Brent Mullins On Positive Leadership And The Importance Of A Growth Mindset

The pandemic has accelerated change and amplified issues within organizations. As a leader, how do you bring in positive leadership moving forward into this new revolution? Today’s guest is Executive Coach Brent Mullins of Brent Mullins Coaching. Brent has over 25 years of experience in executive leadership and organizational complexity at Fortune 200 companies and multi-cultural organizations. He joins host Stephen Jaye to discuss what qualities are required of a leader in these volatile times. Brent underscores a learning mindset as one of the key factors in the evolution of a leader. Tune in for more insights and advice on leadership. --- Listen to the podcast here: Brent Mullins On Positive Leadership And The Importance Of A Growth Mindset In this episode, I want to talk to you all about leadership in organizations and leadership in our lives. Leadership tends to set the stage for an entire organization, how people within the organization interact with one another, how they interact with the customers and how the organization ends up being presented to everybody. A leadership that's misprioritized and misguided can have an impact on the employees. It can lead to employees being disengaged, disinterested and dissatisfied with their job. Given some of the statistics that we've seen about the percentage of employees that are indeed disengaged, it's easy to feel like we're in some multidecade-long leadership crisis at the moment. Here to help with this problem is our guest, an Executive Coach, Brent Mullins of Brent Mullins Coaching. Thank you very much for joining us on the show. Thanks, Stephen. That was a great intro. Every executive coach has their own niche or all coaching because coaching is a pretty broad category of people. Each particular person needs to establish a niche and we've covered this in some of our previous episodes about niching. To orient our readers, what is your niche in this executive coaching world? While I do work across a number of industries, most of my work is working with executives and leaders who have executive aspirations somewhere in the life sciences field, biotech, healthcare technology, medical device, physicians or wherever they are in the life sciences space. In particular, I work one-on-one with leaders, especially those who are wanting to take on bigger strategic challenges, but they're somehow hamstrung or kept from getting to those challenges that they're after. That oftentimes leads into the other part of the work that I do, which is working with the leader and their teams to increase the effectiveness of the team overall. There are a million ways that we can evolve as learners to make daily incremental gains forward.Share on X With these aspiring leaders, you talked about them being hamstrung. What are the most common challenges that people experience as they're trying to step into a leadership role or improve their leadership capabilities to create better teams? Some of the big challenges from a strategy standpoint might have to do with going into new markets. If they're making something, they may be re-evaluating their industrial footprint. I've never met a CEO that doesn't think of more growth on their head every day, day in and day out. When you've got these challenges and you're living in a world like COVID and navigating the pandemic, there are so many issues and people challenges pulling on your time. It's quite remarkable. The question becomes, "How do I as a leader keep everything going and keep my hand on the wheel and still be able to attend to the strategic challenges that are often outside of the four walls of my business?" When you say outside of the four walls to your business, do you mean challenges that arise from changes in markets, a new competitor emerging or consumer trends and things like that? A new technology that has popped up, establishing brand-new markets like the Blue Ocean Strategy. You might create a premium product and there might be competitors on the low end who are coming up and eating your lunch. It's on top of this hybrid workforce that's going on now where organizations weren't ready to necessarily move as dramatically, as quickly as they have to people working remotely and virtually. Now, given everything that's going on in the new hybrid work environment, The Great Resignation, as some people are calling it, people are struggling to find and keep their talent. Do you feel like internal or external pressures are providing a bigger stress on most executives at this point? I've been getting a lot of data on this and looking at it. 7 out of 10 people are saying, "The flexibility that I have through this pandemic, I want to stay." Paradoxically, 7 out of 10 people are saying, "I want a lot more collaboration in person after this is over." On the one hand, I want all this great, tremendous, radical flexibility and I want all the good stuff that happens when I'm face-to-face with my colleagues. I understand how that feels. I have to admit I feel that way as well. I want to see people in person again, but I love the flexibility. Have you encountered any leaders that you're either in contact with coaching that has found that magic formula to getting the best of both worlds? I think about it because I've been in places where you get the worst of both worlds. You're driving through the office every day from 8:00 to 5:00, but you're still doing things all on Zoom or Teams. Have you found anyone that has implemented a way of giving people the flexibility to live their lives according to their circadian rhythms, the weather or whatever people want to do, but also find that right amount of time where people are face-to-face, in person, collaborating with each other and getting all those benefits that make a cohesive team that is firing on all cylinders? There are pockets of great practices. There are some organizations that have been virtual for years and have established solid virtual practices for teaming and leadership. What I think now is this remarkable transformation is going to take a few years for organizations to figure out how to make this thing hum. It is truly a learning challenge. It's an adaptive challenge for organizations to say, "How do we move forward, experiment, learn, integrate those best practices and then learn again to keep those loops of learning happening until they figure out how to do it?" I feel like a hybrid in this challenge which is partly in the marketplace with The Great Resignation and partly inside the organization with the frustration that employees and leaders are all experiencing. It's a little bit like you had an Industrial Revolution and then you had a Digital Revolution. Honestly, now, you're looking at a Hybrid Revolution as we go forward. It's weird because the term hybrid has been used for a lot of things. I remember when people first started introducing hybrid cars. There's a lot of hybridization in everything. I even thought of suburbia as a hybrid before people started using that term. People are trying to find that hybrid between urban living and living out in a small town rural world, which is now over half the country is suburban. I wonder if that mentality has already been set because, a lot of times, these mentalities are brought about and introduced in a lot of different other areas of life. When you say that, it makes me think about something that I've observed, which is this hybrid model is a bit of an amplifier. If things are not going well before COVID and before this whole virtual experiment, it usually amplifies the pain even worse. If you're a leader of leaders, it's one challenge. If you're a leader over people who have their hands on in doing their work, it's a different challenge. If your team wasn't as solid before, whatever the cracks or the fissures were, it has been broken wide open for a lot of people. The same thing can be said for the connection, which is so desperately needed in this virtual environment. There's never been a more important time to be truly connected to the people that you're working with instead of the opposite, which is isolation. The whole silo mentality has flourished in those virtual environments for lack of connection and know-how of how to make that connection. You talked about the levels of leadership, which you're talking about like what I talked to is that middle management or the leaders over the people that are doing the work. You're talking about the executive level, which are the leaders of the leaders. Who is it most incumbent on now to implement this iterative feedback process and learn how to keep that connection with the flexibility of the hybrid environment and bring it down to the people to make the people more engaged than they are now? If the surveys are right, most people are not engaged in their jobs. Positive Leadership: If you're a leader of leaders, it's one challenge. If you're a leader over people who have their hands on in doing their work, it's a different challenge. I am a leadership zealot through and through and have been my whole career. The positive way to say this is that, as leaders, we role model and set the tone for the organization at that executive level. The not-so-positive way of saying that is the fish stinks from the head down. The beauty of the challenge is that those folks in those senior roles are drawn there for a reason. They like the challenge. My experience has been that they're abnormally accountable right there and they're oftentimes tenaciously focused on the interests of the organization. Those qualities can be remarkably positive in a time like this if they're leading through this transformation to help make it okay to experiment and to not always get the right result but to keep learning and keep moving forward. The leaders who are doing that are pushing the envelope and seeing some very positive returns. ...