The Best Leadership Presentation I Have Ever Seen
You can believe that, in my travels over 30+ years in business, I have seen hundreds of presenters discussing hundreds of topics. A fair number of the presentations were on the subject of leadership. You may ask, “Do any of them really stand out?” Yes, of course! There was Capt. Mike Abrashoff talking about turning around the worst U.S. Navy ship and making it the best. But the best I’ve ever experienced was delivered by our own Mike Flentje, a former U.S. Navy submarine commander (be sure to ask Mike F. what submariners call surface ships!).
Please tune in this week as Wayne does a short review of Mike’s two-day leadership course and details the one key slide that best encapsulates the concepts Mike teaches to Boot Camp attendees.
For more information on The Contractor Business Boot Camp, please contact Charlotte at ckopp@familybusinessinstitute.com.
Hello, everyone. This is Wayne Rivers at The Family Business Institute. Thanks for tuning in.
This week, I want to talk about the best leadership presentation I ever saw. Not so much in the last year, but in the prior
years, I was speaking at and attending lots and lots of trade shows and conferences, mostly construction in the last few
years. But prior to that, I was going to all kinds of industry events, and they would always bring in these high-powered
speakers and some are wonderful. Some were awful, some were adequate. But I was thinking about the best leadership
presentation I ever saw, and I have to say it was presented by Mike Flentje, our guy in The Family Business Institute in the
context of Boot Camp. Don't forget about Boot Camp, coming up this October. The 21st is the start date.
Mike does Construction Business Leadership and it's a two-day course. There's one day early on, in series of classes, and
then there's one later on towards the end of the course. And we don't have two days here, you'll be happy to know. So, I
just want to boil it down to one slide that Mike presents that I think captures the entire two-day leadership course, as well
as anything else. In a second, we'll put the slide up here. And if you want the slide sent to you via email, just put that in
the comments and we'll get you the slide so you can utilize it as well. Now, Mike makes a great point. You cannot motivate
people. I believe in that a hundred percent. You can't motivate people to do their jobs. They have to be self-motivated. You can, however, inspire and influence them. And Mike talks about discretionary effort.
Everybody shows up at work every day, prepared to deliver some amount of effort. It might be 50% of their best or 32%
of their best or 79% of their best, but you want to get them up to a hundred percent. If it's 79%, there's 21% discretionary
effort that you can inspire for other people. Mike here has a prescription for how you inspire other people. And the first
thing is engagement. You've got to engage with your people. This means more than just talking about work and talking
about what they need to do today in this week. There's more to a human relationship than just task after task after task.
Leadership by walking around is a great, extremely effective tool. Our own John Mayes does this so well. I know it's a
challenge for him because like many of us he's an introvert, but it's a great tool. And I know that in the Boot Camp, from
the Boot Camp attendees, when they go back into their companies and they begin to practice leadership by walking
around, it's kind of a revelation for them. They are able to build relationships and just check in with people. It's such a
simple technique, I can't believe that we don't all do it naturally, but we don't. So, leadership by walking around.
Recognition and challenges are key leadership tools. They're key engagement tools. People want to be recognized. It used
to be...when I was a kid, you went to work, you showed up, you did your job, you kept your mouth shut, and you got your
paycheck. Well, today's workers aren't like that. They want to know that they're part of something bigger than themselves. They want to know that their personal mission, whether it's written or not, align somehow with the corporate mission.
And so, engagement comes down to often just recognition and appreciation. So, one of our core values is appreciation.
We start off our meetings every single week with appreciations. And it gives you a chance to back up from the drive, drive,
drive, drive, drive, and say, "Wait a minute. I really appreciate Neha helping me put together these videos." It just kind of
starts your meeting in a much different way, but people want recognition and appreciation. Why shouldn't we give that
to them? It's so easy to do. Construction is go, go, go all the time, but it's not so difficult to take a step back and appreciate
your other folks.
And then, Mike talks about servant leadership. You'll see in the graphic this really neat timeline so to speak. Leadership
and engagement leads to inspiration or as some leadership gurus would say "influence", which gets more of their
discretionary effort delivered to the company, which leads to, guess what? Peak performance. If you take the whole Boot
Camp, two days on leadership, and you put it into one place, I think Mike has done a terrific job of putting it into this slide.
I'd like to hear what you have to say about it. If you want the slide sent to you, just put it in the comments or email me, and we'll get that done. Thank you. This is Wayne Rivers at The Family Business Institute.
