Transcript
Speaker: Made on zencaster the all-in-one podcasting platform that makes every stage of the podcast production process so easy visit zencaster using the link in the description it has a built-in discount hello and welcome to the independent minds a series of conversations between abeceda and people who think outside the box about how work works, with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for everyone.
Speaker: I'm your host, Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abusida. Today, Steve Smith from growthsourcecoaching.com.
Speaker: is going to explain how an individual views their surroundings and their circumstances, influences how they interact with other people, and how successful they are or could be.
Speaker: Steve is based in Orange County, the OC in California, USA. I do not know whether I have been to the OC or not. I have been to California, I have been to Los Angeles, If I have been to Orange County, I'd more than likely been driven through it without stopping. I do not know. But if I do deliberately go to Orange County, I'll be sure to make my travel arrangements at the Ultimate Travel Club because that is where I get trade prices on trains, flights, hotels and holidays, as well as all sorts of other travel-related purchases. As usual, there is a link in the description which has a built-in discount on membership.
Speaker: Now that I have paid the rent, it is time to make an episode of The Independent Minds that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to.
Speaker: Very importantly, on The Independent Minds, we don't tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think. Hello, Steve. Michael, it's great to be on Thank you.
Speaker: Thank you very much for your interest in being on the Independent Minds. but Steve, tell us about your career and how you ended up running the growthsourcecoaching.com. Well, my my first 30 years was in consumer products manufacturing.
Speaker: I had worked for four different companies, all very large scale, very well-known companies since I was about nine years old. I had always thought that I would eventually own my own business. I just never knew what it was going to be or when it was going to show up.
Speaker: In 2008 in August, it did show up. I had a little bit of assistance from some people around me who after kind of looking at my own background and understanding how I tend to interact with people, they suggested you need to go into coaching.
Speaker: And so I'd heard about it. I'd i'd i'd seen CEOs of large scale companies getting executive coaches. What I didn't realize at that point was that coaching had kind of leaked down into more of the lower levels of business.
Speaker: And coaching was everywhere. there's there's By my estimation here in the U.S., there's almost a quarter of a million people walking around with the word coach on their business card.
Speaker: So there's a lot of people involved in it. And i decided to to plunge into it. And that was in 2008. I did that by buying into a very small franchise, very small startup. I love their message. I love their energy.
Speaker: It was a great way for me to get in and and become certified as a coach and kind of learn how to run a coaching business. And right in the middle of me doing well, about two and a half years in, they filed bankruptcy.
Speaker: So what do you do with a coaching franchise when the mothership basically goes down? It's not really doesn't really have any marketability to it. So I took everything that I had purchased and I completely revamped the whole system.
Speaker: And I changed the name. I changed the focus and I aligned it a little more with the kind of clients that I had been used to working with back in my consumer products days. And 17 years later, it's been a wild success.
Speaker: Right, congratulations. Being able to run a business for 17 months is quite an achievement, but 17 years, not well done. it is. Well done.
Speaker: To be successful for 17 years, you have to have something that is different about your business that makes you stand out and enables you to add more value into your clients. It sounds like i'm doing a commercial for you, I should charge you. right You're good. Thank you very much. Thank you. But what this thing that is so interesting about your approach to coaching is this thing about just not looking at the individual, but looking at the the the environment in which they they exist, all the different influences that come into them externally, which create the person that they are.
Speaker: Yes. And I don't see that in many coaching models. Focus seems to be very much on, you know, you are this. rather than how do were you created?
Speaker: That's because coaching, like a lot of other functions can go in different directions. You have people that are life coaches. You have people that are marriage coaches. You have people that are career coaches or relationship coaches or all these kinds of things, diet coaches and many, many coaches, depending on the Institute, you might go to, you know, to get your cert certification, you learn how to coach professionally.
Speaker: Many of those are based in therapeutic models. And when I started this thing of my own, I basically decided that what was going to set me apart was bringing in a very business focused environment to my coaching application.
Speaker: So all I do is coach executives or small business owners or mid-level managers. If you're if you're involved in business, that's your vocation. I'm your guy. If you have troubles at home or someplace else, I'm probably not the best choice.
Speaker: That takes me into something which might be a little bit contentious, but you see, I think that the role of managers as we get further into the 21st century will have to change from that traditional command and control management by walking about, issuing instructions, all these sorts of things into a role that is much more like a coach.
Speaker: I agree with you too, because, um, Many people that are moving into management, they're coming from younger generations. They've grown up with a completely different set of values as it relates to work and to being in a workplace environment. When you start to look at it that way and you recognize that management is not just somebody walking around handing out orders, but it's more like a conduit.
Speaker: between the folks at the top of the organization who are responsible for setting the direction, creating a strategy and is you know successful on a continuous basis. And the people at the bottom who are responsible for for producing the product or service that the company is in business to provide.
