Steven Howard With Caliente Leadership

Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Coach the Coach radio brought to you by the Business RadioX Ambassador Program, the no cost business development strategy for coaches who want to spend more time serving local business clients and less time selling them. Go to brxambassador.com To learn more. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:32] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Coach the Coach Radio, and this is going to be a fun one today on the show, we have Steven Howard with Caliente leadership. Welcome, Steven.

Steven Howard: [00:00:42] Good Day League. Did it meet you?

Lee Kantor: [00:00:44] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about coanty leadership. How are you serving, folks?

Steven Howard: [00:00:50] Well, we do a leadership mentoring leadership, coaching one on one and also some leadership training. Plus I I’ve read a lot of books. I try to help people through the written word as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:02] So what’s your backstory? How did you get involved in leadership?

Steven Howard: [00:01:06] I had a job with Citibank many years ago at twenty three people reporting to me when I was living in Singapore, and fortunately, they sent me some good leadership training programs. And when I left Citibank, the company that we use as a training company, hired me to facilitate for other companies. So it was quite a stroke of luck, quite frankly.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:27] So what have you found regarding leadership over the years, is this something that everybody kind of has in them and it’s just a matter of getting it out? Or is it something that in times of trouble, this type of leadership qualities appear?

Steven Howard: [00:01:43] Oh, that’s an excellent question. I think everyone has the potential to be a leader. I don’t think everyone has the desire and part of getting them into leadership is stroking that desire. On the other hand, a lot of people are really good at individual contributor work, whether they’re a researcher or a chemical engineer or a scientist, and they just don’t want to lead people. They don’t want to deal with the people issues of it. So I call leadership in art. In fact, then I differentiate what a good leader is and a great leader is, and I think that’s what the art of leadership comes in.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:14] So you feel that some people just hard pass on being a leader, that they’re they want to be a cog in the machine and they don’t there’s no place for leadership for them. Or is that something that there is a place for leadership skills in everybody?

Steven Howard: [00:02:31] Well, there’s a place for everybody because you have to lead yourself. But when it comes to like leading other people, you know, leading other people about how do you motivate people, how they give them direction, how they give them great feedback, and now some people just don’t want to do that, quite frankly. And I wouldn’t call them this. They a cog in the machine as much as, you know. Like I said, if you’re a chemical engineer, I’ve known quite a few good chemical engineers in places like Shell and ExxonMobil, and that’s what they want to do. They want to be in, they want to be in their laboratories. You know, they work with colleagues. They don’t want to lead colleagues. They want to. They want to do the research, they want to write their research papers, they want to write their findings. They want to get their patents filed with the government. I think that’s a fine career path, if that’s what they choose to do. I think a mistake organizations make sometimes is putting those people in the leadership. I mean, I’m sure you’ve known people who are really, really good salespeople and then you make them a sales manager. They don’t know how to lead people. They know how to sell. And that’s probably if that’s what they want to do, that’s where you should leave them.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:32] So how as a leader of an organization, do you kind of discern who the people are that have potential and desire to be leaders and who should be kind of left to for themselves?

Steven Howard: [00:03:45] A lot of one on one conversations that you can you can take up leadership skill. You see the people who have an inclination for leadership. They’re the ones who, you know, they’ll start small, they’ll lead a task force the team into something. Or maybe maybe they just lead a team bonding session, you know, or they do the team, you know, Christmas party or something like that. The leadership skills will rise to the surface if given the opportunity. I think, like I said, I think most people candidly, I think almost everyone can be a leader. But for those who don’t, you’ll see them shy away when you ask them, Hey, could you go mentor this person? No, no, I don’t want to do that. Hey, could you? Could you lead this group task force on this new research study? No, no, no. I don’t want to do that. And you pick up those clues as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:29] So now has the pandemic kind of created more leaders, less leaders? The same amount of leaders created more?

Steven Howard: [00:04:39] I doubt it. I think it’s creating a different breed of leaders, at least those who are going to be successful coming out of the pandemic. They’re going to have to use a whole bunch of different leadership skills as they’ve had to use during the pandemic. I think leading during the pandemic is very different than leading before the pandemic. And when people start going back in the office place and you have everyone co-located again, it’s going to be you cannot go back to the old leadership skills that you relied on. There’s going to be a new subset of skills that are going to be extremely important to be successful sustainably going forward.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:14] So what are some of those skills?

