#058 - Leadership Lessons: Business Hallways to the Weight Room Floor

In this episode of the Decoding Excellence Show, I'm discussing many of the leadership lessons I've learned, through the successes and failures of operating in elite sport. I discuss tactics to help empower leadership and decisions among your athletes and co-workers. I talk about leaning into your weaknesses and being vulnerable. I discuss ways you can take the first step and challenge others to co-elevate to new heights. I think you'll get A LOT out of this show.

As a reminder, our Monday Minutes shows are a quick 10-15 minute episode where I discuss current industry trends, research reads, current events, and occasionally offer my insights into the training process that we're undertaking each week. I believe with conviction, you'll take away something interesting from this show and I hope it delivers you a little bit of value in your day.

As always, thank you for supporting The Decoding Excellence Show!

In addition to those social mediums, you can head over to AdamRingler.com/Newsletter and sign-up for my weekly newsletter. This is a newsletter for the curious. It's chalked full of interesting articles I've read through the week, things I'm exploring and finding fascinating through my week, and a collections of thought experiences and resources I've cultivated. It's essentially a Birchbox for performance-related articles and musings.

If you are looking to help grow and support the Decoding Excellence show, navigate over to Buy Me a Coffee. Buy Me A Coffee is a an easy & fun way to support the show. For the price of a Grande Latte ☕ you can support the show and help us maintain the quality of the content. One hundred percent of the contributions go directly to supporting the hosting fees associated with operating this podcast.

If any of the material resonates with you, I'd love for you engage with me at @AdamRingler

Thanks again for listening to the Decoding Excellence Show! I appreciate all the support growing this Sport Science, Strength & Conditioning, and High-Performance Coaching resource. If you have taken anything away from the show, please login to iTunes and navigate to Decoding Excellence page and leave us a review.

Go Further in This Episode

Enjoyed this conversation? Here is how to get more from it:

• Read the transcript below to revisit key ideas at your own pace.
• Share this episode with a coach or colleague who would benefit.
• Subscribe to the Decoding Excellence Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app.
• Join the newsletter at adamringler.com/newsletter for weekly insights on human performance.

Episode Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated. While we strive for accuracy, some words or phrases may be misheard.

[00:00:00] Sport science, strength conditioning, high performance coaching, welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show. Hey everybody, I'm going to pause the show real quick and announce something brand new to the Decoding Excellence Show. We've created an online community that has exclusive content that you will not be able to get just by navigating to the site alone.

[00:00:37] If you subscribe today, you will have access to our private podcasts, online video lecture series, brand new digital content that we are creating to help support you as a strength conditioning coach, a new practitioner in the high performance field. You do not want to miss this material. It's going to help you in every facet of your career. Head over to admringler.com and join the insiders today.

[00:01:04] Hey everybody, we have a great show for you today. I'm talking about leadership. How do you give it away? How do you help your team do the very best work that they're capable of? I talk about some very tangible lessons that you can apply to your coaching, your department, your silo, your organization, your startup.

[00:01:23] New name it. You can take these lessons and immediately apply them to your practice. It will help your employees, it will help the subordinates, it will help your direct reportes do a better job for you, for your company, for your organization. You do not want to miss this show. We get into the weeds talking about leadership development and not just the fluffy sort

[00:01:45] Of leadership culture, weak and warrior type of workshop things. We get into talking about some of the very real things you can apply to better your program today. Check it out. Hey everybody. Welcome to the Decoding Excellence Show.

[00:01:58] As always, I am your host, Adam Ringler, and thanks for tuning in. We got a great episode for you today. I'm excited to get into it and talk about something that's near to dear to my heart and something I think that would benefit the field in general. Regardless of you are a seasoned veteran within the high performance community, or if you're just starting out, at some point in time, you're going to need to develop your leadership

[00:02:26] Skills. I know we talk a lot about leadership and culture and standards and things like that, but this show, I'm going to read off a little bit of an article I wrote in the past, and I'll add to it as I see fit, at least within the current structure and framework that I'm thinking of in this present moment, this sort of post-COVID world that we all live in. But I'll read a little bit from the article and then, yeah, we'll jump into it.

