How Thoughtful Leaders Create Meaningful Impact Every Day | RR361

Hello. Hello. Mike Desjardins, welcome to the

show.

Thanks, Janice, pleasure to be here.

I am so excited to have this conversation with

you, Mike. I was just for my audience's sake, I want to share

say that I was a guest on Mike's show just recently, and it was a

pleasure to be interviewed by him. He's a pro and does a Super

Podcast, so I had to do my homework a little bit before I I

brought this together. But welcome to the show, and I want

to just jump in and start here with this question out of

nowhere, if leadership had nothing to do with titles or

results. How would you define it based on how you live it day to

day,

as if it had nothing to do with titles or

results? I mean, I think the simplest thing I would say is

that if you are a leader and you turn around and nobody's

following you, then I might question that title.

Yes,

you know, I think that the reality is that

you're only a leader because there are people that want to go

on a journey with you, and if you don't have people that trust

and respect you, they're not going to want to follow the

direction that you set. And I think, you know, a lot of

leaders get really focused on, you know, what's vision and

strategy, and, you know, they want to think about all of the

sort of sexier parts of leadership. And I think that

emotional intelligence, things like self awareness, empathy,

social skills, self regulation and motivation are far more

important. In fact, I would say that those are the concrete

foundation over which you build every other part of your

leadership. And if you can imagine building a building, and

you're building it on a shaky sand Foundation, and then you

keep building floor on floor, learning more and more skills,

but then they don't work very well, and you're like, but I've

learned all these things, and I'm doing all the techniques,

but It's shaky. It's because that concrete foundation of

emotional intelligence is actually tripping the leader up.

So yeah, I would say that that's the primary thing that that I

would look for, and that we look for in leaders, because once

they have that, then you can teach them a lot of other things

on a very strong foundation.

That's beautiful. I love that. It's true, though,

that there's some things you can't teach them so but there's

a lot that you can if they have that strong base to begin with.

Well.

And the

wonderful thing about emotional intelligence,

like we're born with our intelligence, it's like, maybe

it'll go up maximum 10 points, was the latest research over our

lifetime. We may think we get smarter or our IQ is increasing,

but the reality of what's happening is that we're having a

lot of lived experiences, and when you take intelligence and

you multiply it by lived experiences, you get wisdom. Now

not just the experiences you have to reflect on the

experiences. If you don't reflect, you don't learn, you

don't get the wisdom. So

that's so good, you know why this is crazy, but

I my husband and I play bridge.

Yeah,

I'm whispering now because

yeah,

to hear me. Okay, not really, but we played bridge

last night, and we did online with other couples, and we

didn't do very well, and sometimes we do really well, and

sometimes we just and we just come back from vacation and we

were tired, but he wanted to play. I said, Okay, let's play.

And we didn't do very well, and he just wants to be done with

it. And I say, No, we can learn so much from why we didn't do

well. Let's go through the hands and see because it was our

defensive play, because we didn't get a lot of hands, and

therefore we were in defensive mode the whole time, which we're

usually good at, but for some reason, we didn't do well. So

let's go back and look them over.

There

isn't just

tonight.

There isn't a sports team alive that doesn't

watch its own game tapes, right?

I know,

and they're looking for, they're looking for

the errors that occurred, and trying to figure out how the

other team was able to take advantages of weaknesses. So

you're that's the exact you've got an intelligence at bridge,

but you've got learned, lived experiences. And if you just

stopped there, it's not good enough. You have to do the

debrief, where you got to reflect on what happens, and

then you can actually become wiser. In this case, that bridge

thankfully, emotional intelligence is actually

something you can learn. So throughout our entire life, our

emotional intelligence is growing, but you have to be very

deliberate about it for it to grow. So if someone thinks

they're low in empathy or low in self awareness, these are all

things that can be taught. There's lots of habits and

practices you can put in place to actually grow it.

So this, this kind of connects to something

that I saw on, I think it was on your website. I'm not going to

quote the quote exactly, but it was a big quote on the page, and

it was, it was about how intentional you are in the way.

Build and nurture relationships, both with your clients and your

team.

Yeah.

So for those who don't know who you are, yeah,

can you tell us a little bit about the work that you do today

and and who you love to serve?

