Enjoy monthly reads, reflections, and thoughts from our wisdom filled team.
Have you ever been singled out for criticism by your leader in the presence of others? Do you remember how it felt?
Chances are, if you have experienced this, you have never forgotten it. Getting chastised in plain view leaves a lasting and unpleasant impression. Better said, it just plain hurts. As we move forward, every recollection of that moment makes us feel the pain and embarrassment all over again. Ouch.
One of the things I miss most about being in uniform is the camaraderie I felt with my fellow service members almost immediately upon arriving at a new organization. Over a 33-year career, this shared bond made each assignment a little easier, knowing I would quickly find people with common experiences and a shared purpose whenever I joined a team. These connections are a big part of what made military service so meaningful to me and I wouldn’t trade them for anything. Yet, over time, I realized that if left unchallenged, my comfort with teammates who shared similar experiences and thought processes could sometimes limit my openness to other perspectives.
I wanted to get a better understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it could potentially improve my leadership, so I decided to engage ChatGPT in a conversation on the topic. I started out with an easy one: “how can I improve my leadership?” As suspected, a laundry list of ideas with well-articulated statements streamed down my screen. However…
Studies have repeatedly shown that regular exercise is positively correlated with high scores on leadership assessments (1). It has been shown that individuals who allocate time for regular physical activity into their daily life have a greater capacity to achieve goals. If you need more proof type “statistics on CEOs and physical fitness” into your search engine and you’ll have ample evidence that leadership and fitness are intertwined. So, what’s the connection? With all the time constraints placed on a leader, is it worth the effort?
The key to unlocking your team’s superpower is showing them what it looks like to take the armor off, share your vulnerabilities, and work together to overcome each other’s blind spots. Telling your teammates they can be vulnerable and showing them what it looks like are two very different things. Your actions are more powerful than any words you can share, and your consistency will build the kind of trust that winning teams are made of.
We often wear masks and armor to protect the people around us: our families, our friends, our teammates, and more than anything, the people we are charged to lead. We think our masks protect the people around us from the things we see as vulnerabilities: fear, anger, disappointment, overwhelm, uncertainty. If we show them our fear, they will be scared too. If we show them our uncertainty, they will lose hope. If we show them our weakness, they will lose trust and faith in our leadership. This is what we tell ourselves when we put the armor on.
The statement, “Leaders Are Readers,” as others point out, has become ubiquitous on social media platforms like LinkedIn. Whether or not people who share that sentiment know of President Truman’s quote doesn’t diminish what he meant by saying it. Some people do innately possess powerful leadership attributes and abilities, most do not. Leadership is learned, and anyone, in my experience, can become better leaders through educating themselves.
The best leaders are willing to get their hands dirty in order to understand what it is like to be on the front line serving customers or working on the shop floor. What’s that? You say you’ve been in the “trenches” before? How long ago? Reflect on how long it has been and admit, even if it is just to yourself, that you may have lost touch with your workforce. Look for new ways to connect with your team and lead from the front, even if it makes you uncomfortable.
Fear of failing is a powerful deterrent and an unrelenting roadblock to achieving remarkable results. Leaders who operate in a manner to avoid the possibility of failing, will fail to reach and realize the best outcomes for their organizations and their teams. Napolean Hill wrote, “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”
Succession is going to happen in your organization whether you plan for it or not. People take other positions, retire, or quit. Unexpected turnover can generate significant capacity shortfalls, lost knowledge, and talent misalignments that disrupt or derail organizations. The organizations that execute effective succession plans fare much better than those that don’t. It is the responsibility of senior leaders, with the support of human resource professionals, to create and execute succession plans.
Delivered By: Adam Weiner, Managing Director
Adam spent 14 years in leadership roles as a Navy SEAL where he attained the rank of Lieutenant Commander, including assignments as Platoon Commander, Operations Officer, and Executive Officer. After the Navy, he worked at executive levels in the automotive industry and finance. In 2017, the governor of Michigan appointed him to the Veterans Facilities’ Board of Managers where he served for 2.5 years.