[00:02:53] Essentially, today, I wanted to talk about what effective leadership is and how we can use it and how we can leverage our influence, our ability to lead others for personal and external empowerment, whether it's the athletes who service, if it's the co-workers, you're trying to co-elevate and work with, or if it's anybody else within your organization. So I personally think that leadership can be a tricky thing, and especially because there's not a lot of leadership development, classes that you might take during undergrad.

[00:03:25] I remember biology, I remember physiology, advanced physiology, sports science, these things, but nobody is talking about how do you develop organizational leadership. And maybe in an MBA, they are, or in the business world, they perhaps could be, but certainly not within exercise science, coaching, strength conditioning, exercise physiology. So the conventional model, that is that one person possesses all the leadership capabilities and everybody else wants it.

[00:03:51] I think that is a flawed model. It's my belief that there's a, that this is flawed, right? When possible, we should be trying to do everything we can to move decision-making abilities to those who have the most relevant information, the troops on the ground, essentially. We should be trying to essentially empower and emancipate our employees or staff members, the people that we work with, to make decisions based on the information that they are, they

[00:04:16] Have accessible to them, not necessarily having for them to wait on you as a leader to make the ought to miss a. There's a great book. I think it's team of teams by Stanley McCrystal, and they talk about trying to create a flat organization where these people and people within the organization as the traditional hierarchy structure goes from top to bottom, that a lot of times the soldiers on the ground will

[00:04:40] Have the most accurate information. Remember, the map is not reality, it's a representation, it's a model of true reality. Well, maps can be wrong, right? Some are useful, but maps can be wrong. So we need to be making sure that the people that have the most accurate information, they have the ability to actually make decisions.

[00:05:02] So how can we take a struggling organization and turn it around? There are strategies for taking underperforming organizations, companies and individuals to turn them, to help transform them, to help empower them, to help co-elevate them to operating within a world-class model. The first thing I think that we need to do, number one, is empower others to make decisions. You have to empower those you're responsible for to make their own self-guiding decisions.

[00:05:30] And one of the clearest ways to accomplish this type of remarkable turnaround is simply by asking employees to not ask for permissions, but rather, really, in reality, they have to state their intents. They have to attempt to reframe your employees' requests into intents that allow them to have control over the decision-making process. And they should still obviously keep you informed, they should up-communicate, right, and communicate

[00:05:57] Up and down the communication chains. But they should try to keep you in the loop, and they should, as a supervising manager, it's your job, your responsibility, and your duty, really, to offer coaching, feedback, or negotiate different paths. But ultimately, we should try to give that power to them. Empowerment attempts are nothing new.

[00:06:16] There are easily hundred of books in leadership that can be applied to coaching, especially when it comes to strengthening conditioning, where there is more frequent change over in assistant head coaching positions. It is easy to chalk up a downswing in performance or leadership after a coach leaves to simply the absence of that coach's personality and system. A lot of people, my belief, is if the leader did a job well, the performance should not plummet

[00:06:43] After they leave the weight room, or the organization, or the company, a powerful leader builds the culture, and the culture should become part of the company identity long after that person leaves. You absolutely have to develop trust in order to be an effective leader. The problem with most trust building exercise, or attempts to short change, or short circuit, the attempt to build culture and trust and unity, is they emphasize the system, not necessarily

[00:07:10] The people that operate within the system. Most incentive programs favor short-term success over long-term development. Quality coaching is no different, when a new coach is hired, they are immediately evaluated. The wins need to start piling up, even on year one. There is very little reward for developing talent, culture, environment, and excellence outside the win-loss column.

[00:07:32] However, so much of what influences that same win-loss column ultimately comes down to those attributes that are absolutely critical to the development needs. So what should we do? Do we, number two, flaunt strengths and hide weaknesses? Is this something a strategy that we should use? No, I would say not.

[00:07:52] This system is operating like the following. Champion and broadcast your successes and hide your mistakes. As a result of this systemic leadership problem, most people are shy and averse to actually making decisions that could lead to a mistake. The number one thing I hear from new athletes, new coaches that I work with, junior staff members, is the easiest way to ensure that they don't make a mistake is not to make any decisions.

