Old School Credibility

*Note: The following text is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Bill Berthel: Welcome to the Get Emergent podcast. This is the space where we discuss leadership team and organizational topics and better practices. We like to provide concepts and ideas that you can turn into pragmatic experiments to help you develop your higher potential in all of your work and your leadership. I’m Bill Berthel

Ralph Simone: And I’m Ralph Simone

Bill Berthel: Ralph, I’m excited to talk about this idea of old school credibility. You know, we hear the declaration, I wouldn’t ask anyone to do something I wouldn’t do from leaders.

Ralph Simone: Really I would. I built a whole career on doing that.

Bill Berthel: Well, you’re maybe more a progressive guy than some people we work with, but I agree with this topic when it comes to ethics and morals. Right. I would not ask anyone to do something I wouldn’t be willing to do from an ethical and a moral perspective. But I don’t think that’s what folks are saying. They’re really talking about this idea that, you know, if I’m not a subject matter expert in this space, I’m not going to have credibility to lead others. And I’m really excited to introduce Geoff Storm.

Geoff is with us today. Geoff is with us every recording.

Ralph Simone: Yes.

Bill Berthel: But today we asked him to join us in this conversation because as we were preparing, he had some beautiful examples of this in his career. Geoff welcome.

Geoff Storm: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here. on the mic this time, I guess.

Bill Berthel: Yeah, yeah.

Ralph Simone: So we already has the better voice.

Bill Berthel: Well, Geoff does have a voice for radio, but he’s got a handsome face too. So he’s not one of those guys with just a face for radio. But Geoff is our support from MPW and he is our recording technician. And Geoff it’s awesome to have you here every time, but to hear your voice today and your examples of where this has shown up in your career.

Could you share with us a little bit what you were sharing with Ralph and I earlier about how you felt in your leadership role?

Geoff Storm: I said, as soon as you started to sort of lay out what your plan was for today and where you were going to go with this podcast, I just kind of chimed in and said, this one really hits home for me because as you alluded to, my background is actually in this sort of thing, recording video, audio, that kind of thing. And then I went, twelve years ago now, I came to work for MPW, which is a full service advertising agency. So I mean, there are many people in that organization who do things that I cannot do, that I still, after twelve years, cannot do. They have skill sets and knowledge bases that are beyond the scope of mine. And suddenly I was in a leadership role with these people on my teams, and that was incredibly intimidating because I came from a background where I was managing people who did the same things that I did, and now suddenly I was managing people, whether it be a, designer or folks in our digital department, our web development department, who have skills. Again, they just have skills that I don’t have. It was a really, really difficult adjustment for me, and I will say this, if you’ll forgive me, for what may seem like a shameless plug. I actually went through the Get Emergent program, and I did some coaching with folks from Emergent, and that really helped me get over that. Again, I’ll call it an intimidation. and the thing that helped me was this idea of vulnerability. Right? Just admit that you don’t have those. It’s not my responsibility as a leader to be able to do the jobs, necessarily of the people that I’m leading. In fact, it’s impossible for me to do so. That’s why I have a team, right? I mean, you have more people because you can’t possibly do all the work yourself. And the key for me was when I just accepted that and was upfront with my team about it and said, you know, listen, I need you because you can do things I can’t do. You’re incredibly valuable to me, and I need to trust you to do this job, and I know that you’re going to do it well. And then it just comes down to all the basics of leadership that you guys talk about all the time. Make sure you’ve got the buy in. everybody understands the importance of the task, why we’re doing what we’re doing, what we want the end result to be, when it needs to be done, and let people go and do their thing.

Bill Berthel: Oh Geoff I love it. While we know as leaders we can’t do it all alone, there’s still a lot of emotions that come up with that, or a lot of senses and feelings. It’s very vulnerable space. We could feel intimidated in a way. We might work extra hard to try to catch up, but the change year over year in data being added to the Internet averages a 23% increase. In five years, the data has doubled. If we just take that as one indicator of how fast information changes, no one person is going to keep up with this.

Geoff Storm: Right, right.

Bill Berthel: Embrace that as you did. So you got some coaching, or you were able to really embrace that, to see there’s a different way right, right.

Geoff Storm: Absolutely.

Bill Berthel: Or we can hold on to this old school mindset. Right. That I’ve got to be able to roll up my sleeves and do the work or have done the work of the people that I’m leading.

Geoff Storm: You’re going to kill yourself if you try to do that.

Bill Berthel: I think so.

Geoff Storm: You have to trust that you have good people in place that are going to do their jobs and let them do their jobs, and you’re just sort of there to manage the flow of it, you know?

