Just Lead with Anton Gunn
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“Your responsibility is to meet them where they are, not the other way around. It's not about you. And if you think it's about you, then you don't deserve to lead. The greatest amongst us are servants.”
— Anton Gunn
Barack Obama's Leadership Lessons
Be yourself, don't try to be a leader that other people want you to be or think you should be.
Don't be afraid to show the people you lead who you actually care about.
As a leader, have a vision that's inspiring and compelling for all the people around you.
Always surround yourself with people who are smarter than you, and don't be afraid to listen to them when they have a better way to get things done.
Vulnerability & Apologies: The Surprising Power of Admitting Mistakes
Vulnerability is a key aspect of both personal and business leadership
It's important to show your vulnerability as a leader to encourage others to do the same
Leaders need to be confident enough in themselves and their team to show vulnerability
Leaders often struggle to admit when they've made a mistake, but being able to do so and apologize is another aspect of vulnerability
Toxic Positivity: The Downside of Unwavering Optimism in Leadership
Toxic positivity is when a leader pretends everything is fine, even when things are not going well
Leaders should be honest about the situation and show vulnerability to gain trust from others
“Just Lead” - book by Anton Gunn
Just Lead is an action guide with 44 actions to break down barriers, boost retention, and build a world-class culture
The book focuses on simple, tactical things that leaders can implement to become admired by their team and create a culture where nobody wants to quit.
80 million people left their jobs in 2021, and 55 million changed positions in 2022
The pandemic changed what people deem important at work
Diversity is a real issue in the workplace, not just related to race and gender identity
People want mobility within the company and to feel appreciated and valued
People quit bad leaders, and many leaders struggle to connect with their teams
Answering the Silent Questions: Care, Support, and Trust in Leadership
To be a great leader, you need to answer 3 questions that every employee is asking when they show up to work:
Do you care about me?
Will you help me be successful?
Can I trust you?
These questions are not verbalized, but employees want to see the answers in your actions every day.
Your job as a leader is to help your employees be successful by giving them the tools, information, and resources they need and removing obstacles in their way– If you can't do this, you have operational issues that need to be fixed.
Trust is built by answering the first two questions consistently over time.
Being A Servant in Leadership
The greatest amongst us are servants.
Good leaders recognize their responsibility is to serve first and lead second.
Leaders should not blame their team but help them be the best they can be.
Leaders should understand the environments that their employees have come from.
The Just Lead book suggests leaders ask three questions: what's one thing you love about your job? What's one thing I could do to make you more successful at work? If you were me, what's one thing you would change about our organization?
Leaders should take obstacles out of their team's way by listening to their answers and doing what they suggest.
Showing care, willingness to help, and building trust with employees are important for leadership.
The 4 C's: The Factors Impeding Effective Leadership
Capacity: Leaders often claim they don't have the time to engage in touchy-feely meetings that prioritize people development.
Competency: Leaders may not know all the necessary actions to develop their people and, therefore, may lack the necessary competencies.
Capability: Leaders need to have the physical and emotional ability to care about their people. They need to be able to smile, listen, and ask the right questions.
Courage: Leaders need to have the courage to challenge traditional leadership models and do things differently to meet the demands of the current workforce, especially Gen Z employees who prioritize values alignment with their leaders and organizations.
Thanks for listening!
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Mike: All right, let's dive in. All right. Anton Gunn is a former senior advisor to President Obama and a national expert on socially conscious leadership. Fierce Healthcare recently named him as one of the 10 most
influential minority executives in healthcare. He's a graduate of the University of South Carolina where he played SCC Football for the Gamecocks. He's the bestselling author of the Presidential Principles and Just Lead and has been featured in Time Magazine, the Wall Street Journal. Inc. Magazine and on Good Morning America as an international keynote speaker and management consultant, some of his clients include renowned organizations like Mercedes-Benz, vans, K P M G T-mobile, Aetna, Emory Healthcare, and the Boeing Company.
When he is not working, he could be found listening to hip hop music or cheering for his daughter's softball team, but never at the same time. In this episode, we're gonna talk about everything, leadership, and Tom, welcome.
Anton J Gunn: Thank you, Mike. It's so happy to be with you, so happy to be with your audience and ready for a great conversation.