Speaker: And so when you look at those two ends of the stick, you have to have somebody in the middle that can translate the top end vision down to the day-to-day motivation. and be able to tell the people at the top what works and what doesn't work at the bottom. yes So it's a very pivotal role in the middle that, you know, and and you have to wear a lot of hats in the process. Yes. It's a very awkward position to be in the middle manager.
Speaker: You've got the pressures from underneath and the pressures from above as well. And one of the biggest talents you can have, I suppose, is being able to balance all of that. Yes, that is quite a challenge, even for experienced managers.
Speaker: One of the things that I teach in my my management course, in fact, the foundational model that starts before I get into all the more specific skills and techniques is really, it's called management mindset.
Speaker: What does it actually mean to be a manager? How do managers think? What should you be looking at? How do you make decisions? How do you present yourself to people around you?
Speaker: And once you figure out who you are as a manager, and the particular skills and approaches that work best for you, then I find people walk into any number of situations with a greater level of inner confidence, which basically means you don't need to know the answers to anything in the moment.
Speaker: You just need to be confident on how to guide people through uncharted waters to be able to get to the end destination you're looking for. Very interesting. When we talk about individuals and having the confidence, from a UK perspective, we would say that if you went to a certain type of school, then you're probably going to have a lot of confidence. You may not have the same quite type, number of qualifications, but you'll have a lot of confidence when you go into a new situation, for example. Mm-hmm. Or if you're having to deal with a problem, you'll have a lot more confidence about dealing with the with the challenge, the problem, than people who went to other types of schools, because they will do a lot more public speaking and and things like that.
Speaker: Right. And i I think initially that association with certain institutions probably carries some weight. But one of my favorite sayings, unfortunately, I didn't coin this myself, is knowing isn't doing. Yes. And until you're able to produce a certain approach to working with people, a certain approach to guidance and coaching and support, basically you're hanging your authority on another institution that you came from.
Speaker: Ultimately your authority and your ability to to get things done through others should come from you. If we are saying that something is us, then all of the different labels that we attach to ourselves, like even basic ones, like about our gender, we we can take our different attitudes, views, behaviors, and attribute them to a label rather than to us. Yes. You know, the United States, we're going through our own brand of social disruption, which we've been here for various reasons for
Speaker: you know, since COVID, but it's probably had been brewing before then. But one of the distinctions I make when it comes to dealing with these perceptions that are baked into various aspects of society is, in my opinion, society comes in two parts.
Speaker: You have the masses, you have the groups, you have what some people might call the tribes, people who are very similar in terms of their their ethnic diversity or their culture or their lifestyles and things like that.
Speaker: And then you have the individual. And as a leader, faster you can get to understanding the individual, the faster you can eliminate certain ill-conceived perceptions and mental biases from your workday.
Speaker: Because when when you start to understand the individual, you start to see them as a whole person, and then they become much more known and much more likable. Yes. As you were saying that, I was thinking, know, there's so many things that come to mind as an HR professional from what you've just said. you know When I started my career in ah HR, people were very much grouped together.
Speaker: Even if you think about employee benefits, these are the employee benefits that everyone will get. yes whether they were relevant to people or not, well, this is what everyone's getting. And then we started to talk about things like cafeteria, buffet benefits, where you could pick and choose what it was that you wanted. okay And now we're much more into, so so what is going to be important to you? What's the reward package we need to build for you to make you more interested and motivated so that you can produce your best work? What's the reward we've got to create for you? And it's exactly the same. Like if you're saying, if you're going to take a group of people and say, well, you are all X, which makes you different to group Y. So, but there can be someone in group X who actually says, well, really, I'm a, I'm an R. right Well, need to, to, to kind of jump on your, your cafeteria analogy, I think really, really good leaders
Speaker: have the ability to unite people under a common cause. You know, you're working in a particular department or division of a larger company and you have a yeah you you have a a reason for being, but at the same time, be able to recognize and develop a relationship with everybody individually.
Speaker: And when you can reach them at that individual level, which means you know they who they are as a person, you know what their motivations are, what drives them, you know a little bit about their their family and their personal life. So that adds a little more to that a human element.
Speaker: People will respond to you differently when they understand that you see them as them and not just a number as a part of a bigger group. Yes, I agree with you.
Speaker: but you see, when I say I agree with you, i you know that there's going to be a book. Yeah, I know. I can hear it coming before you said it. It's going to be a bug. I've had many years of experience where in organizations I can say, well, you know this candidate comes in for an interview and I can say this candidate looks like the type of person that this manager will offer a job to. This candidate has the same hobbies as the group. And you could walk around an office and look at the different departments. And as you went from one to another, you would see a change in the type of people. So some managers may have, well, I'm a woman, so I'm going to have women on my team. um I'm a manager who used to play soccer or rugby.