Sure, yeah. And I am very intentional about

relationships in all areas of my life, not just through a from

from a business lens. Yeah, so I got this business. It's 26 years

old this year. It's called Virtus, and we're certified B

Corp. We have been since 2018 we

noticed that that's pretty special. Yeah,

we just recertified, and we were at

108.4 points now, and when we first certified, we're at 83.2

points. And anyone who's listening, who's in the B Corp

world knows how hard it is to get even like point one or point

two of a point. So it's been quite the journey of us really

looking at our corporate citizenship and how we show up

in the world, you know, people, planet, profits and so, yeah, we

do leadership development and strategic planning for medium to

large enterprise organizations across North America. And yeah,

that's pretty much it. It's every level of leader, from

executive team, VPS, directors, managers, high potentials and

then strategies. We usually work with companies for very long

time, helping to guide their strategies, which sometimes is

means a lot of growth. And of course, if you're growing really

quickly, you need your leaders to also be able to keep up with

that growth. Thus leadership development supports them,

having lots of succession candidates internally in the

organization. So that's day to day. That's what I do. And then

I've got this podcast, the mic method, which you were on, yeah,

and that's kind of something fun. I think we're closing in on

100 episodes now. That was something started year and a bit

ago. So that's me,

yeah, no, that's great. You also say that. You

say something about elevating leadership, embracing life's

joys, and making a meaningful impact every day.

Yeah, I

love that. Can you unpack what that really

means to you?

Yeah? I mean, you know our purpose as the

business is to make a difference in the lives of others by

creating respectful, empathetic and productive leaders who are

aware of their impact on the world. And you know that last

statement of being about being aware of their impact. I always

say to leaders, the higher they get in the organization, the

bigger your boat gets, and the bigger your boat gets, the

bigger wake that the boat creates behind it. And as a

leader, you have to remember that there's all these boats

that are supposed to be following in your wake, and if

you don't turn around every now and then and see whether or not

you're throwing water over their bows and swamping them. You

don't even know how it's going, and that's where you know,

soliciting feedback from your team is really important. A lot

of leaders strive to give great feedback, like they want to

learn how to be great at giving it, but they forget that just

simply asking for feedback is one way that they can really

improve as a leader, and that's that way of sort of turning

around and asking the boats behind you, like, how am I doing

as this big super tanker with this giant wake, you know,

trying to point us in the right direction, and am I going too

fast? Am I going too slow? Am I causing too much turbulence

behind me that's making it much harder for you to move your boat

through the water. So that analogy really, really fits to

help leaders understand the concept of soliciting feedback

and how they can become more self aware around how they're

actually perceived and showing up in the world. And I can talk

in a bit, if you'd like, about some simple techniques that they

can use to actually solicit that feedback.

Sure that that would be great. I it's funny. I

was watching something last night on TV, a drama, medical

drama. It was 10 o'clock. I was bitching and the the what was

his title? I don't remember, but he was running this department,

the internal medicine department and someone, and he was new at

the job, and he actually had been part of the hospital

management team, but he, for some reason, came out of that

and went back to his roots because he wanted to get hands

on again. But as a new leader there, he told his staff that,

you know, the door was open and he could, they could come to Him

at any time, and a girl came to him, who was a nurse who had an

issue that she was very upset about, and he kind of pushed

back on her, because he couldn't really it was about somebody

else, another doctor, that she was complaining about, and he

couldn't say anything because it was confidential about what had

happened. So her superior came in and stood up for her and the

and the minute she said, what she how she was doing that he

came back with, I can totally understand how you feel, and I

understand and he was so empathetic, and he was doing

what he's supposed to do. Instead of just jumping in, and

I realized that I noticed that so much more. Now, whether it's

on TV or in real life, you notice it when people do the

right thing or say the right thing or acknowledge,

acknowledge, you acknowledge what you've said, right and that

emotional intelligence is so important.

Well, I think a lot of times when we're in

conversation and people are in conflict, they think that they

have to think about whether they agree or disagree with the other

person. That's where the mindset goes. And the mindset that I

would implore people to try is to think, no, I'm listening just

purely for understanding, not for agreement. I want to

understand the world view and understand that other person's

perspective. Now, I can still completely disagree with what

they've said, but first I've got to seek to understand it. One of

the easy ways you can do that is to repeat back approximately

what the other person said.

Now,

if they were giving you very specific

details, you'd have to be more precise in your language, but if

it's just, you know, just the act of, kind of summing up what

somebody says will allow them to feel heard. Now, when you share

your perspective, they are more likely to listen to you because

they've had an opportunity to be heard. They're now more open to

what you have to say, even if it's something that they

disagree with. And again, all you're seeking is understanding

at that point and the amount of conflict that can be dealt with

in advance just by two people willing to just hear each other,

not agree, but just hear each other first. It's it's quite

common that, you know, I've got position A and somebody else has

got position B, but by just simply hearing each other,

there's like a third position C that pops up out of nowhere that

neither of us thought of as a solution or as a way forward,

but because we were willing to hear each other, all of a

sudden, this other option, just like miraculously appears.

So I'm curious, how do you find when you're

working with your clients. Do you notice when people are are

more receptive to learning that skill? Or do you see people

initially with their backup, because that's the position

they've always held, and so you have to really pull them off the

you know, pull them over to a new position.