Mike: We never talked about this and Anton and I know each other a little bit from two different organizations. We're a part of National Speakers Association Brand Builders Group, and I just feel like Anton, you got one of those names where I just need to say Anton Gunn and that's it it's like a superhero name.
Anton J Gunn: Yeah, I wish it was a superhero name. Back when I was younger, everybody said, man, you got a cool name for outside linebacker or for a quarterback. But, right now I just try to use it for business. But I wish it could just be, I wish I could just go to one name and just be Anton and everybody would know who I am.
Mike: It's better than gun. Gun might. People might have a problem, but both together is great. So anyway, we're gonna talk about everything leadership today. Really, really excited about doing this. And I gotta start. How does one become an advisor to President Obama? How did that all come about?
Anton J Gunn: Wow, Mike. That's a the million dollar question that everybody wants to know. And it's really, I'm gonna just say it man. It is sheer, sheer tenacity. And belief in yourself. And I'll tell you the shortest version of the story, and if people wanna read it, they can just go Google Anton Gun Time Magazine and Obama, and you'll hear the whole backstory.
But I didn't come from a lot of political pedigree. I didn't have any connections. I wasn't politically connected or anything. I was a kid who worked and did community development work. So I lived in South Carolina. I worked on a lot of local issues like healthcare and advocacy. My job was focused on helping people who were consumers get their interest represented in the best way.
And I got the political bug around 2007, 2008, really 2007. And I decided that you know, I was gonna work for Barack Obama's campaign, and all of my friends told me, Anton, you're crazy. You don't even know anybody in politics, much less Barack Obama. And how are you gonna work for him? And I said, well, I'm gonna call him on the phone.
And they laughed at me and said, Anton, how the heck you gonna call Barack Obama on the phone? I said, well, I'm gonna call his office. And they laughed at me and said, yeah, right. Okay. So here's what happened. The next week, I get up on Monday morning and I call his senate office in Washington, DC. Now, of course I'm in South Carolina and I'm calling a senator from Illinois and they take a message and they say, you should call your own senator and not call this senator.
And I was like, I don't want to talk to my senator. I want to talk to Barack Obama. And they said, okay, we'll leave a message and you know, call back later. So I called back the next day, the next day, the next day, and the next day I called back five times in a row in the same kind of response, call your own senator and we'll take a message, but you not gonna talk to Barack Obama.
So then I called again on Friday and I said, I want to speak to Barack Obama. He really needs to hear from me. I'm hearing he's thinking about running for president and I want to help him. And literally, they didn't call me back. And so I said, well, maybe I need to explain myself via email. So I typed this long email explaining who I am in South Carolina.
I do great community work, and I believe in his message and I want to help him. I sent him an email. Nobody responds to my email. So long story short, Mike, I called his office 10 times, sent an email, and nobody called me back.
Mike: Hold on. At what point did the FBI show up and knock on your door? Fearing the worst.
Anton J Gunn: You could have expect in today's world, you should definitely expect that kind of thing. Is that I called him 10 times. But here's the point. I called DC five times. I called his office in Chicago four times, and then I called some other office, the 10th time. And here's what happened On the 11th time, I tried to be creative and says, okay.
I've called DC. Everybody expects the phone to ring in DC. He's from Chicago, so everybody expects the phone ring in Chicago, but where is the least likely place that someone will call and ask for Barack Obama? Well, I looked at a map of Illinois and I found that there's two parts of Illinois. You got the Chicago land area.
And you got downstate Illinois. Now downstate, Illinois is the rural part of Illinois. It's the more conservative part of Illinois. So generally, if you're a Democratic senator from Illinois, your phone in downstate Illinois doesn't ring that much. So I literally says, I'm gonna call that office and see if I can get somebody to call me back.
And I called that office and a young woman answered the phone. I don't remember what her name was, but when she answered, I said, listen. You don't know me, but you need to know me. My name is Anton Gunn and I've called Barack Obama 10 times and nobody in this office has called me back. Now I heard that he's thinking about running for president, and if he really wants to be president, he cannot be ignoring phone calls from people in South Carolina, which is an early primary state.