Steven Howard: [00:05:17] Empathy, empathy would be number one, and I think it’s even taking empathy to to a level of compassion, quite frankly. You can’t just empathize with people’s situation. You’re going to have to show compassion. I think leaders have to understand that’s probably the silver lining coming out of the pandemic is that we have to realize that people have. Not only do they have lives outside work, they have responsibilities outside work. And I think that’s one of the things you’re seeing with the great resignation that’s going on right now with the organizations and leaders who don’t recognize that and don’t respect that they’re the ones who are losing their employees. The number one skill, though I would suggest coming out of the pandemic and for the next three to four years is the ability to handle ambiguity and uncertainty. You know, we used to we we measure leaders on their ability to execute to a plan, and that’s all been well and good in the past. I think now we’re going to have to measure leaders on their ability to adapt to a plan to handle the ambiguity, the uncertainty of what might happen six months from now, what might happen nine months from now? And be able to craft plan a Plan B, maybe even Plan C and D, rather than just focusing on executing a plan that they’ve already got in place.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:37] Well, the people that are comfortable in that level of chaos, that might mean that they might have to admit they made a mistake or that the path they initially started following with less information is now no longer valid. And now we have a new path with new information. Do you think like kind of politically in an organization that that type of I don’t want to say it’s wavering, but just adjusting to new information is acceptable in today’s world.

Steven Howard: [00:07:06] I think it’s going to have to become acceptable. But I will agree with you that there are going to be many organizations and the dinosaur type organizations who who won’t adapt, who won’t be willing to adapt. I mean, I don’t know about you, but one of my favorite philosophers is Yoda, and Yoda has a great said phrase that says You have to unlearn what you have learned. And I suggest that leaders coming out the pandemic, particularly those of, you know, those of us who are over 45. You know, we’ve done it one way for so many years. We’re used to it. We’re comfortable with it. But we’re going to have to unlearn some of the ways we learned previously and pick up some of these new skills. And and also the organizations are going to have to evaluate people and reward people differently. You can’t reward somebody because they executed a plan when like like you just said it may not have been a mistake, a decision that somebody made me think about this two years ago, all the wonderful plans that were being put in place, strategic plans in 2019, how people are going to do so well in 2020. And then came March of 2020. It doesn’t mean their plans are wrong. They just didn’t anticipate the future. They got surprised. And you can’t get surprised by the future anymore. Or can it get taken by surprise, I should say.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:26] Now, for a while now, leaders have been encouraging some of their people to maybe take risks and to, you know, think outside the box and that type of kind of verbiage, at least lip service towards that. But whenever there is kind of an inclination towards action, there are going to be times when you do make mistakes and that you did choose the wrong path and you, you have to self-correct. Typically, in the larger organizations, you’re kind of penalized for that mistake. Are you going to see more empathy and acceptance for that type of risk taking that’s going to be needed when there is such an ambiguity?

Steven Howard: [00:09:07] Absolutely. Again, by the companies that make that change, I would advocate to you that they’re going to be many companies who will not make that change, and they’re going to be the ones we talk about 10 years from now, 15 years from now. Oh, weren’t they successful at one time? I mean, you know, this is not new, necessarily. I mean, the newness now is the fact that the change has been created by a pandemic. In the past, the change has been created by technology. You look at people like Kodak. Kodak was the leader in digital film at one point in digital photography, but they were making most of their profits from chemicals. And so they ignored the trend, and they made the mistake of ignoring the trend towards digital photography. And you know, look where Kodak is today. And, you know, thanks to Steve Jobs and others who put cameras on phones, people don’t need to go to the CVS, you know, go to your local CVS and print sorry print pictures anymore. That’s where Kodak made its money when we used to print our pictures at CVS or any place else. So it’s not it’s not new. The newness now is the fact that the pandemic has forced the management leaders to to leave remotely and lead in the uncertainty caused by a pandemic which has been government influenced in terms of the management of the pandemic. But before you know you could have called technology, you could have called digital technology a pandemic for certain industries.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:40] Now why do you think that there’s very few examples of like a company say, like Netflix that started out in one way, you know, mailing you DVDs to compete against blockbuster totally blow up that whole model and say, Now we’re this new thing and then and then adjust after that to a new new thing that seems to be rare. Why don’t you think that there’s more people out there that can do that type of major pivot and major adjustment based on what they’re seeing in the marketplace?