Well, the funny thing is, like the facilitators

and the coaches don't even need to call it out, because it's so

obvious to everybody else in the room. So say, We're they say

there was a role play happening and and there was, we'd always

put a third person in to be a witness to it, to watch what's

Yes, okay, and

then they're taking notes, right? So they

would debrief it for the other two people, they're not a

leadership facilitator. They're a leader in the program, right?

But just that time they happen to be the person observing and

taking notes, right? They can call it out like anybody can.

Any adult can look at a situation even most like into

I'd say teen years, kids can, or even younger can call it out and

say that person's being defensive and not listening

right like it doesn't take, doesn't take an adult emotional

intelligence to know when a person is just is reacting as

opposed to thoughtfully responding and and so, yeah,

it's, I would say that it's a it's when people's ego gets

attached to an idea, then they are more likely to be reactive.

When their emotional content is quite high, they're more likely

to be reactive. It's why having a disagreement over text message

doesn't work, because it strips

out the context

the emotions, like, think about how much we

have here, like, we can see each other, right? So we can see our

reactions, all that's gone in a text message, and it's a large

part of communication. It's like, sometimes 75 plus percent

of the communication, or more is just the viewing the other

person. So we say, like, text is the worst. A phone call is one

step better. But if you can get on video or in person, that is

the gold standard for trying to deal with any conflictual type

of back and forth, you'll get to resolution faster. Now, with

using the skills of being willing to listen for

understanding to the person before reacting to what it is

that they've had to say,

you just took me back to when I used to teach

customer service skills back in the day at the telephone

company, and I was a trainer, and I used to Teach as part of

the day long workshop was listening, listening skills. And

I always found that fascinating because, and to this day, people

I asked this question, they don't know what's the what's an

acronym of the word listen? Do you know?

No, I've never heard that one

silent. I.

Okay,

an anagram. Sorry, not anagram, yeah, an

anagram,

anagram. Silent,

silent. And that's when I first read that in

a book about listening. I was like, blown away. These things

aren't accidents, you know, like, yeah, yeah, you have to

listen, right? So, yeah. So that was a fun thing that you

reminded me of. So I in my conversation with you on your

podcast, we were talking about nurturing relationships and

about appreciation and all of that, and I learned some very

cool things from you that you're known for thoughtful,

personalized gestures for your clients. Where did that

philosophy come from, and how has it impacted your business?

It's, it's from a very old book. It's from a

very old book called swim with sharks.

Oh, yeah, which is

Harvey McKay, from the McKay envelope company.

I don't even it's at least 40

years. Is that the exact title?

Yeah, it's, it's

how to swim with the No,

I think it's, I think it's either how to swim

sharks, how to swim with sharks without getting eating again

alive. Yeah. And the concept in there is, you can be a shark,

you can be shark or bait, or you can be shark proof.

Love

it, but, but deep, deeper into the book,

there's this concept that he brings out about the McKay 66

and what it is, is it 66 questions that you can ask

another person, and if you have the answers to those 66

questions, you know them better than every single person in

their life, including their siblings and their parents and

so and their spouse. And so it's a very cool framework. And

Harvey's thing, he was very good at building relationships. It's

how he built his whole business. And you think he's selling

envelopes, like, how is that related? Right? But he had all

these really cool techniques. And I read that book when I was

18 a minute ago, and I decided to start to put some of those

techniques into place. They're very intentional, and they take

a little bit of work. But that then led to when we got this

business going to a discussion around how we wanted to

recognize people, and so we're just really good at in listening

for cues about important events in people's lives, and then

coming up with something unique that fits for them, that fits

either their hobby or sports team they like, you know,

something for their kids. Like, we're, we're just, that's just

how we roll here. But it's also just how I've been since, you

know, at a very young age, and it really matters to people like

I think, you know, everybody sends, you know, their clients,

gift baskets and stuff at Christmas, right? So we get to

get a ton of those every year, and which is great, and I'm

super grateful for them. What I find really interesting is when

you can send something that's unattached to a holiday but is

attached to either a meaningful event to the client, or to

somebody that's in my world, and for it to be personalized as

well, something that's unique, that that shows that you

listened, shows that you listened to them,

and

that you were paying attention and and How thoughtful of you

well.

And it's, it's, the thing is, you don't have to

ask a lot of questions. Like, if you read the Harvey McKay 6066

the questions are like, where did you go to college? Where did

you go to elementary school? How many

know how that's translated now somewhat, if you

look really closely at somebody's LinkedIn profile,

oh yeah, there's so much about or their

Instagram, like Facebook, there's so many ways to find

out about

I don't trust Instagram. Oh, you don't

Okay,

well, it's very pretty in most cases. And you

don't know if that's the real thing in some people's cases,

but that's more being old, I guess. Yeah, I

think it's more that if you saw them canoeing in

more than one photo,

well, yeah, different

locations, it's like, oh, okay, the person likes

canoeing,

of course,

the coolest thing that's out in canoeing

right now, right? So it doesn't take very long to jump online or

even ask GBT, what's the coolest thing in canoeing, and then find

a gift that's super unique to send to them that maybe even

their close friends hadn't even considered sending to them. So

it's not it's not a lot of work, but that's the thought process.