So I need you to write my phone number down and he better call me back, and if he doesn't call me back, I'm gonna make sure he loses. And I said it just like that, and I hung up the phone, had nothing to lose. I called 10 times. Nobody called me back. Why would I expect anything different? Well, 20 minutes later, Barack Obama called me back. He called me back and I talked to him on the phone. And when he answered the call, when I talked to him on the phone, I had a message that was compelling enough for him to have more interest. I said, Senator Obama, you don't know me, but you should know me. I'm in South Carolina and I don't know a whole lot about politics, but I know a whole lot about people and you cannot be successful if you don't have a people powered campaign, and I'm the guy that can help you in South Carolina.
Two weeks later I was riding in the car with Barack Obama and he told me that he wanted me to join his team. To become a campaign director, his political director, and his South Carolina campaign, and I kind of advised his strategy of what he did in South Carolina. That was the beginning of the next five years of relationship where I played multiple roles in his administration and even advising him on how to talk about the Affordable Care Act, becoming one of his top spokespersons on the Affordable Care Act.
Mike: If that's not a lesson in perseverance. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. So you worked with him for four or five years?
Anton J Gunn: Yeah, off and on. So literally I started working for him on January 2nd, 2007 on his campaign. And when he won the South Carolina primary, I kinda resigned from the campaign, not in a bad way, but I decided to run again for the state legislature. So I ran for public office. I got elected to the South Carolina House of Representative.
So I'm a former state legislator in South Carolina, and I served in office in 2009 and 2010. Those are the first two years of his presidency. But at the end of 2010, when the Affordable Care Act became law, They asked me to join the administration, so I literally left the state legislature and went to go serve at the US Department of Health and Human Services, as a regional director, and then I got promoted to the director of external affairs.
And then after that I spent about six months, in and out of the White House helping to plan the strategy for customer acquisition in the Affordable Care Act. And when I say customer acquisition, when people signed up for Obamacare, they became customers of a health insurance marketplace. Well, I was one of the architects of building the strategy.
On how we ended up acquiring 7 million customers that first year, and then ultimately about 23 million customers over time. So I knew how to come up with the right words that work, reach out to the right audiences in the communities, and really understand the people side of why people make buying decisions and what do they need, answered in terms of questions in order for them to get what they want.
So that. That ended up being all the way until about 20 14 is when I left the Obama administration.
Mike: Excellent. So let's transition from that to dive deeper into leadership. But by the way, if that's not a lesson in leadership, I don't know what is, but from the time you spent working with the president, what did you learn from him about leadership?
Anton J Gunn: Mike so much. I always try to narrow down the lessons that I learned from Barack Obama about leadership. And there's so many, and some of them are business related, or when I say business related, they're totally business related. They translate to business, but the others are really about you as a person.
And I'm gonna start with the person first, and that is one thing that I learned from Barack Obama is to be yourself. Don't ever try to be, a leader that other people want you to be or think you should be. Because what ends up happening is when we put on airs and pretend to be a leader, that we're really not and we're not authentic to ourselves.
What ends up happening is you set an expectation that you can't ever keep up. And when the times get tough, when times get tight and when there's difficulty, the real you is always going to come out. And so if you're a butt hole and you like to curse and you like to, you know, drink a lot, well, when times get tough, you gonna drink a lot more and you gonna curse a lot more.
But if you built a brand that I don't curse and I don't drink, Well, how long are you gonna be able to hold that up if that's not really who you are? And one of the things I always saw in Barack Obama is that he never tried to beat anybody that he was not. He knew he was awkward. He knew that he had big ears and he made fun of himself.
And he knew that he was very cerebral. So he was really smart and he wanted to learn from people, but he never tried not to be the college professor that he was. He was a college professor president. So that's lesson than one. The second personal lesson is this. Don't be afraid to show the people that you lead who you actually care about.
It's one thing I learned from Barack Obama. I knew that he loved his wife unconditionally and that he was a girl dad and he loved his two daughters, and he didn't mind showing you. The human side of him is that I'm not just a leader of the free world, but I'm a dad. That I, you know, I coach little league softball, basketball games and that, you know, I play with my girls in the backyard.
I read to them that, you know, I go on dates with my wife. He really showed you the full side of him. And what ends up happening in business so many times, we want to be that stoic, you know, badass leader for business, but we never let people know who our family is. Who do we care about outside of work.
So that's a second personal lesson. And the two lessons from business that I'll give you, are really big ones, and they're really clear and transparent, and ones that, that everybody should be able to understand is that as a leader, you better have a vision that's inspiring and compelling for all of the people around you.