[00:08:15] At all. None. We do that most often, while they don't make a mistake acutely in the short term, their absence of decision-making ultimately renders them useless. This is a system that is wrong and broken. It doesn't empower anyone to make a decision for the betterment of the organization.

[00:08:32] You absolutely must shift the control to those who haven't. They need to feel as if they are in power of their own decisions, of their own actions, and many organizations don't have any power structure that resonates to those critical people who make up the deepest and most vital parts of the organization, the company, the program, the team. Furthermore, most companies need to develop and build empowerment in the people at the

[00:08:56] Bottom. If the root of the company has low morale, the company is affected from within at its most central and deepest unit. Fake empowerment programs, culture building exercise, weekend warrior workshops, those will not help the issue as it also looks like an artificial attempt to share power. From those who have it and those who don't, the paradox is, even when you try to give

[00:09:21] Power away, it still comes across as if you're controlling people. So what do we do? The third step, the leader must take the first step. As a leader, you must take the first step at changing the culture in a lot of the places I advise, whether it's organizations or companies, what I found is that morale is low, and pride is abysmal.

[00:09:43] It's my first recommendation to focus on your efforts in increasing both. When it comes to the coaches in my weight room, the junior coaches I work with interns, I ask my staff to constantly brief me by stating their intent, the commanders intent with what they plan on doing, rather than asking me for permission. They simply relay to me what their intents are, and it allows me an opportunity to help direct them or allow them the clear path, the green light that all go to implement their actions.

[00:10:12] It's a small little nuance change, right? It's not asking for permission, it's stating what they're going to do, and I've found that when my coaches ask for permission, I put them in a box. In some way, it disempowers them. It disempowering that they need to even come out and ask me. I pride myself on the ability to coach and train our junior staff members to be high functional

[00:10:32] Coaches. I want those I work with to understand that they are indeed great coaches and that I trust their judgment. They wouldn't be here otherwise unless we trusted them. I do everything in my power to resist offering any sort of short term immediate solutions. I want them to think deeply and think thoroughly.

[00:10:50] They need to be able to react and figure out their solutions on their own term. I want to only provide feedback and solutions when the decision is urgent. Otherwise then, I try to allow for the team to evaluate the decisions during the debris briefing moment. The way that we operate within a high performance culture is different than a lot of other organizations, especially some that I've been a part of.

[00:11:12] When you have a tremendous amount of talented and smart individuals, which we do, all you want to do is allow them to do their best work and allow them to harness their talents and to be able to go out and do the things that they do. You have to be able to operate a little bit differently. When I speak to others about our department, I often quote late Steve Jobs or pirates, not the Navy.

[00:11:33] I try to keep the horizontal hierarchical structure in most high performance departments. The way that I operate within junior coaching and some of the coaches that I have worked with, all ideas are valid and discussed. When there is a top-down hierarchy, discussion is often frowned upon. It's the system that we currently have where our coaches ask questions, submit novel ideas. They propose complex questions and they try to go out and solve those.

[00:11:58] If everyone thinks the same way, especially if they think like me, that I have no need for them to be here. I need them to bring their authentic and true self. I seek out those who have interesting backgrounds and different vantage points. The coaches I have built historically are high performance departments, some of the best in the country and like all good things, this development takes time.

[00:12:20] Competence does not happen overnight. It's built brick by brick and needs to be consistent actions across the organization. It's always been my belief that the more a coach knows, that learning increases their competence and their confidence, right, competence and confidence go hand in hand and confidence and competence goes hand in love as well. I've always prided our department on the ability to provide a world-class education to

[00:12:46] The coaches and junior coaches that we work with, the interns that we take on. We learn by doing and we want to give our coaches as many opportunities to coach and to do and be as physically as present as possible and they need to be put in that position where they have to make critical decisions at the time that it really matters. Another strategy I often ask our staff to do is to put your name on it. What I mean by this is it's metaphorically having our staff put their name on the work

[00:13:12] That they've done. If a coach undertakes a small project in our training facility, even if it's cleaning, I'll ask if they would put their name on it, would they vouch for it, would they take ownership of it, extreme ownership of it? Usually, they will often respond with an, you know, a phatic, absolutely, but every so often a coach or intern may acknowledge that they give subpar efforts and they would, you

[00:13:33] Know, go and repeat the task again up to the personal level of competency simply by asking if they would be willing to sign off on a task with their unique names, right, family give a name, right, would you put your name on it? Would this become part of your brand? It shifts the person into the right mindset to acknowledge whether or not the work was completed with the utmost quality.