The other thing is, even just articles, like I text people, I

fall I use Flipboard for this, but I follow a ton of blogs. And

if ever I come across an article or a blog post or like a YouTube

video or whatever, as I'm flipping I'll look at it and

I'll say, oh, you know who would really like this? Like, my

mentor loves motorcycles and cars, right? So if there's

anything cool coming up about motorcycles and cars, I'm like,

Oh, I thought of him. So I I'll flip it over to him, right?

Another one of my mentors is really big into create creating

things in art. And he's also written five detective novels

that are published. So, you know, they're all set in Kauai.

In Hawaii, like so, you know, the more, the more that you're

just sort of paying attention and and asking questions just a

plain curiosity. What's your dog's name? What kind of dog is

it? Right? Like these things, just sort people will share a

ton of information if you're curious, and you just ask, and

it's just normal human conversation where, I think in a

lot of meetings, people are like, we're here to meet with

this agenda, and we're going to cover all these things. We don't

let any meetings start in our company until we do a proper

check in about how everybody's doing, what happened on the

weekend, what they did this morning, and we set the tone for

the meeting. So my first meeting this morning, we said, How's

everybody doing? And they said, how are you? And I'm like, I'm

great. I said, I got on the peloton this morning, which was

super fun. I needed to move our car because driveway is getting

or the garage is getting power washed. Needed to get the dog

out because my wife was going to her exercise class. But like,

everything's done. I did it all. I'm here. I'm ready to roll. So

what that does is, instead of somebody then replying next and

saying, like, how is your morning, they're not going to

say good, because now that feels trite, so they're going to say,

Oh, well, I'm actually the client. Was like, I'm actually

in Toronto. My husband's doing an MBA right now, so I'm here

for the week so that I can hang out with him while he's doing

it. But I'm also learning a lot from it. And I'm like, Oh,

that's so cool, right? And so, you know, it's then, because I

mentioned that my dog was sleeping on the chair behind me,

then the other client was like, Oh, I've got a dog too. We just

got her in January. And so, you know, that type of personal

connection will take us sometimes. I mean, my record is

55 minutes of an hour long thing. And the client, the

client, said to me, Oh, my God, I have a meeting in five

minutes. And my job there, what in the meeting was to present to

her a quarter million dollar proposal, and I hadn't done it

yet. And so she said to me, is it everything we talked about

last time? I'm like, it's everything we talked about, the

prices as we've agreed. I've just written it all out. She's

like, then I'm good to go. Just send it to me and I'll sign it.

Love it.

And so I tell that story to the team, because

I think a lot of people would be anxious in that situation,

thinking, I gotta, I gotta present this proposal. But the

human side of us wants to work with people we like, trust and

respect.

That's a great story. Fabulous story. Yeah,

exactly because she trusts you enough to to know you're going

to do what you say you're going to do. And that, to me, is my,

you know, my thing you got to do what you say you're going to do,

and more probably. But, yeah, that's beautiful. Yeah, did you?

Did you know that you'd taken that the or you were just both

just drawn into the conversation? Yeah,

we were just drawn into the conversation and

then lost track of time.

Yeah,

we were on Zoom and and it was, it was the

client that actually said, Oh my god, I have to go in five

minutes.

Has

she been a client before?

No, not

a new client.

Yeah,

I love it,

but we got to know each other through this

process, right? Of putting this deal together and and we hadn't

worked with the company or worked with her and so, and

originally she said, we're probably going to have to go to

RFP, but then we spent nine months getting to know each

other, which is why we were chatting like this, right? Yeah,

and this was the day for me to present this proposal,

so, like,

I literally pulled it up on the screen, and

I'm like, it's everything we talked about. And she's like,

okay, great,

I love it.

And then we both got to our meetings early.

We didn't even take five minutes to do it. And she and I laugh

about that, and we both tell the story, because we're like, well,

at the end of the day, like she and I and our teams were going

to work together, and we built up this trust over time. And so

was it important for us to go through all the nuances of

everything? No, she could read it when I sent it to her, so,

you know, she was fine with that. And it was everything that

I said it was going to be in there, and the team had put

everything together. And so, yeah, it got signed, and we

started the work, and had a wonderful relationship with that

client. They were big hotel client chain, and then they

ended up buying a whole bunch more hotels. And so then we

ended up, you know, growing the program, and went on for a

number of years. So yeah,

that's a great story. So let's go back to what

you offered to talk about. Oh,

yeah,

yeah, yeah,

soliciting feedback thing, yeah. Okay.