Like a lot of leaders, they really get into the tactics. Sometimes they like focusing on the operational side of things, but I believe that every great CEO, if you are a great CEO, then you gotta be the visionary all the time. You gotta be the one that inspires people towards the goal and keep that vision big.
Now you gotta have a team who can execute on the operations and get into the details, but your job is to always be the good cop. Always be the big visionary, the one that says, Hey, I really want to get us out of this, and I can't get us out of this without you, and I need everybody bought in. And Barack Obama was great at giving the big picture vision, and I believe that that's critical to my success, is giving that vision.
The second lesson from an operational standpoint, from a leader's standpoint is this, always surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. And don't be afraid to listen to them when they have something that's better than what you thought of. And one thing I was real clear in the many meetings that I was in with Barack Obama, as smart as he was, as cerebral as he was, as a thought leader and someone who gathers intelligence, he was never afraid to ask you for your opinion.
He was never afraid to ask you what we could be doing better. And then when you gave him an answer that made rational sense that you could back up, with facts and data, that he would not be afraid to change what he was doing because you had a better way to get it done. And if he was not at all myopic, he had a big picture vision.
But as we all know, visions don't have all of the details. And what he allowed inside of his operational standpoint is to surround myself with people who are smarter than me about the details, tell 'em what my vision is, and if they can give me a better way to get there, then I'm all ears to listen on how we can execute in that way.
And so I could give you another a hundred lessons, but those two to me are some of the most powerful ones that I got from him is have that vision. And don't be afraid to surround yourself with people who are smarter than
Mike: Love that. And I actually see, you could tell me if you agree, but I see a real connection between, I think it was kind of personal leadership. Two business leadership, your second person leadership was, he wasn't afraid to show who he really cared about. And then this idea of surrounding yourself with people that are smarter than you.
To me, what both of those have in common, and it's what leaders get wrong way more often than they get right is this idea of vulnerability. The idea to show you are a real person. And when Covid, when we were like, man, it was a month or two into Covid.
Everybody was scared to death. They were gonna stay in business. I had to tell leaders, look, if you come to every Zoom meeting with your superhero cape on. And act like you've got all the answers and you're the smartest person in the room. And I said, everybody else is gonna be afraid if you can't show your vulnerability.
Everybody else is gonna be afraid to show theirs. And then you have no clue what's actually going on in your organization. And I think that the second personal point, and the second business point to me are both about the fact that you've gotta be confident enough in yourself and the people around you to show vulnerability.
Anton J Gunn: Totally. And another aspect of that, Mike, where I find that a lot of leaders and clients that I work with, leaders don't know how to admit when they screwed up. They're not willing to be vulnerable to say, listen, I got it wrong here. I made a mistake or I went in the wrong direction, or my plan last year was not a solid plan, and so I'm sorry for screwing up, but here we're together and we're gonna get it right.
That's another aspect of vulnerability is being able to admit when you're wrong and then apologize. When you make a mistake, and I think the greatest thing a leader can do is to be comfortable with saying, I'm sorry, when they screwed up. It's just, it's the honesty and vulnerability of knowing that you don't have all of the answers and you don't have everything figured out.
Anton J Gunn: I remember working with an organization, going through the pandemic. The leader was from like a deep northeast part of the country, like way, way up high north of Boston, and they didn't grow up in a household where people showed emotion, so they were operating their organization in the middle of the pandemic.
Thinking that they needed to be strong all of the time. And they told me about a circumstance that they were at a board meeting with the board and broke down and literally started crying in front of the board about how hard it was to manage through the pandemic and waited for the board to fire them.
Anton J Gunn: But here's what happened. The board said, we've been waiting for a year for you to show us some emotion. About what's been going on with the team. We know it's been hard, but you come in here, every board meeting, all positive, like you got all of the answers. And this is what I call toxic positivity. The person who pretends like the ship ain't sinking, I mean, remember the captain of the Titanic in the movie, there's nothing to see here.
Everything is fine. Today is gonna be great, and you've hit the iceberg. The ship is sinking. It's listening now, but you want to stand on the bridge and act like there's nothing to see here. And that's a big mistake is that leaders should always be okay with being honest about where things are as an organization and where you are as a person.
The more you do that, the more people believe in who you are and what you're doing to help them to get out.
