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Leadership, Culture, and Results Come from the Top CEO Chad Silverstein EP:13

Chad Sivlerstein bg

Laura sets the stage for today’s conversation by reminding Chad of when they first met, several years ago, and she was struck by how different his business and office space was. She was attending a 2-day workshop in Columbus, and the Choice Recovery office was a field trip / live demonstration of inspired thinking and leadership in action. She reminds him of how he had a Think Tank rather than a conference room, and initiates an exploration of his mindset, practices, and beliefs around business, leadership, culture, growth, and how he thinks about people.

“If you don’t know yourself, there’s a huge disconnect in your ability to lead,” explains Chad Silverstein, as he and Laura talk about how he’s created – and is creating – success in his life and how it extends to everyone with whom he works.


Chad explains how, even though he’s responsible for the success of his businesses, he’s never focused on the income. “It’s (revenue) the result of what you’re doing with the people, with your growth, and the growth of your team,” he says. He goes on to share some insights into his personal growth journey, working closely with his coach, Chet Scott, Founder and CEO of Built to Lead.

Laura notes that Chad’s leadership style and commitment to investing in his own personal growth and that of his team is unique, in that so many people end up in leadership positions they are unprepared for, unwilling to take the time and make the effort to invest in their own growth, and sometimes view developing their people as a way to “fix” them when things aren’t going smoothly.

They talk about what it means to craft one’s OPUS (vision, values, beliefs, etc…), share it with others, encourage others to craft their own, and work together to create bigger things in the world. This heightened level of awareness drives Chad to do most things opposite of standard business practices.
His team works flexible schedules, is known for holding each other accountable, and are encouraged to discover what lights them on fire and are supported in pursuing it – even when it takes them away from his company.

One example he shares is the story of one of his Collection Reps (Choice Recovery is a collections agency – one unlike any you’ll have ever encountered!) wanted to change the world. After some exploration, Chad gave her the job of helping people find jobs so they could actually pay their bills. It started slowly, but the growth has been remarkable.

Six years in, they’ve helped 700 people, and started a second business called [re]start, which is now changing the way employers and candidates connect and fill open positions, based on objective knowledge about one’s unique abilities and best fit in work roles.
Essentially, as Chad says, he watches what’s going on in the world and businesses around him and does his best to think into and do it differently!

To learn more about Chad and his work, look here:

[re]start
Choice Recovery (collections)
Learning Platform
Built to Lead

Chad Silverstein, founder and CEO of Choice Recovery, Inc.,  [re]start, LLC, and Platform Partners, LLC, has worked in the Healthcare Accounts Receivable industry for 22 years. Chad has developed and refined his personal philosophy throughout his career and integrated them into his businesses and relationships with clients, teammates, and his community, focusing on: purpose, responsibility, kindness, and love.

Chad has participated in many leadership and career development programs that have been catalysts for his growth, including graduating from several Dale Carnegie Development training courses, engaging his team with EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System), joining Dan Sullivan’s Strategic Coach Game-Changer Entrepreneur Program, weekly executive coaching with Built to Lead, and becoming a Kolbe Certified Consultant.

  • 2013-2019 CEO Magazine and Business First Top Work Place winner – 7 years in a row
  • 2016 Better Business Bureau Torch Awards for Ethics Winner
  • 2016 Columbus Business First ranked Choice the #1 best medium size business to work for
    in Central Ohio.
  • 2017 Columbus Business First ranked Choice the 2nd best place to work in Central Ohio
  • Nationally recognized Insidearm.com Best Places to Work winner in Collections 2013-2016
  • 2019 Ernst Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist
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The Road to Success is NOT Paved with ESP!

Winding Roadjack-anstey-415825-unsplash

Surely, you’ve had this experience: You have an expectation that someone will do something or something specific will happen… but it doesn’t. As a result, you may have become a little cranky, perhaps frustrated, or even angry.

I’m confident you said, “Yes,” because I’m confident it’s happened to all of us at least once in our life. More specifically, I’m contemplating those instances of it happening as an adult because we’re supposed to have grown wiser as we’ve aged (this is not always the case, however, based on my experience!). 

The Salon

I have a friend who is a hairstylist. She rents a space in a salon owned by another stylist. The salon owner recently decided to add a little retail shop in her salon. She is selling essential oils, journals, trendy t-shirts, and a few other items. To make space for this shop, she commandeered what used to be the client waiting room, and she changed the station spaces the other stylists rent from her. 