Well, so one of the things is, we tell leaders, you know, you

lead, solicit feedback, and they're like, so like, how am I

doing? And, like, No, that won't get an answer. So what? There's

two simple ways, two simple ways. So one simple way is to

say, What am I doing? Too much of what am I doing? Not enough

of and what's just right, and how I'm showing up as a leader

for you,

Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and baby bear, baby

bear, yeah. And what's interesting is that

people will sometimes not respond right away, because

they're kind of like, what are you going to do with this when I

tell you sort of thing? And so it's some. Times, takes a while

of asking that question before people give you a meaningful a

meaningful response. The key is that you then have to repeat

back what they said, like write down or type, type out what they

said. And then you can then say, Can I or can I not do something

about that? Because maybe they've given you feedback

about, hey, I want to have our meetings, our one on ones at

eight o'clock in the morning. It would be better for me. And

you're like, and the leaders like, I have to drive my

daughter to school, so I can't, but I could do it at 845 Would

that be okay? And they're like, Yeah, that's great. So so, you

know, it doesn't mean you have to exactly do the thing. It's

just feedback, right? It's like, wine tasting. You can, kind of

like taste it, swirl around together, spit it out, or you

can swallow it. Is your choice, right? The other way is you can,

you can say, hey, in our relationship in terms of how I'm

doing as a leader, what's working well, what needs

improvement and what's missing in terms of how I'm showing up

for you. And I put these questions into my one on ones,

and I ask the leaders, I do one on ones weekly with the leaders

here, and I ask them every week those questions. And sometimes

they're like, I don't have anything. I'm like, okay, cool.

And sometimes they're like, Yeah, this worked. This is

working. Really

leaders in your company,

yeah, the people my direct reports, sorry,

yeah, yeah, yeah. So we teach leaders those two methodologies

because they're so easy to remember. You just pick the one

that you like. But the thing is, you have to consistently ask

those questions, and then you've got to be willing to respond and

take action. Now you might say, oh, I need to sit with that. And

then come back next time you're together to say, Hey, I've

thought about it, your feedback, and this is what I think I can

do, you know? So it's not like you have to react in the moment.

You just need to be responsive in some way. You can't just let

it, can't just let the feedback hang. And one of the one of the

best compliments I've gotten from direct reports is the thing

I like about giving you feedback, Mike is that you

listen, you take it in, and then you actually respond and do

something about it. Then you come back to me and say, Hey,

I've been trying to do this differently because I know it's

important to you, how's that going for you? And, like, you

even check back to see how it's going for me with your change in

behavior. So that's the kind of like, that's the like, secret

little extra sauce, if you're going to put sprinkles on, is to

come back after you've practiced it for a while and ask your

direct report, like, how am I doing? I'm trying to do this

differently. Like, how are you finding this change in me? So

that they can give you positive reinforcement that the changes

that you're making are actually improving the relationship that

the two of you have

totally and you, I think you probably answered

this question already, because this is what I was going to say,

have, what have you learned about trust when it comes to

giving your team the autonomy you give them in choosing those

gifts back when we were talking about, you know, if somebody's

got an idea to send their client, they're working with a

special gift, and you give them autonomy, pretty much to to make

that decision, those decisions. But as you're doing this

feedback thing, which I think is brilliant, you're building your

the trust between you so well. I mean, I would think that you

know you're not getting awards from major things that say this

is the best company to work for, but it could be the best company

to work for, right? Yeah,

exactly.

Yeah. I mean, those are the things that help

build the culture that makes people want to stay right

to answer your question around the gifts. The

the rule of thumb is, if it's under 250 bucks, I don't need to

approve it, so you just do it and let me know, not because I

want to approve it, because I just want to know, in case the

client writes me, thank you so much for I want to know what it

is we say,

of

course, right? Of course. But, I

mean, I'll give you an example. Like, one of our

clients was going on, she just got married, and she was going

away on her honeymoon. And so the person on my team said,

like, where are you going? And she's like, well, I'm going to

Tofino. And she's like, Oh, cool. I love Tofino. Where are

you and your new husband going to be staying? And she's like,

Oh, we're staying at the Long Beach Lodge. And she's like, Oh,

that's what's beautiful property, right? And then that

was it. This is maybe like months, three months before she

got married, and she was just excited that she managed to book

the Long Beach Lodge. And so we didn't say another thing about

it, but what we did was when she and her husband arrived in the

hotel room, there was a bottle of champagne and chocolate

dipped strawberries sitting in the hotel room with a card from

us saying, congratulations on your wedding. Have an amazing

honeymoon. Love your friends at Virtus. And she called us and

was like, I didn't get anything from the company I work for, but

I'm your client. And I don't even know how you pulled this

off. I don't even know how you know, I was staying at the Long

Beach Lodge, but this is the nicest thing. There was nothing

else. We didn't get anything else on the honeymoon. That was

the only thing we received, was from, from your team. And you

know, I think the bottle of champagne was, I think it was

150 bucks, maybe. And the strawberries were another 50 so

for like, 200 bucks? Yeah, the client, the client and the

person that was getting married were part of a $300,000 contract

for us. So do I need to approve 200 bucks?