While in automotive, Adam was the Business Manager for the Vice President of Engineering at General Motors, where he managed a $3.5B budget and coalesced eight Executive Directors. After that, Adam began his career in finance as a Divisional Vice President for AIG, consulting with hundreds of financial advisors on retirement solutions. Within the financial space, he transitioned to become a financial advisor and partnered with Michigan Retirement Advisors. Working directly with individuals and families, Adam was able to increase the firm’s assets by over 25% in less than 24 months.
In 2022, Adam’s success led him to founding Freedom Financial Team where his pillars are: providing clients financial peace of mind, community philanthropy, and financial literacy. Consistent with this, Adam is a proud member of the Association of Financial Educators, a 501(c)(3) non-profit created to help with financial literacy. Adam brings this education to high-schools, colleges, and businesses in the Detroit Metro area to help demystify complexities in investing and retirement planning.
Adam’s passion is teaching mindset, character, and leadership. Alongside his teammates at Victory Strategies, you might catch him at workshop or delivering his keynote, inspiring people to Rise, Focus, and Persist!
Adam is a proud graduate of the United States Naval Academy. He is happily married, and they have three wonderful children.
Have you ever wondered what the ‘secret sauce’ is to high performing teams?
Like many leaders, I’ve pondered that very question many, many times. Operating in and having had the honor of leading high performing teams, I’ve found a few select ingredients to be vital. Such as trust and strong professional relationships. Such as deeply held shared values and a clear and unifying purpose. From what I’ve experienced, these are essential cornerstones of excellence in teams.
However, even the strongest of cornerstones can be eroded by ‘change’. And, as we all know, the only constant IS change. So, what is a team leader seeking long term high performance to do?
Try this. Experience has taught me that ownership and accountability can be outstanding countermeasures to the challenges of change. Ownership embodies initiative and determination to overcome any obstacle. Accountability brings commitment to team and teammates, and that ‘I’ve got this, you can rely on me’ mentality. In my journey, taken together these are powerful catalysts supporting consistent high performance in the face of ‘change’.
This has been a leadership lesson learned for which I owe a huge debt of thanks. As a newly minted team leader in the early years of my career, I learned first-hand the power of ownership and accountability. My executive leader - let’s call him Mike - was extremely wise, experienced, and knowledgeable, a true ‘engineer’s engineer’. He placed a strong emphasis on not only performance but also equally the long-term reliability of our designs. He was data driven, deeply experienced and excelled in asking detailed and challenging questions during our many design reviews.
Our team had deeply studied the designs of not only domestic competitors but also global competitors whose designs sometimes differed from common accepted practices in our North American market. Our challenge, as an engineering team, was to find the best practice for our designs. In our design reviews, Mike drilled deeply into our designs, asking difficult but appropriate questions, seemingly one after another, non-stop. It was extremely rigorous. Our design challenged some of the conventional wisdom of designs in the North American market and was counter to his experience. As an executive leader, Mike had to make a choice – direct us to change the design to be more conventional or trust and empower our design direction given the rigorous engineering reviews he conducted.
In retrospect, it would have been easy for Mike to micromanage and support the more commonly accepted design practice at that time, but he saw opportunity in our design to set a new, better standard and supported our approach. After explaining to our team how he reached his decision, his words still ring true to me to this day, decades later.
Those are the four magic words: ‘I’m counting on you”.
In only one short phrase he empowered us. And in doing so, ownership and accountability immediately followed. We knew our leader challenged us deeply and ultimately believed in and supported us. If you have ever experienced the restrictions of a micromanager, you know firsthand the feeling of freedom when it is truly your call, and you are being trusted to deliver success.
It has been said that the difference between managers and leaders is that managers make sure things are done right, while leaders make sure the right things are done. Mike was a true leader, and his decision was a prime example to us all. Mike trusted us. It was both the ultimate compliment and ultimate incentive at the same time. Now, it was up to us to make it happen.
It wasn’t easy. Long hours, lots of learning and continuous improvement along the way. But knowing we owned it and were accountable for its success, we pushed ourselves willingly. Discretionary time now was also devoted to the cause. We went way past ‘above and beyond’. We were on a mission.
Imagine unleashing that same energy, enthusiasm and determination on any problem or objective your team faces. It is magical to be part of, and thanks to Mike, a leadership lesson forever learned.
So, now it’s your turn. I’m counting on you.
Authored by: Jeff Boyer, Managing Director
Victory Strategies is a Veteran Owned Business.