Mike: Love it. And I just wrote down toxic positivity. I love this stuff. So talk a little bit about your new book is called Just Lead. Tell us a little bit about the book and why you decided to write it now.
Anton: Yeah, great question, Mike. So here's where we are. The reason why I wrote this book is for the last two years I've been getting lots of questions from clients. I literally have been keynoting across the country and doing a lot of LinkedIn live talking about the issues in the current American workplace and what do I mean, issues.
We know that since 2021, 80 million people have left their job. I mean, they've literally left their job in 2022. I think it was like 55 million people who've changed career positions. Now all of this is showing us is that people are making the decision to walk away from certain employers, certain managers, certain leaders, and certain teams.
And the question is, why? Why are people leaving? Well, we know the pandemic has changed the landscape in terms of what people deem to be important at work. It's not all about the salary, the benefits, and the bonuses anymore. Those things could be perfect in your organization, but guess what? People will still leave a job and go somewhere else.
And so the question is why? Why is for a lot of reasons, number one. Diversity is a real issue in the workplace, and I don't shy away from talking about the multiple dimensions of diversity. So it's not just race and gender identity or sexual orientation, but it's literally my background. Does anybody in the organization value my background that I bring a unique set of skills to the workplace?
Or do I feel appreciated when I show up in the workplace? Do you give me an opportunity to add value to certain conversations, or do you expect me to just stay in my lane and only do this? Another reason why people are leaving the workplace is because they want mobility within the company, which is, I may have started my career in the sales and marketing team, but I don't like sales and marketing.
I really wanna mover move over into compliance. Is there a pathway for me to leave from sales and marketing to compliance? Or is there a pathway for me to go from operations to finance. You know, it's like all of these things people want in the workplace, and then I get 'em. The third thing, the reason why people are leaving the workplace is because we all know this, Mike, is that people don't quit jobs. They quit leaders, they quit bad leaders. And so there's so many people who are struggling. On how to find an environment where they feel valued, respected, and included, and that they work for a leader that they actually admire. And I get calls from those leaders saying, listen, man, my best employee quit.
Or my team is falling apart. I can't get my team deeply engaged. You know, I'm not connecting with my team. Or now my team is more remote today than it ever were before. What do I do, Anton? What do I do? And so I wrote this book and when I mean book I call it an action guide because I tried to reduce my carbon footprint.
It's not a 500 word bibliography on how to be a leader. It's not that I wrote you a simple action guide to give you 44 actions, to break down barriers, boost your retention, and build a world-class culture. I want you to know that you gotta break down the barriers between you and the team that you lead. You gotta learn how to boost retention. Why do people quit a job? And where, why do they stay? What keeps a person employed in an organization? And then most importantly, how do you build a culture where you become the leader that everyone will admire?
And those employees are people who never want to quit. And so this action guy Mike, are simple tactical things that you can implement tomorrow morning to help you to break down those barriers between you and those team members. You don't know. To build a kind of culture where nobody wants to quit, but most importantly to make sure that you become the leader that they admire.
And it's a simple framework and I'm happy to give you any of these simple steps right here cause your audience I think will get great value. They just understand that it's some small things that matter, and I really try to teach em the small things in his book.
Mike: Excellent. So I'll let you kind of prioritize based on the ones where you think people are screwing up most or they're adding the most value. What's one? Let's see how many we'll get to, what's the first one?
Anton: I'm gonna give you three combined that if any of your listeners answer these three. If they're able to answer these three and do them well, you will be the kinda leader that nobody ever wants to quit, and you are gonna inspire people beyond belief. So here's the first one. Now I'm gonna just give you like this. Every employee that you meet, every employee that comes to work for you, every person who you hire are asking three questions every day when they show up to work.
When they walk into the office or when they log onto the teams meeting or the Zoom meeting, they're asking three questions, they're never gonna verbalize these three questions. As a matter of fact, you should probably pretend that they have a t-shirt on that has these three questions written on it. So here are the questions.
Question number one is, do you care about me? Question number two is, will you help me to be successful? And question number three is, can I trust you? Now, here's the point, Mike, your mission statement, your value statements, your personnel policies, they all say yes to those three questions. We care about our employees. We are helping every one of our employees to be successful, and we're one of the most trusted brands in the business.