Yes,

you know, right for 300,000 no like and that

story, I'm sure, got told by the bride to buy an umpteen number

of people, right? So we don't do it for that. We don't do it

because it's like a marketing route. We do it because we care

about people. We're great to be in relationship with. One of the

things our clients get to experience is that our team and

their team become a team, and it's so much fun. Like my

favorite compliment from our clients, one of them said to in

a meeting recently, she's like, I know our meeting was supposed

to be half an hour, and I know we're closing in on an hour. I

don't want to do anything else on my schedule today, so I'm

dragging out our conversation because the meetings with your

team are the most fun I get to have all week. And I know why,

because the people on our team are super fun to be in

relationship with. So it's something we hire for. We hire

for people that are great to be in relationship, that are great

at collaboration, great at empathy, and they care a lot. So

they do things like sending champagne and strawberries, like

another client was was off on a baby moon, and the client had a

NFL team that she really loved, so we bought a tiny NFL hat and,

like a, like, a baby onesie, yeah, and a bunch of other swag

that was all baby related, but it was all for her very

favorite, I think was Kansas City very favorite football

team, and we sent that to her before her mat leave.

I love it. Yeah, it's fun to be creative and

things like that. That's That's amazing.

Yeah,

so many businesses fall into being

transactional. What's your advice for leaders who want to

shift towards more meaningful, relationship driven

interactions?

I think the first thing is to at the very

beginning of the relationship, before they're even a client, to

not thinking about closing the deal. Because if the if the if

the company is just focused on closing the deal, then it really

feels transactional to the client. That's not great. You

want to think about this is the beginning of a long term

relationship. And if I think about, hey, you know, with our

clients, that like one of the longest standing clients, I

think we're on year 18. So imagine if I didn't know that,

right, and we're starting, and I treated it like transactional

and now we've been in business together for 18 years. Like it

would be weird. And so I think the first thing is, as a leader,

is to think, hey, just like I might work with the people that

I work with every day, and I should probably get to know them

and know more about them as human beings. The same thing is

true about our clients, that we could be in business together,

hopefully for a long time. When you think about the cost of

acquisition of a new client, it's very high. But then flip it

around to the client, the client has a very high cost of

switching. So if you're their partner and they have to switch,

there can be quite a high cost for them to switch. So both of

you should have, you know, an incentive to creating a long

term relationship. The other reason is that there's bumps in

the roads in relationships with clients, like stuff happens

either they make a mistake, or we make mistake. It doesn't

actually happen that often, but when it does, the stronger the

relationship you have, the easier it is for you to come up

with a solution that works for everybody, and the less does it

feel adversarial. If it's transactional, then when bumps

in the road come along, all of a sudden it feels adversarial, and

you're so well the contract says this, and the contract says

that, I can tell you right now, if you devolve to the level of

what the contract says, the relationship has been broken for

a while. And if instead you say, Yeah, I know we did this

contract, but like, also, what's the right thing to do? And you

get a couple of people together and they have that Relational

Approach, then all of a sudden it's like, imagine there's, I

mean, if people are watching this on a video, then you'll see

my hands doing this, but if you're listening to this

podcast, imagine that there's two people on either side of a

boardroom table, and in the center is the problem, and

you're batting the problem Back and forth, right? That's how

most of these situations kind of devolve. So instead, imagine

you're both sitting on the same side of the table and the

problems in the center of the table, and now you're both

looking at it trying to figure out how to solve the problem,

but you're not competing, because you're not smashing the

problem back and forth, right? You're just both sitting on

this. Same time of the table contemplating how you're going

to fix it. That's the difference between relational leadership

and transactional leadership. And so who would want to be in

the first position I described, where you're batting it back and

forth, right? It doesn't sound icky. It sounds like it's full

of conflict, right? It sounds like it could damage the

relationship further, no matter what the outcome is, where the

relational approach will most likely strengthen the

relationship.

I love it. Yeah. It sounds so simplistic and and

easy, but people make things like that very complicated.

