marketing strategies and process improvements and organizational alignment and all that kind of like buzzy, good sauce that you bring to the table as a marketer. And so just being strategic didn’t suit really what was going on. And so I changed the name to pivot studios and started immediately working on a rebrand. And so as part of that, my deadline for getting everything together and focused and ready to launch was April, and right now we’re recording in August. So when you talk about that messy middle, there is a lot of messy middle that happens. Right? You have these like, great ideas. You’re like, this is easy. I know exactly what I want, but it wasn’t true. What I found out was, as we were going on, I needed to relearn my customer and as I was relearning what my customer needed, how they appeared in the world, what they wanted from businesses and partners, I had a misalignment of my own customer base for my marketing strategy work for that executive function, I really needed to talk to CMOS, CFOs, CEOs, people that were in that marketing need or really understood a business strategy and how to execute on that, to really do my best work as a leadership coach and helping managers understand their function that creates culture, that creates training and opportunities for people. Well, that’s more of an HR function. That’s not the same as this other C suite part. And so I really debated, because I tried so hard to squish those together and make it all work on one website in one company, and it just didn’t. It didn’t do justice to anything. And so I made the decision to split the two, and that’ll officially launch next week. Hopefully it’ll be all live and done by the time this goes out. But I decided to officially launch the human centric leader so that people that really resonated with that part of the message felt like they had a home and it wasn’t bogged down with more formal business jargon or buried in the website as just a part of offerings. I really wanted it to be able to stand alone and have its own importance. And so that is really the morphing of what can happen when you look at a rebrand. And that was my own huge pivot. I mean, that’s one of the reasons I really love my brand name, is because I literally just, I say it all the time. I’m like, you don’t need an overhaul, you just need a pivot. And in my case, maybe I needed more of an overhaul than a pivot. But, you know, it’s just always so applicable. So I’m really excited about this new opportunity to really serve the people that might be able to find value in a human centric approach.
Aaron Lee 24:22
What do you feel like is unique from your vantage point and your career experience in bringing both the human centric side with the marketing?
Rachel Anderson 24:32
I think that sometimes we think that it’s an either or option. You either are great at business or you’re great at building strong teams. And in fact, I see a lot of executives that have a similar mentality, like we can either achieve these aggressive revenue goals or we can build a thriving culture. And I have been so fortunate enough to put this to the test. A and approach we can do both together. And so the first time I ever implemented human centric leadership on my own team, not as part of a business offering, but actually as a person who was approaching 2020, when the whole world changed because of covid and we had to learn about remote teams and figuring out how to keep people energized and everything, I decided, You know what? I’m just gonna come back to the table with values. What are the values that we’re gonna represent on this team for this particular place in time? And I implemented those within my team, and then I saw an incredible thing happen. My own team grew by 300% over two years, the business revenue grew by 28% and we had production growth of the tasks and responsibilities that we did almost up to 200% and so for me, seeing that there was this direct tie between the choices I was making on how to lead my team and the outcomes that were coming was an incredible eye opening experience. And so I’ve been able to take that and apply that to a lot of different businesses, different kinds of teams, different kinds of industries. And it’s not always that aggressively successful. I think that was probably a little bit due to just that special moment in time, but there’s always a positive outcome that comes from taking that approach. So I think that that’s a really unique thing that I was able to bring to the table, and am able to bring to the table because of that marketing meets human centric leadership approach in business,
Aaron Lee 26:35
one of my favorite all time stories about that human oriented view, the human centric view on building culture and building a strong team was, I think 2020, 2021, friends, client, their CPA came to them and said, Hey, It’s tax time. Really the best thing for you to do right now, to reduce your tax liability, because you’ve just slayed it over the last year, is you should probably buy a corporate jet. And again, like you said, sometimes those stories are outliers, but it doesn’t take that kind of change or positive impact to really make a huge difference in the lives of your people and the people you lead. Sometimes it is the small change that relieves a little bit of the pressure that they’re feeling on their shoulders, makes them a little more human and lets them be who they are. Not fitting the box of what work expects them to be, but fits them for who they are.