Steven Howard: [00:11:16] It takes risk, and I think it takes it takes the ability to understand what the trends are. And but more importantly, like I said before, if if. People were being measured on their ability to execute a plan, and that plan didn’t include pivoting into a new industry or to a new distribution channel. Then they didn’t do that. And it’s interesting that analogy you made, you know, that Blockbuster could have bought Netflix for a few hundred million dollars at one point, and the board of Blockbuster said nobody wants to get their DVDs in the mail. People want to come into our stores and get the VRC the videos and buy their popcorn and buy their M&Ms, and they want to know what they’re getting. Whereas Netflix, originally when you got your DVDs in the mail, you know you had a list of 10 and you’d get it two or three in the mail, but you didn’t know which two or three of the 10 you’re going to get. So you didn’t know what you’re going to watch on Friday night or Saturday night until you open the envelope. Blockbuster did not think Netflix’s Business Strategy business model was going to work. Well, guess who won that? I think there’s one blockbuster left the entire country. I think it’s in Oregon somewhere now.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:27] Now, how do you help that leader that wants to be that bold? What are some what some counsel to make those kind of bold choices and to, you know, pivot and take the risk?

Steven Howard: [00:12:39] I think it’s understanding the trends. Looking at history when I think one of our shortfalls and leaders today is their sole focus on dealing with today and trying to prepare for tomorrow, they don’t look at historical trends, they don’t see what’s happened to other companies, other industries in the past. And they don’t. Therefore, they don’t think the lessons are relevant to them. Secondly, I think as we talked earlier, the ability to handle ambiguity and certainty in the building and say, OK, we’re going to go take Netflix as your excellent example. They’re, you know, we’re going to go down this road, we’re going to deliver DVDs. Oh, you know what? We can do something else we can. This streaming service that looks interesting. Well, why don’t we let people download and watch their movies on a streaming? Ok, that’s kind of interesting. Oh, technology is now now streaming. We could create a TV channel. We could create a TV channel that streams. Ok, let’s go in that direction. So it’s not just when you admit mistakes and you pivot. I think it’s also when you when you see technology becoming alive or anything becoming alive. The new distribution channels new customer trends and say, Let’s go give this a try. Let’s see how this works. And then when it starts to work, being not being afraid to drop a business unit, Netflix dropped the DVD distribution business unit for something that was going to be better in the future. Kodak refused to drop the chemical business or diminish their chemical business when they saw digital photography came. They stuck to what was working for them and didn’t realize the marketplace was changing.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:21] Now, do you have any advice for the leaders of an organization on choosing other leaders, like what are some of the kind of green lights and red flags when you’re assessing a potential leader?

Steven Howard: [00:14:37] I would say right now the number one red flag, if I can turn your question around slightly, number one red flag would be do not promote the bully, do not promote the person who gets results at all costs, who burns out his staff or her staff. Do not get the one who you know, and we all know who they are in the organization. Don’t promote the one who who throws the tirades and yells and screams and uses profanity because they’re the ones are going to have a high employee turnover. So turn it around. The green flag is promote the person who does both. And as I said earlier, the difference between a great leader, a great leader will either focus on results or focus on people. And if they focus only on people, they don’t necessarily get the results. A great leader will focus on both and and great leaders are not just in the C-suite. Great leaders can be supervisors. They can be team managers. They can be first line leaders. These are the people you need to promote, the ones who can, who can balance leading for results and leading people and leading people development. Those are the leaders that you want in your organization.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:47] Now what advice to a young person maybe that just graduated is entering the workforce. What are some things they can be doing today that can signal that they’re going to be a leader?

