In this episode of the Transform Your Workplace podcast, Brandon Laws interviews Dave McKeown, leadership expert and author of The Self-Evolved Leader: Elevate Your Focus and Develop Your People in a World That Refuses to Slow Down. In a business world that places increasing demand on the business leader’s time and energy, Dave offers practical tips for prioritizing what matters and elevating our focus above what doesn’t.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Dave McKeown is the Founder and CEO of Outfield Leadership, the author of The Self-Evolved Leader, and a leadership strategy coach, speaker, and trainer. With experience in helping organizations achieve scalable growth, Dave is passionate about seeing business teams reach not only their leadership but also their company-wide goals.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, Sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
THE CHALLENGE
…elevate your focus and develop your people in a world that refuses to slow down.
The subtitle of Dave McKeown’s book says it all. He recognized that we “live in a world where everything is urgent, where we’ve given anybody permission to interrupt us at any time.” And his work with leaders and leadership teams over the last ten years or so has taught him that this urgency has only accelerated.
Dave explained, “It knocks us into this cycle where, to keep moving forward, leaders are finding that they’ve got their hands far too deep into the weeds of the day-to-day actions and crises.” The result? Leaders aren’t able to think about the medium and long-term direction of their teams, leading to disempowerment and mediocrity.
But there is hope for the modern-day leader. It is possible to break the cycle of mediocrity. And according to Dave, it’s all about recognizing the problems, elevating your focus, practicing humility, and looking to the future.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Adjusting to the New Pace
“This fast pace has continued over the last year or so as we’ve tried to deal with the ebb and flow of the pandemic and the strengthening and releasing of economic issues relating to that. And now we’re looking at, well, how do we return to work in a way that’s going to be productive and safer for our employees? And the world will still continue to move quickly. It’s something that’s just not going to go away, and our leaders need to adapt to it. And I feel like we’re very much behind the eightball on all of that.”
The Cycle of Mediocrity
“Mediocrity doesn’t mean that we’re doing bad work. It doesn’t even mean that we’re not doing sometimes good and occasionally great work. It means that we’re not consistently delivering our best work. And the reason why is the behavioral cycle that goes along with the need to respond to our fast-paced world. So leaders see new information come in. There’s a sense of needing to respond urgently. Well, that’s a demand placed on us from our clients, from the industry as a whole, and from the leaders above us.”
“And so it causes, in many cases, leaders to lead through active heroism. So they’ll either jump in and see if they can do the thing themselves, or they’ll just bark orders in the anticipation of improving efficiency — which in and of itself doesn’t seem like it’s necessarily the bad thing. But over time, what we do is we build learned helplessness in our people.”
Breaking the Cycle
“Like anything, whenever we’ve realized that we’re in a negative behavior loop, we’ve got to make the commitment to get out of it. It’s about making a mindset shift to say, ‘If this is what we’re trying to break, what are we trying to move towards? And rather than tending to everything in a crisis, it’s choosing the stuff that’s truly important. It’s about working with your team to develop solutions to the problems that they have. It’s empowering them to go and deliver that and then to learn from it — to grow and improve. Replace one set of negative behaviors with one set of positive ones.”
Traits of a Self-Evolved Leader
“Culturally, we’re fighting a battle of responding to whatever’s urgent. And so it’s our job to grow and develop ourselves as leaders. And that’s just as true whether you get promoted into your first frontline managerial job all the way up to being CEO of the organization. It’s up to you to continue your own quest and path for growth and development, and that’s where the self-evolve piece comes in.”
“In leaders, we look to develop things like having the growth mindset, things like being intentional about how we respond and react to new information or crises in front of us. And then the biggest kind of mantra that sits underneath all of it in terms of being a self-evolved leader is the understanding that your focus as a leader is on helping your team achieve your shared goals, but in doing so, developing them into the best version of themselves. If we’re not developing and growing our people while we’re achieving our goals, then I think we’re missing a key component.”
The Limitations of “Soft Skills”
“If we call something a ‘soft skill,’ we’re implying that it’s hard to assess, it’s hard to train against, it’s hard to evaluate. And that’s just nonsense. From my perspective, you can learn to be a good leader in the same way that you can learn to be a good cook or a good musician. You can break it down into its component parts and practice it and learn from it and grow from it. And when we say, ‘well, it’s a soft skill,’ we are basically just saying, ‘I don’t want to put in the work to actually learn how to become better in this area of my life.’”
Self-Evolved Leadership is Contagious
“Many leaders are part of an organization where the culture doesn’t fit with what they’re trying to achieve, so they get frustrated. They think that there’s no point in trying because the organization won’t accept this change anyway. There’s obviously an element of truth within that, but you still have the ability to control what happens within your team. You have the ability to control how they converse with each other, how they interact with each other, how they show up for each other. […] What I’ve seen is that when leaders start to operate in this way in small pockets, that it becomes contagious because you’re creating an atmosphere that people want to work in. You may not transform the whole organization, but you certainly can have an impact on those that work closely with your team.”
Opening Up the Conversation
“We’ve got to move away from this notion that, just because you’re the leader of the team, you have the final say on everything or that everything needs to be deferred to you. A self-evolved leader is much more desirous of rigorous debate and discussion to arrive at a solution — that would be better than any one person could bring. Some folks think that what I’m talking about is needing to have consensus on everything, and that’s actually not the case at all. There should be intentionality about including the team in where they’re headed and how they should get there. Sometimes the greatest leaders have no answers — all they do is ask really good questions and help people come to their own conclusions themselves, and then they support them to go deliver it.”
LEARN MORE
Head over to davemckeown.com where you can find a link to Dave’s book, The Self-Evolved Leader, and more information on the transformative work that he is doing.