In this global episode, President & CEO of Norman & Associates, Matt Norman, shares how he has trained sales leaders worldwide on coaching and developing their salespeople and helped shared services teams create more value through their partnerships with the business.
You will discover:
– The highest form of trust and how you can create it for your team
– Why you should lead without authority (and what to use instead)
– Why prioritizing productive may be crushing your leadership
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And I am here with yet another high demand coach. It is the one and only Matt Norman, who is President and CEO of Norman and Associates, which offers Dale Carnegie programs in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. Dale Carnegie provides its tools and courses through a global network, helping improve how people think and work together. And Norman and Associates also offers practical talent strategy in hiring, onboarding, strategic planning and goal alignment. Matt’s coaching and facilitation have helped fortune, 100 corporations, nonprofits and entrepreneurial firms to transform how they engage employees and clients. Also, author of the book, lead with influence, a proven process to lead without authority, and he’s here with us today, Matt, I gotta ask right out of the gate, why should we lead without authority?
Matt Norman
Well, because people are more likely to be engaged. You know, Gallup has studied employee engagement, has found that when people are engaged, they’re more committed. They apply discretionary effort to their work, and if we lead with authority, according to the research, if we make people do things, if we lead through our power, they’re less likely to be engaged and therefore less likely to apply discretionary effort, not to mention a lot of the gaining cooperation that most people need to do today are is from people who they don’t directly have authority over. So I think we need to learn how to lead and gain cooperation from those people as well.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that’s so true. One of the things that I’ve found, you know, particularly in the busy world of entrepreneurism, is many founders will kind of buy the idea, like, I don’t have time for that. I don’t have time to measure engagement, right? Even just the idea of engagement seems to make sense, but it’s like it just feels like a moving target sometimes, how can we just, in kind of practical, real world, really assess the efficacy of our leadership style?
Matt Norman
Well, it can be measured certainly and work with a lot of founders, entrepreneurs, business leaders that do 360 evaluations to try to find out or organizational data points like employee engagement surveys can be really helpful feedback loops, or even just asking people anecdotally, I’ll often suggest asking people in one on one meetings on a scale of one to 1010. Being fully engaged. Where are you and what would it take to get you one number higher? So we can collect those, those data points. Additionally, one of my favorite quotes about leadership from Dale Carnegie, is people support a world they help create. And question, I think we need to constantly be asking ourselves as leaders, is, am I engaging? Am I including? Am I empowering people that work with me to co create the world that we’re living in so that they have more ownership in that or am I in some ways, dictating or driving that world for others and hoping that they want to live in it.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love that. One of the goals when I’m working with an organization is to help build an environment where their employees can take ownership, right? But it takes a really big shift in mindset to say, hey, just because somebody’s productive doesn’t mean that we’re leading them well right now, when we lead someone well, they will be productive. But you can do short run productivity through the worst possible leadership. And so I want to look at some of the kind of the approach that you take to developing this this leadership with influence, this high degree of engagement with employees. In your book, you lay out several steps or phases, but the one that struck me right out of the gate was kind of laying the foundation for this. And you said you need to prioritize availability over productivity, unpack that for us.
