Helping leaders motivate their people to a higher level of performance through strong human relations, team building, and golagiving. This is the seven Minute Leadership Podcast with your host Paul Fellavaledo.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the seven Minute Leadership Podcast. It's episode seven point thirty five. Today. I want to talk about something that separates leaders who struggle from leaders who seem to just get it. And it comes down to what they notice first when they walk into a room, take over a team, or face a problem. Experienced leaders see differently. Not because they're smarter, not because they went
to a better school or read more books. It's because they've been through enough situations that their eyes have been trained, sometimes the hard way, to look past the obvious and focus on what actually matters. So what do they see first? The first thing an experienced leader notices is the energy in the room, not the words people are saying. The energy. Are people engaged or just going through the motions? Is
their tension that nobody's naming. Is the team tight? Do they finish each other's sentences or are they politely tolerating each other? A newer leader walks in and listens to the update. An experienced leader walks in and reads the room before anyone says a word. They notice who's leaning forward and who's leaning back. They notice who makes eye contact and who avoids it. They notice who's quiet that
usually isn't. That energy tells a story, and experienced leaders have learned to read it before they do anything else. The second thing they see is where the real influence lives. Every team has an org chart, the official structure that's who reports to who, And then there's the real structure, the person who isn't a manager, but that everyone goes to when they have a question. The person who if they buy in, the whole team buys in. The person
who if they check out, others follow. Experienced leaders find that person fast, not to manipulate them, but because if you want to lead well, you need to understand where trust already lives on your team. That unofficial influencer is a signal they've earned credibility in ways that don't show up on any report, and a smart leader respects that and works with it. Third, and this one is big, Experienced leaders see the gap between what's being said and
what's actually true. In most organizations, there's the official version of things, and then there's reality. People will tell a leader what they think the leader wants to hear. It's human nature. People protect themselves. They soften bad news, they stay quiet about problems that they're afraid won't land well. An experienced leader knows this, so they don't just take the first answer at face value. They ask follow up questions.
They have one on one conversations. They pay attention to the stuff people mention, almost in passing, because that's often where the real issue is hiding. When someone says, oh, it's fine, we're handling it, an experienced leader hears that and thinks, are you though, tell me more. They've learned that fine is sometimes the most loaded word in the building. The fourth thing experienced leaders spot quickly is where the
pressure's coming from. Every time a team is carrying something deadlines, competing priorities, a difficult relationship with another department, a process that's been broken for years that everyone's just learned to work around. Experienced leaders look for what's wearing their people down. Because a tired, frustrated team doesn't perform no matter how
talented they are. And here's the thing. A lot of leaders miss this because they're so focused on the output that they forget to look at the conditions producing that output. If the conditions are bad, the output eventually suffers. Experienced leaders know to look upstream. In fifth, experienced leaders see potential that others overlook. They walk into a team and
they're not just assessing problems. They're looking for people who are underutilized, people who have more to give but haven't been given the space or the challenge to give it. People who've been labeled one thing for so long that nobody's noticed they've grown into something more. This is actually one of the most powerful things a leader can do. See someone before they fully see themselves. Call out of strength. If someone doesn't know that they have, give someone a
chance that nobody else thought to give them. That kind of leadership changes people's lives and it changes teams. So to pull this all together, experienced leaders see energy, influence, truth gaps, pressure points, and hidden potential. They're not just looking at the surface. They've learned, usually through trial and error, that the most important information in any situation isn't always the loudest or the most obvious. The good news is
this isn't some gift you're born with. It's a skill, and like any skill, you get better at it by being intentional, by slowing down enough to actually observe before you react, by asking questions instead of assuming, by staying curious about your people instead of just managing tasks. Start paying attention to what you notice and more importantly, what
you've been missing. So the longer you lead, the more you realize that leadership is less about having all the answers and more about asking better questions and seeing more clearly, every room you walk into is giving you information. Every conversation has a layer underneath it. The leader who makes the biggest difference are the ones who take the time to look. So this week, slow down, watch, listen, and
see what you've been walking past. You might be surprised what's been right in front of you the whole time. This has been the seven Minute Leadership Podcast, and I thank you for listening.
For more Paul Fell of Alito Podcasts, visit paulfellowalito dot com.