Steven Howard: [00:15:58] Well, put your hand up. Volunteer, it could be something simple. It could be leading a project. It could be leading a small task force. It could be as simple as leading the Christmas party or anything like that. Demonstrate your leadership skills whenever you get that opportunity. And obviously, when you’re first starting out, those leadership skills are all about driving results, so you’re not trying to become a great leader. Try and be a good leader. And you’re obviously the first step is to show that you can deliver show that you can that you can overcome obstacles. Resiliency is an important part of leadership today show that you don’t give up just because you hit a hurdle. And then as once you get your first leadership position, realize that you have three hats to wear, you’re going to be wearing the hat of a manager, and that means you give directions and dictate what people should be doing. You also going to have to continue doing your own individual contributor work so that your second hand, but your third hat. Once you get into leadership, you now need to start coaching people, mentoring people, developing people, communicating feedback, all that kind of stuff. So understand that there’s three distinct hats that you’re going to wear when you have your first leadership position.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:14] Now, when you’re delivering your service to your clients, are you delivering them through kind of training in some sort of workshops that are, I would imagine nowadays virtual, in-person? Or is it through your books? How do you typically deliver your coaching and your work that you do?

Steven Howard: [00:17:33] I deliver it through four channels. So you’re right, it’s now mostly online virtual workshops, with some hybrid work starting to come out now that would be number one and and part of what I do when I do training, I don’t just do training anymore. I always combine some element of coaching. I’ve been working with a major retailer right now in the United States with their IT department, and so we’ve been doing 90 minute workshops and then once a month we do 90 minute group coaching sessions for them where they get a chance to more interact and bring up their issues. So that would be one. The other would be one on one coaching again. Right now, it’s all virtual. Then most of the coaching has been virtual for many years now. You don’t need to sit down face to face to do that. The the books obviously are the third channel. The fourth one is and this goes to those young leaders you just talked about. I’ve got an online, self paced leadership development program that’s eight modules, and it comes with two years of monthly coaching sessions. So that’s for the, you know, the young people like to learn through video. They like to learn through self pace. They like to learn on their own. And so that program allows them to go through each module, send me questions if they have send me work workbook assignments when they want for me to review. And then we we get together once a month and answer their questions and develop them one on one. So it’s kind of a hybrid model as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:56] Now are you seeing coaching becoming more accepted as a tool for leaders of organizations that can be disseminated throughout the organization rather than just kind of at the highest levels?

Steven Howard: [00:19:10] Absolutely, absolutely, I. One company I work for right now has saved up five hundred and fifty employees there in the services business there on the West Coast. I’ve been coaching there. He started when I started coaching him. He was the chief technology officer. I’m sorry. He was the IT manager and now he’s the chief technology officer. He’s now in the executive team. I’m now coaching one of his direct reports now that he’s moved up to like assistant it manager. And I’ve got one of their regional sales managers that I’m coaching as well, who’s not on the executive team. So he’s on the second layer. So it’s not. It’s no longer just C-suite type individuals who are getting coaching. So this one organization is a great example. Three three of their mid-level managers are all going through coaching, and I know several others in the organization are using other coaches besides me. So it’s part of the ethos, part of the culture of that particular corporation.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:08] Are you finding that that’s happening more and more, that it is becoming part of the culture and it’s built into what’s attracting people to organizations that when they do have a robust coaching program?

Steven Howard: [00:20:20] Yes, definitely. It’s it’s one of the things that attracts them. And right now, I think it’s one of the things that’s keeping people in this organization because I asked this question the other day, the nine people who are receiving coaching are all staying with the organization. They have lost about four or five people during this. You know, this great resignation as people are calling it, none of those four or five at the same level had coaching had personal coaches. So I know it wasn’t so much that it wasn’t. I think it partly was. It wasn’t offered to them. And also they didn’t take it up. But yeah, definitely. The retail company I just mentioned earlier, they’re now offering coaching. To their second line and first line managers as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:03] Well, Stephen, thank you so much for sharing. What you do is if somebody is interested in learning more, can you share the website?

Steven Howard: [00:21:10] Yes, it’s client leadership calling Lee Kantor, as you probably know in Spanish, means hot, but the second definition is passionate. So I’m very passionate about leadership and leadership development, so it’s client leadership. My email is Stephen at Caliente Leadership. You can find me on LinkedIn under Stephen Howard. I think it’s as Greater Los Angeles area, but you can find me pretty readily.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:35] Well, thank you again for sharing your story. You’re doing important work, and we appreciate you.

Steven Howard: [00:21:39] Well, thank you, Lee. I appreciate this and I appreciate. I’m sure your listeners appreciate the opportunity that you’re giving people to share this. And before we sign off, I just want to wish you and your family all the best during the forthcoming holiday season.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:52] Yep, you too. Thank you. All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Coach the Coach radio.