Yeah. Okay, let's just switch to lightning, lightening it up a

little bit, but my first question isn't quite as light as

the other one, but I feel like I have to ask it, because we've

talked about, well, it is, but we've talked about it, and it's

my favorite thing, is curiosity and and you say it very easily

as well as I do. You just have to be curious. You just have to

ask the questions. Lot of people aren't right,

yeah.

And my question for you is that I ask a lot of

my clients is, do you think that curiosity is innate or learned?

And part two is, what are you most curious about these days?

I Okay, so this is a great question. I think

that curiosity is innate, and anybody who doesn't believe me,

just go find a toddler and bring up any topic, and then see how

many Whys you get back, especially at like

five six,

yeah, five to seven years old. See how many

Whys you get back to a point where you're like, I don't know

how to answer that last why, right? So I think we're all born

with innate curiosity. I think schools are doing a better job

today than they did in the past of helping to foster that

curiosity, but I think for a couple generations, it was sort

of beaten out of us in school, Curiosity is absolutely

something that people can learn. I think today we would call it a

growth mindset, but that sounds like an overly complicated way

of saying, just be more curious in life. Yeah,

just ask questions.

Yeah. And I think, you know, innately, we

think our ego tells us we should have an opinion about

everything, and we should then make a statement about it. And I

think I would flip the script, which instead is to say, you

know, why not just ask more questions instead? And when

somebody gives you an answer like, get more curious and ask

them the next question, there's always, like, another question

that you I

agree. I agree.

Yeah, like,

yeah. Although you see one of my daughters will

say, Mom, stop asking questions. You ask too many questions.

Well, here's the thing, you can reply to your

daughter questions. Tell you that I care.

Yeah, I know,

because you know, the act of asking a

question is opening up a possibility for the other person

to share their knowledge with you. And and Plato has this

wonderful quote. I can't remember the exact quote, but

basically, it's like, you can't learn anything while you're

speaking. Yeah, so, right. So if you want to learn, you've got to

be be willing to ask questions, and you've got to be willing to

look dumb sometimes, and looking dumb is really just saying,

like, I don't know about this subject, so I'm just curious. I

don't want to learn from you. You think you're looking dumb,

but the other person actually feels great about their ability

to share their knowledge with you, so they're not thinking

about you. They're just feeling great about the fact that they

can share with you. That's that's what their experience is.

On the other side,

beautiful. Okay, so how Owen, what are you most

curious about these days?

I'm more curious. I'm most curious right

now about the move. There's sort of three parts to AI. There's AI

that is big data. So we have a lot of data sets, and you're and

right now, we use a lot of report writers and reporting

systems to analyze that data. I'm really curious to see how

business systems can shift and change, and leaders can start

thinking about using AI for large data sets, as opposed to

Excel spreadsheets, for instance, like for instance,

chat, GPT and Claude are both, can both be embedded into Excel,

and Gemini is already embedded into Google Sheets. So the

technology is there to do these things. And I think the other

one is using AI to build out systems.

So what I'm curious about right now, yeah,

and so you'll hear a lot right now about open

claw. You'll hear a lot about Claude co work, and those tools

are, they're sometimes called a genetic that, basically they're

like AI agents. And so what you're doing is you're building

a business system that makes something really efficient, but

it's something you do all the time. And so you want an AI to

do this thing that we might have purchased software to do in the

past. And then the third part of it is AI relative to to like the

normal prompting right where you go into chat, GPT or Claude, and

then you like. Type in a request back to you and the if leaders

aren't already using AI every single day, I think they're

missing, missing on everything, like I would say, to start as a

leader, to start your day and think, What can I get done with

AI today? And the thing is, you don't even have to know how to

use it, because you literally can go to chat GPT and say, I

don't know how to do the following the task.

Yeah, yeah,

using AI,

yeah.

And then the AI

will

tell you how to do the thing. So a lot of people

like, I'm not sure of the perfect prompt. Like, we'll then

ask the AI to tell you how to do it. Yeah, I've even gone through

a whole thing with AI and then said, hey, now that you know the

outcome I was trying to shoot for. What should I have asked

you? Like, 10 minutes ago, we should have just said this. And

I'm like, Yeah, okay, perfect. Well, now I know right for the

future we use, so we use a shared team GPT, or chat GPT. We

use lots of different AIS, but we use notebook, notebook LM, we

use Gemini, we use Claude, and we use chat GPT here with chat

GBT, we have a team version. So what it enables us to do is

share projects where we're all working on something together,

and we can all build off each other's prompts and each other's

work. And then we've also started creating gpts, which we

use externally, which people can then use. But I would say that's

the thing I'm most curious about, and spend most of my time

contemplating is how leaders need to adapt, how they show up

as a leader in an AI environment on a daily basis, how they need

to be thinking about business processes, to ship the systems

by using agents, and then on the third case, how do they think

about large data sets? And and the person who taught me this

framework is Rob lAmore, who's the the VP of it at Cactus Club,

and he did a presentation describing this brilliantly. And

I'm like, yeah, those are the three things that we need to be

talking about as leaders. So, yeah,

that's good. Well, this has been fascinating.