Speaker: that People on their team look like they play soccer or rugby. People recruit too many often of people who are like them rather than skills-based recruitment. I want the person with the right skills, the right knowledge, the right experience to do a great job rather than the person who looks like me or has the same hobby as me. And what you've just described, and and I would have to say here in the United States, there's a fair amount of that that continues.
Speaker: But what you've described are the inherent biases that we all walk around with. In a manager leader type role where you make decisions and you you have influence over how other people think and act and do things, you have to really, really be concerned about how much of your innate bias is getting in to the way you manage others.
Speaker: So if you like soccer and everybody on your team likes soccer, you know, that's what's called affinity bias. Yes. And so you've basically just said, OK, as long as they're like me, they're good to go. it Everything else doesn't matter. That's the first hurdle they have to get over.
Speaker: I will tell you that although it's growing in popularity, this started probably back in the late ninety s Some of your larger corporations like like Sony is a good example.
Speaker: when they would bring in executive level people to to take positions, you know, at a high level in the company, and they would take them through batteries of tests that involve their intellectual intelligence, you know, their experience, their technical knowledge.
Speaker: But then they started introducing emotional intelligence tests. And if those individuals could not score as high or higher in the emotional intelligence as they did in their regular IQ, they would pass on them. Yeah. And you think, well, why would you do that? And the answer coming back was, if we put somebody in a position that governs a substantial part of our organization, and they are a people train wreck, we are going down.
Speaker: Ain't that the truth? Yes. I have seen where managers have recruited ah very diverse team. They've said, this is this particular job. It requires someone with this type of personality, with these types of skills, knowledge, experience, all these sorts things. This is the right person for this job. And then they need another type of personality for a different type of job. And they make the recruitment of those people because they're ideal for those jobs.
Speaker: Now, the part that is missing is that when they offer those jobs, they know those two people will never really get along. They'll never be part of a team, but their skill as the leader is to ensure that whilst people may not be best friends, that they do have a mutual respect.
Speaker: Yes. And to me, I think it's smart when you're recruiting people that you look at two fundamental aspects. one Do they have the capability to do the job, which is everything that you listed?
Speaker: But secondarily, will they be able to adapt and basically work within the culture that the company already has in existence? When you do that, then what you end up having is you could have a very diverse group of people on your team, but as long as they all understand the mission of the company and the mission of the department they're in,
Speaker: and they can work to that level, then everybody else just becomes a colleague. Now, whether you go from colleague to friend at some point, hey, great if you can do it, but you don't have to, to have a well-balanced, well-run team where everybody respects their running. You can respect people and not necessarily like them enough to want to have ah a beer at a pub with them on a weekend.
Speaker: But without that higher level of goal setting that everybody can aspire to contribute to, That's where you start getting the personality infighting at the lower levels. Yes.
Speaker: Because a vision hasn't been created, i suppose. Well, the vision, well this is interesting. Most companies have visions that they put on their website and they print it out and put it in their employee handbook.
Speaker: And after that, it's not really spoken of on a regular basis, which I think is a big downfall. um What I encourage a lot of people to do within their departments is create a mission.
Speaker: Make sure that everybody understands that what their department is there to do serves the vision of the company. But very few employees can attach a line between what they do every day and achieving the mission of the company. So you have to make it a little more departmental mission so that people feel like they're contributing to a bigger cause other than them just getting a paycheck.
Speaker: That's true. There's the published vision, the published values. and the lived vision or lack of it and the lived yeah values. And it's great when the two are the same, but it's very rare that the two are the same.
Speaker: You're right. Visions, missions, and values can very much be influenced by people's experience of the outside world as well, though. And I think that's where we're we're sort of saying there's all sorts of different things that are involved in growing an organization and building teams of people who can be really effective. But where your coaching comes in in terms of, sorry, growthsourcecoaching.com is it's almost like that word source.
Speaker: Where have you come from? Where is the source of the river? Where have you come from that is and the experiences that you've had that lead to you being the person that you are today rather than you being the person that you are today?
Speaker: What do we do to mend you? You have to, i think, think back through that journey to identify the issues or the experiences that cause the challenges for the individual now.
Speaker: Well, it's funny that you picked up on that because you're one of the very few people that I've ever talked to that has made that reference. And when I actually rebranded and reworked the company out of you know bankruptcy back in 2011 now, I had to come up with a name that I thought would be emblematic of what I did as a service, but also point to the ultimate benefit that my clients would get.
Speaker: The term growth source basically means the source of the growth that you're trying to achieve is actually coming from you. yes And I'm just the I'm the catalyst through my coaching method to help you understand what that looks like to be able to make sense of the things that have held you back from reaching your full potential and then figure out what steps you need to take and maybe even what mindset barriers you need to break down in order for you to just run at it hard and feel like ultimately you're going to get there. it's just a matter of are you doing enough of the right things for a long enough period.