Here’s the catch: The shop was designed and set up by the owner. She didn’t ask the other stylists what they thought or if they wanted to be involved. She didn’t offer them any incentive or a percentage of any sales they might make from the shop. She did, however, “suggest” (vaguely, based on how the story was related to me by my friend) that they should encourage their clients to buy items from the shop. 

One Possible Hallucination

As we cannot see into the owner’s mind, nor have we engaged her in discussion about her vision for the shop or her expectations around what it might do for her business or how she imagines the other stylists might be involved, we can only imagine what she is thinking and what her expectations may be. This is why I refer to it as a possible “hallucination…” as it’s only in my mind, and my assumptions about what’s going on may be faulty! 

She has expressed her desire to supplement her normal income through sales from the shop. Because she has suggested her stylists should encourage their clients to buy things in the shop, I imagine (hallucinate = seeing something that isn’t actually there!) she’s hoping they are as excited about it as she is and will actively take part in promoting it and encouraging their clients to shop and purchase the wares on display. 

Increasing the Confusion

Another aspect of this story that has me even more confused is the fact that the owner is actually working fewer hours, now that the shop is “open” than she used to before she added it to the salon. If she wants to grow her revenue, working less doesn’t make sense. Nor does it make sense to create an add-on to your business, which will require active promotion, a live body in the shop to answer questions, encourage purchases, and handle the transactions, and then be there fewer hours. 

And based on the story, as related to me by my friend, the other stylists in the salon take no ownership for this new shop. They aren’t actively promoting it or encouraging their clients to shop in it. In fact, they are actively and openly questioning the salon owners’ thinking and expectations.

Compounding a less-than-ideal situation is the fact that this salon is a “destination” kind of location. You don’t wander by or into it because you’re strolling down the lane filled with other shops, café’s, or anything of the like. It’s situated in a little older house, next door to an auto-glass shop… on a street with a 45-mph speed limit. There is no random, walk-in traffic. 

Recipe for Disaster

This is just one story, one situation in which there appears to be some unspoken expectations. Yes, the stylists could simply come out and ask her what she’s thinking and what her expectations are, but they won’t. Besides continue to service their clients, they’re busy making assumptions that she’s expecting them to do more work on her behalf with no benefit to them. 

Based on experience, unless one of them is compelled to bring this up in conversation, the shop will not be a success, the owner will be frustrated and confused about why it failed and why no one helped her, and the stylists will feel justified in saying, “I told you…” 

It’s Painful for All Involved

While this specific situation may not be even remotely related to your business, it still has implications for you and your business. I would be willing to bet a months’ salary that someone in your organization – maybe even you – has unexpressed expectations about something. 

There’s some specific task you expect someone to take on and complete. There’s an expected outcome… or a specific path someone is expected to take to get a task completed. It may be about thinking or behavior or action, but there’s some unspoken expectation harbored in someone’s mind, and when what they expect doesn’t happen, it creates misunderstanding and frustration, perhaps regrettable communication, and may even undermine relationships. 

I know, because it’s happened to me when I was an employee. It’s happened to me when I was supervising others. And it’s happened in my personal life, with more than one person and on more than one occasion. And in the spirit of full transparency, I’ve been on both ends of this equation – as the person with the unspoken expectations and as the person who was expected to have active ESP and just know what the other person was thinking or wanted. 

Regardless of which end of the equation you are on the result is not fun. 

Implications for Your Business

Perhaps the more important thing to focus on, however, is “what does it mean for your business?” 

Here are some questions you might ask yourself, if things in your organization are not going as expected: 

  • What exactly am I expecting of my people? 
  • How have I communicated my expectations to them?
  • How did I check for understanding, after communicating my expectations? 
  • What did I do to refine my expectations in situations where it appears they were not clearly understood? 
  • What responsibility do I have in this situation (assuming something wasn’t completed due to lack of communication or a miscommunication)?
  • What could I have done differently, to ensure I articulated my expectations in a clear manner and that the person I shared them with understood and was ready to take responsibility to meet them? 
  • What could I do differently in the future to avoid a similar misunderstanding? 

What I Know for Sure

One thing I know for sure is that in any given interaction, at least two people own a piece of what happens. So, when a communication or interaction goes awry, and the outcome is not what I desired or expected, I am well served to first question what my personal role was, before looking to the other party to consider what went wrong. 