But those employees, they don't give a rat's tale about the words to those three questions, want to see the answer to those three questions in your actions every day. if you don't know how to answer the question, I care about you, and let's be clear. The answer that I care about you is different depending on the individual employee.
Cause some people might say, well, if you pay me fairly then you're showing me that you care about me. But another employee might say, well, if you recognize me for the successes that I've done at work, you're showing me that I care about me. But then there's some employees that says, Mike, how could you ever care about me when you don't even know who I am? You don't even know anything about me. You don't know my wife's name. You don't know my cat's name. You don't know my favorite movie, my favorite sports team.
You come in every day bragging about the New York Giants. but not recognizing that I'm a Cowboys fan, and so that doesn't make me feel good To know that. So my main point, the first action that anybody, if you want to become the leader that everybody admires, then you gotta show the people that you lead, that you care about them.
But you can't do it if you don't know what makes them tick. What inspires them, what motivates them, what pisses them off? Why they show up to work every day. Because again, we all got choices. If 55 million people quit a job, then that's showing that people have a choice where they work.
But my question for every leader is, do you know why your team is still working for you? Why each individual to your team is still working? If you know the answer to that question, then that means you should be showing them that you care about them. And the second question is very simple. Will you help me to be successful? Cause nobody wants to go to work every day and fail.
So the question of helping them to be successful, are you giving them the tools, the information, and the resources that they need to succeed in the job? And do you understand that your job as a leader is to take the obstacles out of the way of them being successful? That's your job.
It's not about managing them and making sure they're short for lunch on time and making sure that they, you know, did they check the box? No, that's not your job. Your job is to ask a question. Do you have everything that you need to achieve the goals that we set out for this year? And whenever they tell you that they don't have something, your job is to get it or to remove the obstacle out of the way so they can be successful.
And if you can't remove the obstacle or get them what they need, then you probably got some other operational issues that you need to fix in your organization. And the third question is about trust. And I don't even have to talk about trust cause let me tell you why. If you don't answer that first question and answer that second question, they're never gonna trust you. They're just not. And the moment you, if you answer the first question and answer the second question, they'll start to trust you over time.
But the moment you've stop answering the question, You're gonna lose that trust. the leaders that I've found that have been most successful in the organizations that I work with, or that follow the principles that I teach in my keynotes, in my workshops, in my trainings are the leaders that understand that I always gotta start with knowing my people first and then understanding how I can show them that I care about them.
Anton: And I'll give you a simple example, and I'll close with this. The simplest example is a woman that used to work for me for me and, we were literally working together for three years and I went around as I do in every staff meeting. I have this routine at every staff meeting. The first 15 minutes of the staff meeting, I ask a, non-conventional question to the business that we're handling that day so we could be working on the next infrastructure project.
And my question is, your favorite restaurant? And I want every person on my team to tell me what their favorite restaurant is. So somebody says, Ruth Chris, and somebody gives me some specialty restaurant, somebody gives me something else. And then Sarah on my team says, olive garden is my favorite restaurant. And I'm thinking, olive garden.
Mike: You gotta fire Sarah. What? What's her problem?
Anton: Yes. Right. Well, so we all ask why Olive Garden? And this is what Sarah says when I was younger. My family would go to Olive Garden with my grandmother on Sundays, and it's what we did as a family. And when my grandmother passed away, we stopped going to Olive Garden and I really missed those fun and engaging family dinners with grandma when we go to Olive Garden.
So I took note of what Sarah said. So five months later we finished a big project. Sarah was instrumental in the project. Things went well on the project, so rather than me taking the whole team out to a Mexican restaurant or to Asian cuisine, I decided I was gonna get everybody on the team a gift card from their favorite restaurant.
Well, when I handed Sarah a $25 gift card to Olive Garden, and I said, I know your grandmother's not here, but I want you to go have a good time at Olive Garden like she was. She cried. And said, this is the best team I've ever been on in my life. Because you remembered that my favorite restaurant was Olive Garden. Now, Mike, I've had employees respond to me that way with simple things like what their favorite candy bar is or remembering the town that they grew up in.
And then if I ever traveled for a speaking engagement in a town that they grew up in, brought them something back to the office from their old hometown. These are the small things that add up to the big things. And so every leader is capable of learning about the people that they lead, and knowing what's important to them and showing them that you care by making what's important to them and important to you as a leader.
