Hey, it’s Jeremie Kubicek here.

We’re excited to have you for this week’s edition of the Relational Intelligence at Work newsletter, where every Tuesday you’ll get an email straight to your inbox from me or my business partner, Steve Cockram.

This newsletter's primary goal is to support you on your personal growth journey, and to equip you with the skills and knowledge you need to excel as a leader.

Let's dive into today's message...

Before we get into the message, a quick word from today's sponsor:

Consider bringing Jeremie Kubicek, the co-founder of GiANT, into your team or organization to share the 5 Code Words of Communication and watch the performance of your teams improve overnight.

Go to jeremiekubicek.com and check out Keynote Topics for more information.)

My Enlightening Airport Conversation

I once had an enlightening impromptu conversation on leadership while waiting for a delayed flight at Orlando International Airport.

I struck up a conversation with a British couple, who seemed to be veteran travelers.

When I told them I was involved in leadership training, the woman stated: “We simply need more leaders.”

She didn’t offer what sort of leaders she had in mind, but she did say several times that we needed more of them.

Her husband, who was reading his Financial Times paper, offered a few vague comments as she reiterated her point…

“Everything depends on leadership, you know. Everything,” he said.

Finally, I pushed for a bit more…

“What type of leaders do you think we need?”

“Well, proper leaders, of course,” the British woman said. “We need established leaders coming through the right universities who are credentialed to lead the proper way.”

It dawned on me that she had a very formal view of leadership - more by title and or prestige than by serving in the trenches.

This exchange reinforced my sense that there are many diverse views of leadership, some of them dating back to dynasties in the past.

The reality hit me hard as we were saying the same words, but meaning a completely different thing. All Leadership is not equal.

The 'Right Kind' of Leaders

We don’t need more leaders, but rather more of the ‘right kind’ of leaders.

We need dynamic men and women willing to take the lead in guiding and influencing people to create a better world for our children and grandchildren.

We need a radically different style of leadership than we have experienced through the past decades of leadership by title.

We need:

• Leaders we can trust

• Leaders we can believe in to do the right thing

• Leaders who are invested in the long-term success of their followers, our communities, our nation, and the world

• Leaders who fight for the highest possible good of those they lead

Most of all, we need leaders whose concerns extend well beyond their own gain.

If this does not occur, leadership will continue to be a common buzzword that lacks true meaning to the masses of everyday workers.

The Need for Better Leaders

For the past ten years, Steve Cockram and I, along with our GiANT team have been consumed with how to build leaders worth following.

It’s doable. We know because we have been apart of doing it.

We first need to understand that adult learning has changed.

Most adults:

• Are cynical know-it-all’s because of the proliferation of content.

• Read far less than ever and learn by watching or listening more than reading. 

• Have attention issues that keep them from staying engaged for longer periods.

This is the current reality. We simply have done something about it.

Scalable People Development

We have countered the realities of the changing adult learning by:

1. Creating a Leadership Language that every single person at every level can understand and use to create a common and objective way to communicate.

2. Building Visual Tools that are simple enough for an educated 13 year old to understand so that it will scale throughout organizations and become a sustainable leadership system to leverage for a decade or more. 

3. Focus on helping each leader get to 100% health in the way they lead themselves and others. 

4. Teach people to Multiply what they have learned to others for the benefit of the whole.

The results have been profound. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Biogen and thousands of others have tested it and proven that the concept works.

And, the concept is not just for the big companies. Dentist offices, banks, hospitals, mom & pop entrepreneurs can all use the tools because they simply work - for everyone.

Every great leader I’ve come across in my last 10+ years of GiANT has these three things in common:

• Great leaders are self-aware.

• Great leaders can self-manage.

• Great leaders know those they lead.

Effective and strong leaders first develop their own inner core, the guiding principles and values they believe in, and hope to instill in their teams.

Once you are confident in who you are and what you believe in, you can more effectively communicate strategies.

Good leadership is about building mutually beneficial relationships and you can’t teach relationship-building through the application of generic principles.

To know yourself you must also have a realistic inventory of your strengths, your weaknesses, your style of leadership, and the challenges in your work environment.

Once you know yourself, you can lead others more effectively, but only if you make the effort to know them, their strengths, weaknesses, and challenges, too.

Self-Awareness & Self-Appraisal

Oftentimes leaders in large companies are viewed as distant… well, because they are.

Leadership begins within, but only if you are honest in your self-appraisal.

Most of the problems we see with leaders stem from the fact that they refuse to acknowledge their weaknesses and blind spots – or those of their team members.

How about you?

• What do you want?

• What do you not want?

• What do you need right now?

• What are you afraid of losing?

• How well do you know yourself?

Questions like these can help you learn more about yourself and those you lead.

Once you understand yourself and your specific limitations, you can find ways to be a better person and a better leader, which will benefit everyone on your team.

As you grow in your leadership abilities, you can learn from those mistakes and begin to focus on your strengths and minimize your weaknesses.

At the end of the day, we must remember what good leadership is about –fighting for the highest good of those you lead!

To do so we must manage ourselves first before putting generic principles on the backs of others.

It is our responsibility to see leadership come alive.

That's all for today's message. Thanks for reading!

Until next time,

Jeremie Kubicek