Rachel Anderson 27:34
Absolutely one another. Great example that you just made me think of was in that same time period, the company I worked for had unlimited PTO, which is sort of a slippery slope. I think sometimes because people decide to be productivity warriors, and they just don’t ever want to take a break, even though they technically take a lot of break, right? Like, it’s this weird. This is weird thing, but the CEO decided to take a stance seeing how much burnout was happening, and how much working time people were putting in, stranded in their homes. And he said, everyone’s required to take one day off a month for free, no penalty. And I just thought it was so weird at the time, because I was like, this doesn’t make logical sense. They already have free time, like, like, it’s not like, this is just normal PTO where they’re like, don’t count it against the 20 you have for the year. You know, like, you can technically take however much you want. It’s free. And so I was like, Well, okay, whatever. I’ll I’ll stand by this like you gave me full permission to require people to go take a break. Great. And so I started talking to my team members, and instead of asking them, like, when’s your next break? Blah, blah, blah, I would say, okay, great. What day are we putting it on the calendar, right? Just sort of this, like really subtle affirmation that they should, in fact, be gone and making them make a decision. And then over the next several months, it was really incredible, because not only did I have to protect their time, right? So they come to the day and be like, Oh, but I can work be needy. And I was like, no, no one will be contacting you. Like, this job is not important. This is we’re not saving lives here. Like you can go have a day off, and if something burns down, you can take care of it tomorrow, or you can take care of it on Monday, like it’s fine. And so we protected that time, and employees started just really thriving. We created a lot of what I call creative margin, so that they had time to rest and and regenerate, like rejuvenate, and they started really looking forward to that time and taking other time off. And it was just such a switch and culture. And even, like, creative output just was great. And so I think it’s so interesting that you can have a really small, small thing that just has a huge ripple effect throughout an organization. And it doesn’t have to be, you know, some crazy buy a jet. It can just be, no, you’re actually gonna, like, take time off, and I’m gonna help you do that. Just
Aaron Lee 29:53
take the day. It’ll be okay, yeah, one of my favorite things that our team does, we. Teach it to clients. We also do this ourselves. Is we start every meeting, every conversation, every time we’re together with at least a few minutes. We call it third gear, which is part of a whole productivity, presence tool that we teach. But the third gear time is so you took Friday off. How was that? What did you do? Tell us about that. Let’s celebrate it and reinforce it. And I think that little bit of humanity so many of us want to just dive into productivity. And at times, certain team members will be like, Hey, can we just forego the third gear time? And we’re both like, Yep, let’s dive in. We’re ready to get after it. But I noticed even this morning, I was collaborating with somebody on a keynote that we’re delivering in a few weeks, and we had a little bit of that third year at the beginning, but then at the end of our conversation, we realized there were still a few things that we hadn’t touched base on, and there was some big, personal, family news that this colleague shared and we got to celebrate. And so it’s all of those little kinds of things that actually have nothing to do with the work itself, but are completely human centric and should probably be celebrated and recognized as part of our work. Yeah, absolutely.
Rachel Anderson 31:18
Have you ever taken or heard of the DISC assessment? Yeah, okay, so I did this several years ago. Now I was probably like, seven or eight years ago, and it was fascinating to me for multiple reasons, that I’m going to try to not go down to tandem, because I could, I love personality assessments and things like. I think it’s so interesting to get inside people’s brain and see how to work. But it said that I was like, A D, so like, basically, you’re very just like, you want to get stuff done. You’re very focused on the goal. The slogan always made me laugh that they assigned to it was like, Be bold, be bright, be gone. This was like, so perfect. And so I learned shortly after taking this assessment from a manager of mine that actually had to set me down and be like, Rachel, you’re gonna need to work on this is that I am the worst when it comes to wanting to just dive right in my brain, like, switches over into, like, productivity mode, and I just think everybody’s ready to do the work, right? And so I’m just like, here’s the question, let’s, let’s do the thing. Let’s get in and get out and be done, and, you know, all the things. And she’s like, You need to start asking people how they’re doing. I was like, because I’ve never been that person that’s just like, you know, floating around, not talking to people. I’m very like, How are you, how’s your life, how’s this, how’s that, but not when it came to, like, the work, and it was like a switch that would go off. And so I think that that is so funny because it’s really a skill. I mean, you just the way that we have an idea about productivity from wherever you learn it, whether it’s your family and what their like ethos is around that, or your first working experiences, or the industry you’re in, that was the thing that young Rachel had to learn was that you need to care about people, even in emails and slacks, it’s still something that I’m like, remember to ask the question, yeah,
Aaron Lee 33:08
write the email, write the Slack message. Oh, yes, maybe I should warm this up. Right?