Mike: I love it. I love it because so often, I'm sure we both come across leaders where it's all about the leader.
Anton: Mm-hmm. Totally.
Mike: I can't my people, you know, why can't they do this? Why can't, how come they're not thankful about this? It's not about you.
Anton: No, Mike, that point about is not about you. You know, those three questions that I just gave you, I've had leaders say to me, well, my team should be answering those three questions for me. I. They should be caring about me as a leader. They should be helping me to be successful as a leader, and I'm questioning whether I can trust them.
And I say back to them, leadership is a privilege and a part of that privilege is your service to the people that you lead. The prerequisite of leadership is service. And so your responsibility is to meet them where they are, not the other way around. It's not about you. And if you think it's about you, then you don't deserve to lead.
Anton: The greatest amongst us are servants. We know that the Good Book tells us that Dr. King had in a speech one time that says anybody can be great because everyone can serve.
And we all think about the most successful organizations. The leaders are the ones who recognize their responsibility is to serve first and the lead second. So it ain't about you, it's about the people that you lead.
Mike: I love it. I love it and a great example of that is, I was actually working with a client a few months ago. One of the things I do with my clients is I help them assess their talent. They do it as a group. I work with a leadership team and they're figuring out who's, you know, a player, B player or C player and what we call toxic C players.
And I noticed the these, this team was talking about a whole bunch of folks that they categorized as B players as if it was their fault.
Like these B players. They do. And it hit me. By the way, the problem was me, cause I was calling them B players. And I said, wait a minute. I said, let's think of these folks as people performing at a B level.
Anton: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Mike: Their mother 30 years ago did not give birth to an eight pound, two ounce B player.
Anton: Correct.
Mike: Maybe they're a B player because you are not leading them in the right way. You're not coaching them in the right way. So you talk about being a servant.
Anton: Yes.
Mike: That's what being a servant's all about. You, you hired people. It's your responsibility
Anton: Mm-hmm.
Mike: To help them be the best they can. Not to just help them do more of what you know, what you're trying to get 'em to do. And it's all about you.
Anton: Yeah. And not only that, Mike, what sometimes what leaders forget is that, When you meet a person, when a person joins your team, let's say a person joins your team in 2023, and they're a seasoned leader, so this is the leadership team in an organization. That person who's coming to you has worked at multiple other places before, and when they come into your workplace, if you are thinking that they are totally divorced from their previous experiences, you're wrong.
So part of your job is to understand the environments that they've come from. What good lessons of leadership have they seen? What bad experiences that they have? And the more you understand that, the more you're able to get the best out of them by duplicating and repeating the great things that inspired them in the workplace and minimizing or eliminating the bad things are the reason why they left that other role. Because everybody leaves a job for a reason.
Sometimes it's money. Sometimes it's the team that you're on. Sometimes it's because you got mistreated or overlooked in the workplace, and so you're not gonna put up with it anymore. And sometimes you just leave for a better opportunity. But when they come to you, you should always want to know know what can I do right now to help you to be the most successful?
Like in the book, Just Lead. I give leaders some questions that you should ask every person on your team. What's one thing that you love about your job There's a question that you should always ask. Number two is, what's one thing I could do to make you more successful at work?
And then the third question is, if you were me, if you were in charge for a day, what's one thing you would change about our organization? Those are three great questions that if you ask every person on your team that reports to you and you got good line of sight, let's say you got. Four direct reports, and you shouldn't have many more than five. But let's say you got four direct reports and you ask all four people, what about their job they love?
What do they love about their job? Number two, what's one thing you could do to help them to be more successful at work? And then the third question is, if you or me, what's one thing you would change about our organization? Well, you got your passions. You understand their passions of what they love about work, okay?
So you can feed into those passions. Number two, you got a short list of things that you can do to help them to be more successful at work. And then number three, you got a list of four things that you need to work on as a leader to solve for the organization, because chances are that third question is once one thing you can improve about our company, you're gonna hear repeat answers from most people on your team.
Cause they're all dissatisfied generally around the same thing. And so if you wanna solve the big problems, take obstacles out your team's way, you gotta ask them questions, and when they give you the answers, just do what they said you need to do. it.
Mike: So both of these things, right? getting to the point where you could, you know, showing people you care, you're willing to help them, they can trust you. And then the questions you just brought, I mean, none of this is rocket science, right? Oh my God. I could do this, Anton, but I need a three month training program that teach me how to do this.