[00:13:55] So I'm asking you, the listener right now, put your name on it. We built this, put your name on it philosophy into our program so much so that it becomes a thing of repetitions as humans, we learn best by repeating things in high repetition. And I found it incredibly powerful to be consistent in this messaging from top to bottom and back up to the top. Our coaches and interns are always asking to sign off our tasks and projects.

[00:14:19] It creates a unity, a consistent message, a code to our team and allows everyone to do their best work. And certainly as a mentor, right, and as an advisor to other young coaches and organizations and practices, I try to be as specific to the end result as possible. I don't want to micromanage people, I don't want to micromanage organizations or things like that.

[00:14:40] Nor do I want them to provide a three-step process to accomplishing the end result. I trust them. I want the coaches I know, the end goal for our organization is x, y, and c. And I want them to be able to provide their own methods and means to accomplishing it when I specify how they must accomplish something. I diminish their control over their project.

[00:15:00] I essentially sap any trust that I have built in them to be able to complete the project by their own will. I try to take care of our coaches. I don't want to protect them from their own mistakes. Our vital mistakes are provide an opportunity to learn, to grow, to try, to iterate, to do better.

[00:15:17] So I try to educate and support them through the ongoing education process, which helps build their trust in me as a mentor and ultimately themselves as a competent, strengthening coach. When I clarify a project, I do need to start with some standardized principles. We're also very transparent about the progress and regression that we have on a project. I've always found openness incredibly powerful.

[00:15:41] It's actually liberating that people I work with need to be able to speak one mind, right? And the exercises like this reflectively listening and shared transparency and up and down communication and stating your intent all help contribute to the team around. Everyone on the staff needs to be able to challenge our own thinking and the thinking of other people. So what can we do next, what the next lesson shorten the feedback loop when our coaches

[00:16:08] Do an exceptional job. They need to hear about it immediately, like why is with our athletes, the very best feedback comes immediately after the rep was performed. We got to shorten that feedback loop. I strive to give immediate recognition to reinforce the intended behavior. When feedback is hesitated, it creates a lapse in the sequence from action to information.

[00:16:29] We want to shorten that action of information feedback loop. So within our weight room walls, our facility, feedback is consistent and it's constant. Our athletes and coaches come to expect feedback regarding their efforts and performance. Many times we compare feedback from athletes and teams and allow for them to be able to compete for that positive feedback. We essentially create a culture of gamification and allow the athletes to compete in the

[00:16:55] Game of positive feedback. So the next thing we can work on is working backwards from the end. Try to take a look at your organization with the end in mind. Create a mental map or image of what you want your company, your department, your program, your organization to look like five years from now. Look out maybe even ten years from now.

[00:17:15] Look out years in advance and start measuring yourself up against that image. Is it incredibly far off? What is the next actionable steps you can get and take to become a little bit closer to that mental image? Ask your employees to write down their own goals and imagine five years, ten years, fifteen years out and challenge them to come up with a system to deliver on those goals.

[00:17:38] Lastly, questioning orders may save you from disaster. I know this is paradoxical in some respects. The last thing I want are in my coaching staff and the people I work with and the people I'm surrounded with is a bunch of yes men or yes women. Obedience is great for dogs but not so much in high functioning cognitive based systems. I will never be 100% correct.

[00:18:01] I love my odds and I think I've stacked the deck in my favor certainly over the years but I also know I'm human and I make plenty of mistakes devoted obedience in spite of information can lead to catastrophic results. Look at the Titanic. Plenty of good and smart leaders have made poor mistakes that cost many people dearly. You need to arrange your staff and your people around you to be honest, to be trustworthy,

[00:18:24] To be able to deliver those hard and cold facts to protect you from your own curse of knowledge. So I say to you right now listening, take the look at your own organization, your own company, your own program, your own people, your own department and ask yourself if the way in style you lead invites permission from others and for others below you to challenge your decision.