I also recognize that when I have unspoken expectations and things don’t go as I’d like them to, I’ve done the other person a disservice by not letting them in on what I’m thinking. Regardless of how long or how well I’ve known someone, it’s not fair to them to expect they can read my mind. Finally, I remind myself that allowing this to become an ongoing behavior can be damaging to the relationship over time. 

Let Me Hear from You

I’m curious to know how this expectation of the people in your life having ESP and just knowing what you want plays out in your life. Send me a note or leave a comment and share your story so we can all learn from it together. 

_________________

Copyright 2019 Laura Prisc, Conscious Leadership Partners  www.consciousleadershippartners.com

Laura Prisc is The Most Trusted Authority on Conscious Leadership; she is a certified Gallup Strengths Coach, certified People Acuity Coach, Gallup-Trained Builder Profile Coach, and a member of the John Maxwell Team. 

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Begin by Leading Yourself – Cast a Vision for Your Life

Girl with "Future Leader" on her shirt.

After I published last week’s article, I received some inquiries from a few people who are not in official leadership positions in their work, but still recognize the need to be theleader in their own lives. I was excited to hear from them, because this is truly where leadership begins. If you can’t effectively lead yourself, how could you possibly lead anyone else? 

Foundational Leadership Characteristics

Again, as I’ve shared in other articles on leadership, the building blocks are basic, fundamental, and necessary for any leadership position, whether it’s leading oneself, leading volunteers, leading a team, or leading an entire organization.

Those foundational building blocks are: Self-Awareness,Other-Awareness, Clear Vision, and Living & Leading with Intention. You can refresh your memory on those ideas by reviewing the last article here. Today, I’m going to focus on the Vision portion, as the exercise I take individual coaching clients through is a bit different than what I would use with a leader responsible for a team or an organization.

Designing Your Life

In my work with individual clients, we typically begin our work on a specific challenge or goal the client is focused on, but along the way, our work often shifts to a more holistic approach in which the client decides he or she wants to look at the bigger picture of his or her whole life, not just one piece. 

Why think small? After all, if you can design a piece of your life and craft a strategic plan to achieve it, why wouldn’t the same process work for all areas of your life? 

First, you’ll need to give yourself permission to imagine, dream, and explore. In fact, I encourage you to speak that permission out loud in a confident tone. While we are all born with insatiable curiosity, vivid imagination, and unbounded creativity, it is often beaten out of us as we grow up and make our way through traditional education systems. This may not happen intentionally – meaning the people around us who do this aren’t likely thinking of what they are doing as intentionally shutting down that side of us – but it happens, nonetheless. 

Repeat after me: “I give myself permission to imagine, dream, and explore…to be curious and allow ideas about how I want to live my life to bubble out of me freely and unabridged.”

Reserve the Time

The exercise I’m going to share with you will take some time – 7-14 hours, more or less, depending on how much thought you’ve already given to your vision and how much free reign you allow your imagination. I encourage you to get your calendar out right now and block out the time… and treat these appointments with the same level of importance and commitment you would afford someone you were paying money to see. This is that important! 

You’ll want at least an hour for each session, for 7-14 sessions. The difference will depend on if you want to give yourself time to imagine every dayor every other day. The rule of thumb for the exercise is to work through it with at least 24 hours in betweensessions but notmore than 48 hours in between. 

The idea here to is to engage your curiosity, imagination, and creativity. It’s not a race or a competition. I actually had one client who was so focused on completing the exercise, she only heard me say how many times she should do the exercise and missed the time interval direction entirely. She very nearly sat down and wrote out her vision 14 times in as short a time span as she could manage, because she was so driven to complete it! Do that and you will miss the point and the magic of this simple exercise altogether!

Choose a time of day when you know you’ll be able to relax and flow through it unhurried. Also, if you’re aware enough of your personal creative rhythms, intentionally choose a time of day when you are more creative. Find a place where you can be comfortable and do the exercise, uninterrupted. Inside, outside, on a bus or a train, in a coffee shop or in your office… There is no one perfect location for every person, but I trust you’ll know yours. 

Finally – and this is possibly the only rigid direction I’m going to give you, and it will make the most difference in your experience and outcome: Do NOT do this on any kind of electronic device. Select a nice journal, pick up a blank notebook, use a legal pad… the kind of paper doesn’t actually matter, but it needs to be pen or pencil on paper, written longhand. 