Rachel Anderson 33:13
Exactly. I love this. Sometimes I’m gonna remember that third gear. Yes,
Aaron Lee 33:17
I’ll send you the whole tool and the whole thing. I taught it to my seven year old a couple years ago. She’s 12 now, but when she was seven, and it changed a lot just in that short five minutes. Wow, pretty cool. Okay, so pretty cool to think about time and recognize. Hey, we need to be present. We need to make things personal. Yeah,
Rachel Anderson 33:38
it makes a huge difference. It really does. And I’m gonna, I’m gonna take your your advice about, if your seven year old can do it, I can for do it
Aaron Lee 33:50
so easy a seven year old can do but and truthfully, now that we’ve unpacked her a little bit more in terms of her personality, she’s the opposite. She will naturally struggle to get into productivity, because she’ll just get stuck in the relational space. So that’s one of the things I’ve started to recognize. Is a lot of leaders, as we’ve talked about, we learn the expertise, but we pick up the leadership skills by instinct, but not from learning it. And so part of the way we approach it is, hey, let’s turn instinct into something that’s a repeatable process that you can teach to each person. And Rachel’s way might be similar to mine, but it’s going to be different from my 12 year old, or different from another team member who thinks, hey, let’s connect first and catch up and be more relational, but we all think that our way is the right way and the only way, and doesn’t everybody else think like we do, and it’s just not the case.
Rachel Anderson 34:51
Yeah, I know I well, and kind of going back to even the beginning of our conversation, that was, you know, something I had to realize really early on in my career. Career, like, why doesn’t everybody know how to do this leadership thing? And so as I have been really careful about creating human centric leadership, what does it mean? Tools, programs, all these things, I have been really careful to try and not say it’s another leadership style, because I want this to be something that you can lay on top of whatever leadership style works for you. Leadership is really culture bound. It’s situation bound. And there are times when you should flex that leadership style according to whatever’s happening in that moment. And so I think it’s important to make space for that. You know, we all have the different things we’re really great at, but we can all take the approach to getting there through that human centric lens. And so I think that that’s, you know, really freeing, I think, for a lot of people, especially when you think about some of the age old debates of introverts versus extroverts, or, you know, do more people things or less people, things, more productivity, less productivity. But you know, outcomes can still be the same outcome. That’s just the path you take to get there that really matters.
Aaron Lee 36:10
One of my favorite stories just came up on the last episode of the podcast, and that was Barry sharing how hidden to him, his unique gift, power, skill set was after decades of leading and building a business, his team came to him and said, Hey, don’t you know this? And he’s like, No, I don’t they’re like, this is what everybody loves about you. And I think there’s something to that. I’ll share that story, the full story, with you later. If you’re listening here, go back to the last episode, and Barry’s conversation. It came in towards the end of the episode, but I’ve started to ask clients that, hey, what’s your own superpower? But not only what’s your own, but what do you notice in the other people on the team? Because often we don’t see that in the mirror. We don’t notice it about ourselves, or we think everybody else has it. So why is that special from us, when really it is a unique gift that each of us have? Yeah. So
Rachel Anderson 37:12
I would recommend also, for people that are really curious about this, you should go look up something called the Johari Window. I think you spell it, J, O, H, A, R, I, Johari, but it is an incredible explanation of this exact concept. So basically, there’s four quadrants, and it’s things that are known to things that are unknown, and then it’s yourself to other people. And it sort of makes this like plus sign, right? So you have these four quadrants. And it basically says that there are things that you know and other people know, and it’s very obvious, and so that, for me, could just simply be like, you have a blue car, and you have, like, the cutest dog in the whole world, and you know, like obvious things, and then you have things that you know but other people don’t know. And maybe those are things that are vulnerable for you private. Maybe they’re just things that happened in the past that the people around you right now haven’t seen, and so at some point they might know it, but they don’t at the moment. Maybe it’s even things that you just dislike doing in business, that you know you’re like, I never want to do another piece of math again, right? Like it could just be whatever. Then there’s a window that says these are things you don’t know, but other people know. And then the final window is things that nobody knows. And I think about those two quadrants a lot, because there’s a certain amount of time and space required in order for something unknown to become known, you have to have an experience to realize that in times of crisis, you respond to like fill in the blank, or you need to have an experience to understand that when someone comes to you with a difficult problem, your instinct is to do X or whatever that thing is right, sort of like required experience to understand. But I think that we assume sometimes that we can thrive and live in all three of the quadrants and be fine, but there’s this really valuable four quadrant of relying on other people’s observations to help shine a light into who you are and how you behave, for better or for worse, which I think is why sometimes that’s really scary for people, but