Speaker: For everybody I've ever coached, They already know what their problems are. They already know what they're capable of, but they've allowed themselves to live with limited thinking, with other mental barriers, with other confidence limit limiters that have got them to accept mediocrity.
Speaker: And so at some point they kind of wake up and they say, you know what? I'm capable of more. I'm better than this. My long-term outcome should be greater than what I'm living today.
Speaker: So we start working together, and that's where I go through the process of helping them in their minds really kind of pull things apart and say, what do I really want?
Speaker: You know, it's okay to say, gee, I'd like this, I'd like that, but are you willing to work for that? No, probably not. So, okay, that's, we've got to take that off the table. Let's talk about your true compass, right?
Speaker: where you want to be ultimately, and what you are willing to do to get there. And after that, it's just a matter of assessing what works for you versus what doesn't. I'm going to go back to the river analogy because the river, when it goes from like the source into a stream, into a river, into an estuary, into the sea, it makes that journey by taking the easiest route.
Speaker: Yes. Listening to you there, I'm thinking what you're overcoming in your coaching is people who have taken the easy route and found themselves in a situation that they they know is not the right situation for them.
Speaker: And you remind me of when I worked at one particular location, a factory, and we were closing down part of the factory and decided to give everyone that worked in the factory the same sort of placement support, career support that we would give to a manager to get these people into jobs as quickly as possible. And I sat down with one young woman and said, okay, what do you want to do next?
Speaker: And she said that she wanted to be a physiotherapist. so I said, right, great. I know people who work in hospitals. We'll get you some you know experience to get you to meet a physiotherapist and see what it's all about. What would you do that for? Well, it's my job.
Speaker: Oh, right. But there's no point, she says. Why is there no point? Well, people like me don't become physiotherapists. Ah. Right. I'm going like, um who told you that? Right.
Speaker: oh All the neighbours and the people on the production line, people like you don't become physiotherapists. right Well, they didn't know what it took to become a physiotherapist and neither did she. Neither did I for that matter. But it's that whole sort of The surroundings that you come from, your river, this easiest route, that easiest route is to agree with everyone else about what you are or are not capable of, what your potential is or isn't. And listening to all of those outside voices, like you say,
Speaker: Within you as an individual, you have the ability to do whatever it is that you want to do. but But the easy route is to just comply with everyone else who's accepted the easy route and ultimately to be unhappy, discontent with where you are.
Speaker: Throughout life, many, many, many people will will live in that river from from a very young age to the day that they pass on because Nothing has ever challenged them to do more, to do better, to think differently.
Speaker: There's a very, very small percentage, and it's borne out by all the statistics in business with people that are highly successful, people that become million and billionaires. If you look at those folks as a percentage of the general population, it's minuscule. It's like 2%. And yet these are the people that you look at and say, these people risked everything.
Speaker: They gave up years of comfort. in order to achieve what they truly believe they were capable of. That's, in essence, what my coaching foundation is designed to help the average person.
Speaker: Fast-track that process, get past those limiting beliefs that you've grown up with, regardless of where they came from, but you've now packaged that very neatly in your head, and it's like a tape loop that plays 24-7, and you've just now you've convinced yourself that this all you'll ever be.
Speaker: For people who are able to just step back from that and say is this all I'll ever be? Or do I want more? Those are the people that have a fighting chance. That's a great phrase, have a fighting chance. And I suppose that creating that fighting chance is these expressions roll off our tongue, but they're anything but easy. But you have to go into it knowing that it isn't going to be easy, but get the support that you you know you need yes in order to make it happen.
Speaker: It's great. Thank you very much. You know, Steve, it's been really very interesting. I don't think we've had the the conversation that we were perhaps thinking that we would, but I think it's for me, it's been fascinating. You've certainly made me think. Thank you very much.
Speaker: You're quite welcome. Thanks for having me on. I love your style that this kind of conversations, I think. I mean, it helps me think differently just because of the things that you brought up and hopefully your listeners will get the same benefits.
Speaker: I hope so. Thank you very much. I am Michael Millward, Managing Director of Abbasida. And in this episode of the Independent Minds, I have been having a conversation with Steve Smith from growthsourcecoaching.com. You can find out more information about both of us at abbasida.co.uk. There is a link in the description.
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Speaker: If you are listening to the independent minds on your smartphone in the United Kingdom, you may like to note that 3.0 has the UK's fastest 5G network with unlimited data. So listening on 3.0 means you can wave goodbye to buffering.
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Speaker: That description is well worth reading. I'm sure that you will have enjoyed this episode of The Independent Minds as much as Steve and I have enjoyed making it. So please give it a like and download it so you can listen anytime, anywhere.
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Speaker: Until the next episode of The Independent Minds, thank you for listening and goodbye.