Matt Norman
I came home from work recently and my wife asked me how my day was, and I said, it was great. And she asked why, and I said, Because I got a ton done. Got all kinds of emails answered. I got a lot off my to do list. And she stopped me in my tracks when she then asked, Is that how you measure your day? And I realized that so often My days are measured by my productivity more than my availability, and it reminds me of the late Clay Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor who famously delivered the commencement speech that turned into a book called, how will you measure your life that so often, especially those of us that are driven maybe type A inclined, who are good at building a product or a service or an organization do ultimately value whether we like it or not. We where we place value. We place priority on things that have immediate return or short term results, so we can tangibly cross off a to do list, a product’s delivered, a deal is closed, a business. This is acquired, an employee is hired. And yet Clay Christensen made the point to the Harvard Business School class and in the book that many of us, ultimately, from a long term standpoint, may not that doesn’t reflect what we truly value. We truly value is people, culture, values, making an impact, et cetera. And so there can really be the short term, long term tension that we have. And I think the the mantra of availability over productivity, not that we always, not that availability always trumps productivity, but often that mantra can be helpful to say, What am What am I placing? What am I indexing for today? What am I my priority on? Is it more about my availability, or is it more about my productivity? And likewise, the availability and productivity of my team.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it’s such a huge mindset shift, because what I’ve found is those who, who who don’t get this right, or at least don’t get this right at the right time, right? I think you mentioned there’s a time component to this, but they invariably end up trapped in a prison of their own making. Right? If you value your productivity. If you pride yourself on your productivity, it will inherently make your world smaller, right? Because it’s limited to only what you can do. But if you can, like you’re saying, prioritize availability. I just love the language around that, it actually starts to make our world bigger and bigger. Now, one of the things that happens when when we do that when we open up, when we start working through teams, instead of, you know, trying to define your success on our own terms or buy our own productivity is it takes another degree of trust, right? You’re working out. Trust in yourself is one thing, but working out trust in a team is another, and in your book, you distinguish between predictive and vulnerability based trust, which I think is really, really critical, because most of us think trust is trust. Why do you subdivide trust into those two categories? What are they and why is that distinction so important?
Matt Norman
Credit to Patrick Lencioni on this one is this is really a riff on some of his concepts and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, and this idea that predictive based trust is when we trust somebody because they’re competent or reliable, whereas vulnerability based trust is when we trust someone because we can let our guard down, we can have a more honest conversation. And when we’re prioritizing productivity or availability, we often tend to value or have more predictive based trust relationships where, again, I trust you because you’re going to give the right answer, you’re going to produce your deliverable on time, I can count on you to get this job done, and that’s certainly important, not to minimize that at all. But really, the highest form of trust, as linshoni would say, and as Gallup would say, as part of employee engagement, is this idea of vulnerability based trust, right? I there’s a level of trust, or a psychological safety, as we might say, where we can be more honest, more open, speak to a part of our ideas and emotions that we may keep closer to ourselves, but that’s more reflective of we really are and how we really think and feel about the work that we’re doing and the team that we’re a part of. And so it’s that vulnerability based trust that’s that highest form of trust that we want to aspire to, and we need to, therefore prioritize availability in order to create an environment where we and others are able to be more open and transparent?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that’s so true. So in the second there’s so many places I want to go with that, but there’s a question I want to get to before we round out here. In the second part of your book, you talk about kind of probing and getting the best out of your team and and in there you have a chapter dedicated to the art of facilitation. And again, I love your language with these things, because I found that to be so true. Facilitation is far less science and far more art, especially when you’re facilitating within your own team. And so for our listeners here, tell us what is the art of facilitation and how can we use it to lead by influence?
Matt Norman
Yeah, there’s so many things that we do when we’re participating or especially leading a meeting that cause people, other people in the meeting to hold back because as Parker, Palmer says in his book, a hidden wholeness, human beings are fundamentally like wild animals that are always scanning their environment, looking to see whether there’s any threat to their survival. And of course, in meetings or in a work environment, we’re typically not scanning to look for physical or existential threats to our survival, but we’re looking at reputational threats to our survival, or just frankly, is this meeting worth my time? Because in order for me to survive the day, I need to be productive, and so therefore I need to survive my day. Is it worth my time to be in this meeting? We’re always scanning meetings. And interactions, wondering is in my is this going to allow me to survive? And what Parker, Palmer explains is that human beings are always doing things that cause other people send signals to other