the Johari Window is a great kind of explanation of all of that, and It’s really why I think coaches are a great person to help you figure out what are those things? Asking for feedback in a safe way is really great, because your employees, your peers, your managers, might have observations and have that be something that you can put into your known universe, and honestly, even your friends. I have done this activity with young people. This like activity to figure out where your skills and your passions might intertwine, to give you some direction on like, what you should look at doing or consider for careers and choices. But one of the things that I always say is just go ask some of your closest friends, because they might have ideas and information about you that you don’t. Realize is so important. And that happened to me when I was early on in my career. I did the same process, the same exercise, and I had a friend of mine who really pointed out that I was great at innovation, that I just wanted to constantly do new things, and I didn’t really care about managing things over a long period of time, right? And so I was like, Oh, that’s such a great observation. And that really started to define my entire working career. So I think that this is I’m definitely going to go back and listen to the berry episode, or I’m going to have you tell me the story, because I think that it’s always so fascinating figuring out what people find out. But yeah, the jarring window, you should definitely look
Aaron Lee 40:34
that up. Yes, we’ll link to an article on that in the show notes. And I think that window helps explain. We use the analogy of an apprentice and an apprenticeship, that it’s a long process, and there are lots of things that we learn along that journey. And as you highlighted at times, it’s not until a certain situation happens that you really cultivate or have an opportunity to see, oh, in this very unique situation, here’s how I solve this. And so leadership, development, building a culture can’t necessarily be a quick fix thing. You can’t just read a book once a year or have a half day workshop and make that count for the year. It really has to be a more sustainable rhythm and process and journey to build that within your company. Yeah,
Rachel Anderson 41:28
it’s absolutely true. This is a day by day decision. It’s not a one time and done choice.
Aaron Lee 41:35
All right, Rachel, I think we’ve already covered a number of these, so I’m not going to be surprised if your answer to this question is, can we just rewind 15 minutes? But I’m going to ask you the question anyway, as you look back over your career, your experience, your work journey, what’s something that you’ve learned more recently that you wish you had known
Rachel Anderson 41:55
early on? One of the things that I wish I could tell my younger self is that it doesn’t have to be this way. I think that there was an idea when I first started the working world, that what I saw around me, or what other people had experienced was the way things were, and as I’ve matured, as I’ve experienced life, as I’ve you know, developed an expertise in business, I realized that not only is there another way to be successful, to move forward, to have a life or have a career, but that all the information that other generations Have are based on their time bound, experiences and opportunities, and we can choose another path, and it’s not a bad or different, like, you know, you should have done something different, kind of perspective. It’s just simply that the way that you want to go forward can be equally successful and thriving, but it can just be different. And so I think, you know, without going too much down that rabbit hole of the experiences it took for me to kind of realize this, I think that if I could hold on to that as a younger Rachel, I think she would have had a little bit of an easier time accepting some of the hard stuff that came, especially in the first 10 years, of just figuring out what it means to have a working line. The hard
Aaron Lee 43:21
thing is, it does take time. It does the helpful thing, I think, for us, is we’ve learned these lessons, and let’s figure out how to give these to a new generation of leaders coming up around us. Well, Rachel, I feel like we could keep this conversation going for probably another hour or two, but for today, we’ll wrap it up here. How can people follow along with you and the human centric leader?
Rachel Anderson 43:48
Yeah, so as we talked about earlier, I’m really excited you can now go find me on the human centric leader.com there’s tons of resources and things there to help you figure out this is a good journey for you to join as well, and for today, on this episode, I wanted to offer a giveaway for anybody listening that wants to go and kind of check it out on their own, without fully engaging yet you can go to the human centric leader.com backslash giveaway, and then that’s going to give you a free download about what it means to be manager, some highlights and overviews as well As $20 off the new course that we’re launching that will give you tons of tips and tricks, templates, practical skills to just be a manager that is truly human centric.
Aaron Lee 44:30
Well, that’s great. We’ll link to Rachel, the human centric leader and pivot studios in the show notes at New Generation leader.fm so you’ll have the direct links there or in the show notes on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks, Rachel. I enjoyed our conversation. I hope there’s another conversation. Me too, sometime soon down the road, me too.
Rachel Anderson 44:52
Aaron, it was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.
Jay Smack 44:55
Thanks for listening to the new generation leader podcast. Subscribe today on your. Podcasting platform, download the show notes and unlock your true leadership potential at New Generation leader.fm thanks for listening today, and we look forward to seeing you next time on the new generation leader podcast. You.