Bill Berthel: Yeah. Nicely said.

Ralph Simone: And I think this one cuts both ways. So we’ve been talking about the mindset of the leader, but then there is the culture and the acceptance of the organization for someone leading them that may not have all of the expertise that they have.

And I think that’s also something that we should address in this podcast, Bill.

Bill Berthel: Oh, absolutely. So I was recently interviewing a group of highly skilled metal workers, machinists, welders, and there was this universal attitude toward leadership of, I can’t follow a leader who didn’t do the work I did before, right. From the workforce. I don’t know that that person’s credible. I don’t know I can follow them if they haven’t been a welder, too, or a machinist, too. Right. For years, like these folks were talking about, like, they’ve got to have done this for 20 years. And so a quick follow up question is, how much has the technology changed in your field of expertise? They’re like, oh, it changes fast. So the math isn’t adding up for them. But I get the mindset. This isn’t new to any of us. I come from manufacturing. And by the way, this isn’t just, you know, factory work or blue collar. I’m putting air quotes up. blue collar workers, professionals believe this as well. Every level of organizations want some expertise and experience, and there’s nothing wrong with that. This is a both and of some experience, some subject matter expertise. But we think a real passion for leadership, stepping in to be the expert as the leader is what’s really needed here.

Ralph Simone: Well, this probably explains the trouble I had as a foreman in my early career, managing guys who were ASME certified welders

Bill Berthel: Yeah.

Ralph Simone: Because it did help to know a little bit about welding, to understand what was possible.

Bill Berthel: Absolutely.

Ralph Simone: And so I will admit I was at a disadvantage around some of the aspects of the work, but I didn’t need to be able to weld, to be able to organize the work, to be able to schedule the work, to be able to make sure the maintenance on the equipment was up to speed. So I think it’s, you talked about it earlier. It is a mindset shift that has to take place at all levels of the organization.

Bill Berthel: And so for those leadership components. Right. The ability to delegate, the ability to move resources, get barriers out of people’s way, while you don’t have to have that subject matter expertise of the specific technology, maybe that’s not an absolute. I’m sure there are some highly specialized leadership roles where that is needed. I get that. But it’s really that space of leadership.

As I was preparing for this episode, a, thought about how long does our education today or higher education remain really valuable or relevant in the workforce? And there’s this term I never heard of until I started researching this. It’s called an education’s half life. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with this, right? It’s the time it takes for higher education’s applicable effectiveness in the workforce to be noticeably decreased. And that half life is consistently shrinking over the last two decades. Now, this is not a quality of education problem. It’s a rapid growth and addition of knowledge and information. It’s the exponential growth of our knowledge, our abilities of our organizations, and our technology is the challenge. So one person keeping up with that, right, like a leader, is not a person who knows it all

Ralph Simone: Well, in fact, that seems like it would limit their ability to scale the organization, even the thought of that, because you would try to do everything, and I think you would actually plug the leadership pipeline. If that’s the approach you took.

Bill Berthel: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is the both and proposition we’re talking about today. Right. We need passion for leadership with some knowledge and some experience. We need perhaps organizations to think about how they’re structuring their roles and responsibilities. And, we work with some very progressive organizations that have recognized having equitable development paths for folks in leadership, as in their technical fields. So an individual can have choice and not sacrifice status or compensation as they grow. So an SME can be as valuable to the organization as a leader. Typically, more traditional structure of your growth is in leadership, as some SME’s sacrificing, in a way, their passions, so they can grow in status and compensation to become leaders.

Ralph Simone: This is fascinating to me. I think I’ve shared this story with you before, Bill. I was doing a leadership development presentation for one of the larger regional law firms in our area. And a guy that I’ve known for years said, I went to law school to practice law, not to practice leadership. And I thought that was kind of interesting. So what’s the sweet spot for him? Because I think he did have, there was a need in his firm for him to practice leadership, but there was also a need for him to practice his craft of law. And I think, how do we find that balance? I mean, what guidance would we give to our listeners around finding that balance?

Bill Berthel: Yeah, I think it is that sense of balance or the image that comes up in my mind are, like dials, right? I’ve got these two dials of leadership and individual contributor or technical contributor or, you know, whatever it is. My craft is in this case an attorney. Or if you’re an engineer and you’re leading engineers, you probably are still doing some engineering work. If you’re a programmer, whatever your craft is, right. Whatever that work is you’ve got two dials. And I think it’s about agility. I think it’s about agility to go back and forth and how we use those two dials. It’s not setting those two dials locked to say, I’m going to be 80 20. I’m, 80% a leader, 20%. There will be days or tasks or time where you’re going to ramp up your subject matter expertise and be an individual contributor. And there are going to be times where it might be more on the leadership dial, but I think it’s about dialing that in for the work that matters most that’s in front of us. That may not mean our preference. Right.