people that some of your survival is at risk in this meeting again, whether that’s emotional survival, relational survival, relational survival, reputational survival, for example, little things like, we just don’t appreciate and value people’s presence enough in meetings. Sometimes small things, for example, at a virtual meeting, welcoming people, saying, I’m glad you’re here. When someone makes a comment, acknowledging the comments, Scott, I heard that comment. You know that certainly has a lot of value. But then also being careful not to grade people’s comments. That’s another thing that we’ll sometimes do, where we’ll say, Oh, great idea, Scott, and then someone else will make a comment and we won’t say, great idea, and that second person’s wondering, well, why did they say good idea to Scott? And they didn’t say that to me? Or maybe it’s literally just that I’m doing too much talking in meetings, and I’m not a lot fostering enough diverse input from a lot of people. There’s all thing, kinds of things that I list in the book that might just be small infractions that send people into hiding, as Parker Palmer would say, that cause people to sort of close off, you know, put themselves on mute, multitask in a meeting, not be fully engaged. And those and those add up those, those little meetings, people withdrawing, people holding back, not fully participating, not fully engaging over time, add up to lower and lower levels of engagement, participation and value creation.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it’s one of the key skills that I’ve seen separates, particularly in the world that I’m in with, with a lot of founders and business owners, those who are able to really step into the CEO seat, right? As opposed to just having it on their business card and still being founder in every other intent of the word is this ability to facilitate. Is the ability to get a team into a room together and and let that team have a life of its own without having to dominate it, right? It’s, it’s so hard to do, but it’s so powerful. And again, I love the language around this art of facilitating is, is there’s some intrigue to that, right? It’s not just a skill that you do or don’t have, or some innate ability that you were born with or not born with. It’s an opportunity to step into kind of the blend of all of those things, and use the gifts and resources that you have to do it well. So love it. I could go on that for a really long time, but I’ve got a question for you here. Ask all my guests same question. I’m very interested to see what you have to say. So what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all. What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Matt Norman
I don’t know if it’s a secret as much as it’s a violated concept that I wish everybody would internalize, is that neuroscience suggests that human beings are five times more likely to buy into an idea, to cooperate with a with an idea, if they arrive at the conclusion themselves, rather than being told what the idea is. And there’s so many founders, entrepreneurs, innovators, coaches, leaders that lead with their ideas rather than leading with curiosity. And when we lead with our ideas, we be we’re telling people what we think, whereas when we’re leading with curiosity, we’re asking people what they think. This goes back to the idea around availability and facilitation, that if we take the posture of drawing people in, following the Socratic method, asking questions to guide people to an answer rather than telling them the answer. Again, this isn’t so much of a secret, it’s just that it’s violated so often, because those of us that achieve a certain level of success often do because we worked really hard and we have a lot of answers, and so we tend to over index on that hard work and those answers in a way that doesn’t fully engage people. So I would say, again, people are five times more likely to engage in our ideas and our plans if we draw them in and help them to arrive at those conclusions themselves.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, remarkable. I mean, five like, what could you do with five times more buy in with your ideas or the best ideas for your organization’s fantastic point. I love it so, Matt, there’s some folks listening. We scratched the surface of the surface of the surface of your book, this whole sections we weren’t even able to get to if they want to know more about how to, how to to lead with influence, as opposed to having to lead with authority. How can they get a copy of your book and where can they find water about you and the work you do?
Matt Norman
Yeah, Thanks, Scott. I’d say four places. dalecarnegie.com got a great network of resources and coaches facilitators that can be available in a lot of ways, including the Course Lead with Influence, which is based on the book. The book itself is available at Amazon and other major booksellers in all formats. People can follow me at Matt Norman dot.Com, I write an article every couple of weeks on these topics and also on LinkedIn,
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic, Matt, just awesome having you here. Loved the conversation, loved the language you put to some of these concepts. It’s great work. Keep it up. Yeah. Thank you so much for being here and for everyone watching and listening. You know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Matt Norman
Matt Norman is President & CEO of Norman & Associates, which offers Dale Carnegie programs in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Dale Carnegie provides its tools and courses through a global network, helping improve how people think and work together. Norman & Associates also offers practical talent strategy in hiring, onboarding, strategic planning, and goal alignment. Matt’s coaching and facilitation has helped Fortune 100 corporations, non-profits, and entrepreneurial firms to transform the way they engage employees and clients.
Want to learn more about Matt Norman’s work at Norman & Associates? Check out his website at https://www.mattnorman.com/ and grab a copy of his book at https://www.amazon.com/Dale-Carnegie-Associates-Presents-Influence/dp/1722506822/
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