Welcome to Hacking Your Leadership. I'm Chris Lorenzo, and welcome to this week's Thoughtful Thursday. Don't forget to follow us on YouTube at Hacking Your Leadership and leave us a review on iTunes. On this Thoughtful Thursday, I want to talk about something that is near and dear to my heart when it comes to leadership. And this is something that I've experienced many times in my career in retail leadership, and that's this idea that all things that are a problem come
back to how are you training your people? How are you coaching your people? How are you asking them to do things you know more correctly? If the results aren't there, it's because you have to do this better or that better. And sometimes that's true, sometimes that's absolutely true, but sometimes it's
not true. And sometimes these questions are being asked by people who haven't walked in your shoes for a while or ever, and it's tough to have those conversations with them when they can't necess really see eye to eye with you. Have you had this happened to you before? Definitely, for sure. And I think that this is good because it's a it's a smaller part of a
larger conversation. You know. Um I wrote about this a couple of weeks back on our LinkedIn newsletter around just kind of the myth of training, coaching and focus and again, does training help? Absolutely? Does development help? Yes, absolute hundred percent. We're not saying that that's that's not the case when it happens though many times, is that you're kind of doing the same thing over and over again, or this belief that it's always training that we're
not talking a little bit deeper. It's like, well, who is training and how are they training? And is the training effective? And then not only is there a training done, but then what's the follow up and what's the what's the process in which we're validating the training? And so much of
that falls into the effectiveness of leaders. And so I think that there's been many, many times where I've been in conversations and dialogue and we always want to kind of default to that like, oh, it's like it's it's it's it's a training thing, or it's just like and it's like, well, yes, and because how many times do we have to train the same people on the thing we want them to do without finally saying it's not about the
training. Maybe it's about the execution of the strategy. Maybe there's other factors that are here, and so I think it's it's just something that it's good for us to for us to discuss, but also for leaders to constantly look at because a lot of times the defaults for many strategies, for many organizations is just simply that oh, they need more training, under the assumption that
they just don't have the training they need to do the work. And there are other factors that I think can be a lot bigger in the impact of them not getting the work done how it should be done right. Well, So let's talk about some of those other factors here, because a lot of it comes down to prioritization. And you know, we talk about this as in our culture acronym. The l for culture is to lend air support.
So if you're a leader, your job is to kind of filter out the noise and make sure that your team, that your people reporting up to you don't have a list of seven thousand priorities. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority, right, That's how it works. There has to be something that is a priority, a couple of things, but not everything is a priority, and that can change, but it shouldn't change daily.
It could change quarterly, it could change annually. Like you're supposed to reevaluate what your priorities are based on moving levers of a business if things are not moving the way you want it to move. But if a priority is AB and C on Monday and it's D, E and F on Tuesday, that implies that what you said on Monday wasn't actually a priority, and you lose credibility as a leader when it comes to naming off any priorities at all.
And so you have to really be clear on what the priorities are, and you can't kind of be in it, like if you're being inundated by noise from outside the system. You often will have competing business groups kind of telling you what they believe their priorities are, and it's their top priority for sure, because it's their business group. You as the leader then have to go in and filter that and decide what is actually the priority. And there are
things you can do to figure out what is actually the priority. Look at how people are rated on their annual reviews. Look at what constitutes someone getting a raise or a promotion or not. You want to know where the priority is. Look at what gets a person a promotion, don't It's what the old added you ask a politician, don't tell me your priorities, show me your budget, and I'll tell you what your priorities are. This is the
exact same thing. And so what I want to ask you, Lorenzo, is have you ever run into a situation where you have to kind of push back on someone who has um you know, who's trying to tell you this is a priority and you have to kind of make it clear to them this actually isn't a priority for you, not because it's not to them, but because it just isn't to you. And so I don't want to ask you that, but first I want to get up toward poet of our sponsors.