Bill Berthel: Like, I love it.

Bill Berthel: The attorney was able to share, went to school to be an attorney. That might be his preference. Right. But what’s needed for the results of my team and the organization to reach those goals and objectives?

Ralph Simone: And, ah, when we had the conversation, I said, often you’re contributing your law expertise, but often you’re also coaching people.

Bill Berthel: Beautiful.

Ralph Simone: On how to practice law. I think where people get hung up is looking at one or the other as opposed to both our important activities and to bring that level of agility to what needs to be done in the moment. I think it’s really important.

Bill Berthel: Yeah, I think so. I think it is about that leadership, agility.

I think it’s also about if, this is resonating with you as a listener, you have an opportunity perhaps to start experimenting with this kind of change in your organization. I think there’s perhaps some cultural shifts or some mindset. We called it a mindset shift earlier. And how you start having this conversation with more people in your organization, with your team. So the workforce may be thinking a certain way. Also, with the structure in your organization, where might the opportunities be to experiment with some different lines of growth and development in your organization?

Ralph Simone: One of the things that comes up with some of our clients is that somebody who is not a subject matter expert for whatever the organization does could not be a senior level leader. What advice would we give or what questions would we ask them in those regards?

Bill Berthel: So I think in some cases that might be true. I think for perhaps some highly specialized roles in that senior leadership. If your subject matter expertise is truly, truly so important to that leadership role, again, probably highly specialized, highly technical, I think that leader must be a continual, lifelong learner, not to try to keep up with the complete pace, but to continually challenging the half life of their higher education. Got it right, and I think they can be in that role. But more generally speaking, I think we need to challenge that mindset that they can’t be a senior leadership. I know personally, I grew up that way. I did not go to school for the technical stuff that I was leading. Later, I went to school for my human resources, higher level leadership, but I was leading quality management groups and research and development groups at high levels without that education. So it’s, I know it’s personally possible. So I would say challenge that in the structure of the organization.

Ralph Simone: I’d be curious what Geoff thinks about this, but I think not knowing too much or not being too much a subject matter expert helps you be a better coach, helps you actually draw the answers out of people because you don’t lead the witness. You’re curious about what they can do.

Geoff Storm: I think that’s true. In my experience, one thing that I found was, the way I see my role is not to do the actual work of those people on my team, but to provide feedback on the work they’ve done, which I always felt that I was qualified to do. Right. But I always had that little bit of vulnerability about my skill set or my technical ability. Anyway, what I found was by being vulnerable, by channeling myself into that specific role, I found that my team was pretty receptive to it, and they were actually ended up teaching me. I’ve learned things from them that I don’t think either one of us intended. At the beginning, it was sort of like accidental, or you were just organic learning through the process, which has been really valuable.

Ralph Simone: Geoff very nice. Well, it’s that co mentoring almost. And, I think the vulnerability is the key to a lot of things, to leadership effectiveness, to ongoing learning and development. Knowing that we don’t we can’t possibly know everything about anything.

Geoff Storm: No, you can’t. You can’t. And, you know, so, again, you know, and the other big part of my role, I think, is just. I think one of the biggest things I can do is not only providing feedback and also, you know, my team giving me feedback, which is important as well. It’s that, like you said, Ralph, it’s that sort of dual mentoring. But being in a position to help them, accomplish their tasks and their goals, whether it’s managing deadlines, whether it’s giving them encouragement when they don’t feel they’re quite getting it right, maybe giving them suggestions about how they might approach. So it’s that kind of thing. And, I mean, that’s leadership.

Ralph Simone: Yeah. Perfect.

Bill Berthel: Geoff thank you so much for including your point of view and your voice in this episode. Truly a gift. Thank you, Geoff

Bill Berthel: My pleasure. And thank you so much for the opportunity.

Bill Berthel: absolutely, Ralph. Thank you.

Ralph Simone: Well, I love this because I’m going to ask more and more people to do things that I wouldn’t do. It’s just giving me permission.

Bill Berthel: Permission to carry on. Right. Absolutely. Awesome. Thanks, Ralph, and thanks for listening. You can listen to a new podcast two times every month here at Get Emergent or wherever you listen to your podcasts. This is where we bring you contemporary leadership topics and ideas balanced with what we hope you find are better practices that you can apply directly to your work and your leadership. Thanks.