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Sheldon Harris: You’re really only in one business–the people business.
Guest: Sheldon Harris
Bio in a Tweet: Successful entrepreneur, business leader, and coach who draws on a lifetime of real-world experience to provide specific, actionable coaching guidance.
Key Insights:
- No matter what business you’re in, you’re really only in one business. It’s the people business. And as leaders, our success will directly correlate to how well we assemble the best team and then bring out the best in those people.
- Integrity in communication means, “I will never say anything about you that I haven’t said to you.” From a leadership perspective, the concept is, “You are never going to be wondering or guessing what I think. I won’t be talking about you behind your back. If your name is coming out of my mouth, you’re going to be in front of me.”
- The more you can push that line out on the edge of transparency and sharing, the more you’re going to find employees buying into you as a leader, and to what your company’s trying to do, and aligning their efforts with the outcomes you’re trying to achieve.
- I always say in developing leaders, learn to be a good truth teller, but be an equally good truth receiver. If you are thrown off by receiving the truth, you just aren’t going to be hearing the truth anymore.
- One of the challenges I love to give my clients is, be mindful of what percentage of your sentences in leadership communication are ending with a period or an exclamation point, as opposed to the percentage that are ending with a question mark. Often times, I find that by asking the right question we come to a much better answer than if I just went with my own idea.
- The question we’ve got to be asking ourselves is, “What am I doing to improve my skills and capabilities today, so I can be a more effective leader tomorrow?” As you seek answers to that question, it will lead you to be as diligent in developing yourself as you are in developing the people around you and the organization.
Coaching Takeaways:
- Never forget that you’re in the people business, not the product or service business.
- When in doubt, err on the side of too much transparency, not too little.
- Ask more questions and make fewer statements. Better questions lead to better answers.
Transcript: Download the full transcript here.