All right, Lorenzo, when did you have to kind of make sure that someone who is telling you something that's really important to them it is a priority to them, that it just isn't a priority to you without kind of hurting that relationship and saying no, sorry, Bud, you know, go away and come back later. You have to maintain that relationship. You have to have a working relationship with them, but you, but you, you really
it's not a priority to you. It just isn't. Yeah. I think a lot of it sometimes to your point earlier, is around negotiation, communication, relationships, those types of things. And I can think of many times when somebody has come to me to say, like, this is the thing, this is the priority, this is what you know needs to be focused
on. And and because of the work that I do, and because of the teams that I lead and the involvement and things that are going on, I many times have had different perspectives and said, like, I'm not saying it's not important, but when it comes to like what are we really trying to solve for here or how does this align with the other things that we have, I think in what I've learned over time is to just continue to ask more questions to help to connect the dots on where does this land in
the in the kind of the you know, the list of all priorities, because we have to be honest enough to say that there are many, and then we have to be honest enough to say that some are more impertinent than others for different types of reasons. And and again when you're when you have teams where you have multiple leaders, you have complex businesses, you have different uh you know, different work areas of responsibility, you have all this type
of stuff. There are going to be things that may be more of a priority to this group or to this leader specifically versus that leader or that group specifically. But then as the leader of leaders, you're kind of responsible for it all. So I share that because I think that's where I have and that's typically where I push back, because it happens constantly where I'm like, Okay, walk me through that, walk me through that as a priority.
Why is that a thing? I understand that we may be solving for scale or solving for a reduction in this behavior. Um, and but where maybe you're seeing that as a as a as a as a behavior that needs to change. I'm saying that behavior shows up differently from me here. Let me walk you through and then to ask the questions around, Okay, so like, is this something that's more of a priority than this other thing? Because sometimes people are not even aware of I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
They're not aware that there are some other bigger priorities that are going on sometimes because they're so hyper focused on the thing that they are trying to solve for. They're not even thinking about the other things that are also going on out there. So sometimes it is a matter of saying like, okay, well hold on, I hear what you're saying. This is something that you want me to focus on. Let me give you some other things right now
that I'm also being asked to focus on. And I would love to get your perspective, like where does that fit right when it comes to this and that and then the thing that you've got, where does that fit in your mind? Because I want to understand the level of urgency that you're looking for
versus the things that I've got going on. So let's talk through this, and I think in that type of conversation and then that type of engagement is very helpful in us finding a place where we can kind of negotiate down to like, what is this thing and maybe there's something in there that you just need. I've seen that a lot of time. Sometimes we have people that not only want to tell you what is important, but they want to tell
you how to do it. And I think that's where it's like, well, look, look, if that's what you're telling me it is important if I if I can get you that, if that's the thing that you want solved, and that's the thing that you want to have positive growth in, if I can get you that, then do you really care how I get
it done? And if the answers like, well, no, I don't that okay, great like, then let me focus on getting you what you're looking for, but let me do it the way that it makes more sense for me in the context of the work that I'm doing with the team that I have focused on, so that I can, as you said earlier, like land air support, I can get rid of some of this extra noise and stop changing things so quickly when it comes to behavioral expectations, right,
that should be the default if you're a leader, and you are if a person is saying to you, I can get this done, you know ethically and within the guidelines of what the organization is, does it really have to be done the way you want it to be done. Oftentimes that that kind of procedure, that way that they want it to be done is rooted in a worst case scenario. It's it's it's the prescription to do for leaders who don't have the ability to get it done. It's the it's the prescription.
It's it's like if you if you have no ability to get something done, you got to start somewhere. Well, I don't know how to do it, so you're going to tell me how to do it, and then I can do it that way. That works. But if you are saying you're telling you want this done, I know how to get this done. It's not the way you want it done, but I can still get it done.
If that's a problem for you, that implies that you that you're kind of um, your kind of devotion is not to the actual thing you're saying it is, but whether it's to the process, and then it's a different conversation. So if you want to talk about that, we can have that conversation. But this kind of like a one size fits all doesn't really work. It's it's good to have that procedure in place for people who don't have
the ability to do it. But if you, as a leader are saying I can get this done, you should be allowed to at least make the attempt. You should be allowed to say I can deliver on this um if if it's a prior and if I can show you the movement in this area, then leave me alone. You know, then I should be able to say, you know, I did this the way I wanted to do it.
I think a lot of the reasons people have a problem with people pushing back on that is because they don't want to feel like they weren't part of the solution. That if if it's if they can get the delivery on the number, but it wasn't the way they wanted it done, then then they didn't have any influence over it getting done. They can't own that success at all on their own. I wrote the process to get this done. Look, they were able to get it done. It's like, no, you
just conveyed to them what the priority was. They got it done in a way that's completely different than you. Now you feel kind of removed from that conversation. That's really tough for a lot of people to do. But it's all rooted an ego and and and so if you're having a conversation with somebody, it's important to have the conversation in the context of what is this definition? Are you? Are we? What's important? Is the result important?
Or is the how important? Let's come to an agreement on that first, then we can have the conversation about how to move forward. Absolutely and well that it brings us to the end of this episode. This is hacking leadership. I'm Lorenzo and I'm Chris, and have a great day.