Your brain engages and works differently when you put pen to paper, and this will unlock your creativity at higher levels than any keyboard will ever allow. 

The Exercise

Take a new journal, notebook, or pad of paper and write out your vision for your life — work, home, family, relationships, free time, exercise, travel, learning, everything— in as much detail as you can. 

Write in the present tense, as if it is already your reality… Like this: “I am living in my dream house. It’s a one-level craftsman bungalow with four bedrooms…”

Don’t edit or filter along the way or worry about how someone else might think of it; you don’t have to share it with anyone (and in its early stages, I encourage you not to share it!). Think about the colors, the textures, the sounds, the smells, who is with you…include all of this. 

Just write until it’s all out of you. Set it aside for 24 but not more than 48 hours.

Do the exercise, again, but don’t read what you wrote the previous time. Start on a new page. No filtering, no editing…just write it all out. 

Do the exercise, again…keep at this process for at least 14 days, or longer if you’re moved to do so. 

Don’t worry if what you come up with each time is different than the last time. Just keep writing it out. As you go thru this process, over time, you’ll get more in touch with what you truly long for and will see it more clearly. 

Once you know what you desire to create, it’s easier to start taking steps toward it. Know that it’s an iterative process — do this a couple of times a year, or at least once a year, because your needs and desires will change over time. And as you achieve different goals, have experiences, and acquire things along the way, your needs, wants, and desires will change. 

Clarity Creates the Filter

This is the “leading with intention” part of leading yourself. Once you’ve articulated what you want to create in your life – at least for this next season – you can move forward with more confidence you’ll actually get to experience it. 

“Without vision, the people perish…” This verse from the bible can be interpreted in many ways. For the sake of today’s thoughts, the idea is that with no clear vision for what you want your life to be like, any life will do. No vision allows you to just get up each day and do whatever, repeating those actions and behaviors day after day after day, marking time but not really living. Essentially, you are the walking dead, simply passing the time until you die, and it’s official!

Once you’ve crafted your life vision, you can set about the work of crafting a strategy and action steps to bring it into reality. It’s helpful and powerful to remind yourself of it every day. You may choose to create a vision board with images that spark your thinking, passion, enthusiasm, and energy. Or maybe the words on paper are powerful enough for you. 

To really reinforce it and keep your engine stoked, say it out loud every day. Read the words or tell the story from your selected images and allow yourself to be fully in the moment and emotion of how it will feel when you truly are living your dream life and doing your best work. 

And remember: Any strategic plan you develop, any decision you make, any crossroads you reach, and any opportunity that presents itself should all be measured against your vision. If whatever comes up will support you in achieving your vision, the answer is “Yes!” If it doesn’t, no matter how cool, interesting, or compelling it might be, the answer is “No!”

Leading Yourself – The Cliff Notes

Regardless of your position, title, responsibility, or authority, at the very foundation of your life is the right and the need to lead yourself. How you do that is entirely up to you. And while others will have the opportunity to influence what happens to you – if you allow them that influence – the choices are really yours to make. 

You can’t live the life of your dreams, have the ‘dream job,’ or fully live into any other area of your life if you can’t articulate what those dreams are. This is why having a vision for your life is so important. 

I heard someone once say that if you don’t have a vision for your life, other people will plug you into the gaps in their dream wherever they can make you fit… and you’ll spend your life building someone else’s dream. It’s true. Far too many people – and many of them are well-meaning and may even be your loved ones – have ideas about who you should be and what you should be doing with your life. 

If you’re not careful and don’t chooseto step up and lead yourself, they’ll have their way. Likely, at some point, you’ll come to some new level of awareness where you snap out of it and think, “This isn’t what I wanted for my life. How did I get here?”You get to that dissatisfied place by going through your life on auto-pilot. 

I’m on a mission to awaken you so that’s not your experience. 

Wake Up! 

Do the Vision Exercise… and do it again, and again, and again! 

Then come back and tell me what you’ve discovered.

_________________

Copyright 2019 Laura Prisc, Conscious Leadership Partners  www.consciousleadershippartners.com

Laura Prisc is The Most Trusted Authority on Conscious Leadership; she is a certified Gallup Strengths Coach, certified People Acuity Coach, Gallup-Trained Builder Profile Coach, and a member of the John Maxwell Team. 

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