A couple of quick questions I wanted to ask you for sure. How

do you mostly get your information these days? Do you

read? Do you watch videos? Do you listen? Which is your go to

I still I read. I'm a prolific reader, so I love

reading. I also love listening to audiobooks. It just depends

on what the topic is. If it's something that I know I'm going

to need to take a lot of notes on, then I probably not use an

audio book. Yeah? Because I tend to listen to audio books while

I'm walking the dog or walking around downtown Vancouver.

So do you read novels as well as Yeah,

I do. Yeah. I love, I love spy novels. That's

my genre. So read novels. I read business books and I real read

books that are more on the like, like stoicism, like philosophy

and personal development type work stoicism be the one that I

study the most, I would say. And then I watch YouTube videos,

because there's so much knowledge on YouTube, it's like

anything I want to know how to do some smarty pants has

produced a video about it, so might as well just go watch

that. And then I actually use chat GBT as my learning tool,

like all the time, because it is so incredible. And if you

haven't used voice mode yet, on chat GPT or on Claude, it's

basically just turn on voice mode and you just talk back and

forth. I

know, right?

You can interrupt it, and it stops and

corrects itself. And so I have these massive conversations

going on, right using AI, and it's really helping me to learn.

And then I learned from people. I learned from really smart

people. Because at the end of the day, I think a lot of

business leaders will think, what's the problem, and how do I

solve it?

Yeah,

that's not the order. The order is, what's the

problem and who already knows how to do this, or who can help

me fix this?

Because you don't have to go deep as deep anymore.

Why would you do the how? If everybody else

already knows how to do or somebody else already knows how

to do it, just skip the house Step. Go straight to who and

think about who can help you with it.

That's too good. It's too good. I did want to ask

one closing question,

please,

if there's one thing that you hope that leaders take away

about building relationships and making an impact, what would it

be? Oops,

one thing I would want them to take away

that leaders spend a lot of time, or some leaders will spend

a lot of time. I'm going to use another boat analogy, if that's

okay, we'll spend a lot of. I'm worried about the boat, right?

They're like, I'm the boat. So I need to go get an MBA, which is

to get a new coat of paint and a new engine. And like, you know,

I need to be constantly learning and growing, which I think is

great. All those things are great. But if you want to your

boat to float higher in the water, only the tide will fix

that, and the tide is your team. So if you want to put time into

development, actually focus on your team. Because the stronger

and better the team is, the more you're going to rise up as a

leader, the more and you know, Steve Jobs has this wonderful

quote. He says, You don't hire smart people to tell them what

to do. You hire smart people so they'll tell you what to do. So

if the team below you, you don't think can come after your job,

you you've got to develop them, or you've got to find people

that scare you, like they've got to be that good, and then you

got to spend time figuring out where their path is and focus on

developing them. That will give you so much free time, so much

white space and my for most leaders, there's two or three

things that only they can do, and the more time they spend on

those things, the more leverage the organization gets. They only

get to spend that time when they're not having to fix things

and be in meetings and micromanage tasks and people,

right? So the more they can build their capacity of their

team up, the more it frees them up. The excuse is always, well,

it's quicker if I do it cool, but it's not quicker if you do

it forever, it's quicker. If you teach somebody, it's slower. But

once you've taught them, you don't have to do it anymore. Now

they've developed, and you've gotten time to work on the

things that really drive leverage for your organization

and your role. So that's the one thing I would leave everybody

with

that brings so many more questions to me, but I

have to stop so have to do it again. Thank you so much. I

really appreciate your perspective. I appreciate your

perspective on what it means to elevate leadership, to truly

listen and to create thoughtful, lasting connections in business.

I mean, I really believe the first time that you and I spoke,

that we were on the same page, and you know, I just, I really

love your attitude and your your perspective on things. So thank

you, thank you for being here and appreciate your time and all

your wisdom. So to my audience, I hope that you like what you

heard, Mike, they can find you at Virtus,

virtin.com, V, I R, T, U, S, I N, c.com, and

then my name is as well, Mike com, so m, i, k, E, D, E, S, J,

a, r, d, I N, s.com, That's my personal website, so that has

the podcast and bunch of different stuff about who I am,

but the company site is verticing.com

and of course, you're on LinkedIn.

I'm on LinkedIn. Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn,

and I'm pretty easy to find online.

That's awesome. Thank you again, so much, and

remember to my audience, please, if you like what you heard,

check out Mike's information. He's a great guy and knows a lot

of good stuff, and remember to stay connected and be

remembered. Yeah.