[00:18:48] If it doesn't in some fashion, you need to manufacture and allow for your employees to openly challenge a decision and you may be if you don't, you may be second yourself up or a future failure. Staff and employees' openness is critical in high-functioning companies and the best organizations and startups that I know all have clear transparency. So I say all of these things to you right now.

[00:19:11] Think about the ways within your own company. How are you challenging those that sort of report up to you? Are you challenging those people to be able to have a clear and all ability to be able to communicate what they see, what they feel, what they observe and challenge a decision that you make? Are you open about it?

[00:19:32] Are you actively engaging and soliciting that feedback and that decision, are you allowing them to red team your decision by trying to pick it apart and tear it to shreds? Now are you working backwards from the end? Are you starting with your card view of what your organization department or program is looking like 5, 10, 15 years? And are you referring back and forth between reality and that imagination?

[00:20:00] And are you trying to establish a plan that gets you to that end? Ultimately, are you shortening the feedback loop? Are you providing that immediate recognition or that feedback after action? So you're connecting action to information. Are you trying to find ways of gamifying that sort of feedback communication loop? So your athletes and your reporters and subordinates, they are soliciting honest feedback from

[00:20:28] You. Are you creating a culture that allows you to put your name on it? Are you allowing everybody actually championing their best work and being proud of it and recognizing that and hallmarking that? And are you challenging those people that might be doing subpar work and challenging them to do better?

[00:20:46] That's a critical component within program building. But ultimately, it comes down to you. Are you the leader trying to make decisions to empower the subordinates and the people that you work within and you work with to make the best decisions with the best information that they have? You have to take responsibility.

[00:21:05] You have to take ownership. You have to lean in to these job demands of a leader. People talk about wanting to be a leader and developing leadership, but oftentimes they don't necessarily know that the leadership role, the responsibility, the duty of a leader, it's not always easy and you have to take ownership for everything and you have to try to give away as much of your own leadership as you can to the other people that you work

[00:21:30] With. It's a duty that you serve the people. You're not commanding them. They're not pushing them. Yeah, you're pushing them in some respects, but you're also helping pull them along and allow them to do the very best work that they do.

[00:21:51] Hey, everybody. That's going to be it for this decoding excellence show. I hope you took something away from some of this writing, from some of the leadership lessons, from some of just my thoughts about how we empower those that we work with. How do we co-eleve each other to do the very best work that we can? It's about really trying to draw out maximum output, the very best actions and execution

[00:22:15] From your junior staff members or other employees that report to you. As always, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it on your favorite social media platform. Tag me in it. Adam Ringler is my social handle on Instagram and Twitter and pretty much everywhere that you can find a social media platform. As always, there's a number of different ways that you can support the decoding excellence

[00:22:40] Show. The newest way you can support is by heading over to Adam Ringler.com and joining the high performance insiders. This is an exclusive community that allows you access to the private articles, the private podcast feed and digital lecture series that's being hosted behind this community wall. Check it out by heading over to Adam Ringler.com and subscribing today.

[00:23:06] The second way you could support the show is simply by signing up for the newsletter. This is something I take a lot of pride in. I try to go out on the internet, dig up research articles that are fascinating. I try to find the newest technologies, articles I'm reading, research publications and just really cool things that I discover that sort of exists between performance science, biology and technology.

[00:23:31] I think you'll get a lot of value simply by signing up for the newsletter. I promise you, I will never spam you, I will never sell your information or give this out. I cherish this little small community that I'm creating with this newsletter. The last way you can support the show is simply by heading over to buymeacoffee.com forward slash Adam Ringler.

[00:23:54] Now, the name is a little misleading. You are actually not buying me a coffee. You're buying the show. A coffee. It's a micro donation. Anywhere from $3, $4, $5.

[00:24:03] It's a latte, a cappuccino at Starbucks, essentially, and you're buying and supporting the show's hosting fees and the ability to deliver great content to your ears weekly. So head over to buymeacoffee.com forward slash Adam Ringler and buy the decoding excellence show, a coffee. Buy two coffees. Buy five coffees if you're an espresso junkie.

[00:24:26] As always, I love you guys. Thanks so much for supporting the show. Stay safe, stay strong, until next time.