Recording of L2L Webinar with Sam Reese, CEO of Vistage Worldwide
At the end of August, I was joined by Sam Reese, CEO of Vistage Worldwide for a discussion on where leadership is going and what great leaders are doing to inspire action and engagement.
Following are my key takeaways from our discussion.
- Develop your people and then work hard to keep them. Sam was given advice early in his career that as leaders our primary job is to develop others so that they become so capable and talented that your competition wants to recruit them away. Then we have to work hard to keep them by creating the environments where they can continue to grow and develop into better versions of themselves.
- Lead with vision, mission and purpose while keeping “purpose” out front and center every day. Purpose, or why we do what we do, drives engagement and helps people connect their contributions to the bigger agenda. Sam shared an example of keeping purpose out front. To this day he starts his team meetings by asking his team members to share a story of how they helped their customers.
- Embrace ambiguity and uncertainty. It’s easy to get pulled away from our vision when we think it’s our job to remove all ambiguity. Things are changing so quickly that we need to be okay with not knowing all the answers. What we thought was the right answer or course of action yesterday may be the wrong answer today.
- Command and control leadership is dead. People don’t want to be led by leaders who direct and control things. We need to hear from our team members and learn to listen intently. We also need to put our egos aside and avoid driving our own agendas.
- Lead with the right question rather than the right answer. Many of us have been promoted because we know the right answers. As we take on bigger roles, we can’t know everything so we have to ask more than tell and rely more heavily on those who are closest to the action.
- Practice vulnerability and transparency. Vulnerability can be seen as weak, even risky when leaders are with other leaders or in a competitive situation. When we don’t open up as to what’s really going on we invite others to do the same; and when we create cultures where it’s not safe to address the real issues, that’s when you need to worry.
- Hold people accountable and jump into the details when needed.One way to hold people accountable is to have regularly scheduled weekly 1:1 meetings with each of your team members. Sam recommends we start our 1:1 meetings with these 3 simple questions, “What’s going well?” “What’s not going well?” and “Where do you need my help?”
Check out the full interview by clicking the video below.