Now what holds, and you don't have to just limit it to these two things. You got, you got 44 things in your book, but what holds leaders back? I love this thing. I call the law of positive intent. I assume everybody's just trying to do the best they can with the resources they have.
So leaders that aren't doing these things are not bad people. They're not trying to be bad leaders. They're doing the best they can with the resources they have. So if we assume that what's holding them back, this stuff isn't difficult. Why aren't more people doing this?
Anton: Yeah. I'll give it the four. Okay. And it is simple. But it's not easy. The reason why, it's simple is because these are things that we all know. These are universal things. I didn't break off any new ground in terms of leadership development and people development and people management.
But it's not easy because we're so busy, filling our days with things that we think are productivity, but then nothing but activity. We're distracted on the wrong stuff in the workplace, and we don't focus on the people. We want to have the quarterly meeting about the quarterly numbers, about the team who didn't meet their goals in the quarter.
And we don't ever talk about the people. We talk about the products, we talk about the services, we talk about everything else, but the people. And so the four Cs that it comes down to for me are why leaders don't do these things. The first C is that they don't have the capacity. Meaning that they don't have the hours in the day.
They make the excuse, they don't have the hours in the day to do all of the things that I need to do that you laid out, Anton. I mean I don't have time for touchy feeling meetings all day. I got products I gotta sell, I gotta do this, I gotta do that. So they don't think they have time, they don't have the capacity to do it. The second C is the competency. And again, the reason why I write a book is because I know leaders don't know all 44 of these actions. They might know one or two of them.
They might know three of them, but they don't know all of them. And so you have to have the competency to do it. And so I'm giving you that in the book, just lead, and I'm giving you that like you're giving it to 'em every day.
So this is a second C. Then you move on beyond competency, you have to have what I call the capability. Okay. Capability for me is real specifically, do you have the physical wherewithal, the heart to care about your people. Do you have the disposition to care about people? Do you know how to smile?
Do you know how to listen? Do you know how to even ask the questions that I ask? I mean, cause you know, think about it. Those questions are very simple, Mike. But it would be a mistake for a leader to email his team and says, Hey guys. Can you respond back in bullet format the things that you care about and send that to them via email? It's not gonna work, bro.
This is not a email conversation. This is an interpersonal conversation done in a one-on-one meeting in 30 minutes. But again, some people don't have the ability to ask those kind of questions. That's the third C and in the fourth C, courage bro. Do you have the courage to do it differently than you were trained to do it as a leader, because we know a lot of us take our leadership cues from the leaders that we work for, how our first boss, we replicate the things that our first boss did.
Because we saw them as a leader and we thought, this is how we get up the chain of command. How we move up the ladder is to do what we saw other leaders do. But we know in the eighties, in the seventies, and even in the early nineties, there were some bad examples of leadership, really bad examples that drove things hard and didn't have a heart-centered role of a leader, and really weren't comfortable talking about the touchy feely stuff.
So you gotta have the courage to break out of the mold of what you've learned before. You gotta have the courage to do that. And that's the main reason why people don't do it, is because they don't have those things lined up. And if they do, then they're the kind of leaders that we all have confidence in that we really do wanna work for. And in the 21st century, we are seeing more and more leaders who are quitting.
I mean, Mike. In the first six months of 2022, 774 CEOs quit their jobs. Why? Because they didn't have the four Cs. That's my opinion. That they just, you know, they couldn't do it. I don't have the capacity, I don't have the competency, you know, I'm not committed to doing it, and I definitely don't have the courage to talk about guns and abortion. And why did I say that? Because employees today, gen Z employees that are now a third year workforce.
They want to know, CEO, what's your position on guns, on assault weapons? And I know you sell widgets and you're thinking, why do these kids care about my position on assault weapons? Because they want to know who you are. They want to see some level of vulnerability that your values match the company's values. Do your values match their values?
And there's element brand research that says that 18 to 35 year olds will leave an organization in a heartbeat that don't have values that align with them. People are making choices, and your key to retaining your talent might be you being vulnerable to talk about the things that are important to you.
Mike: Are there folks who just aren't cut out for leadership? Whether it's the capability part the competency part. Are there folks who just, they might be good people, they're just not cut out for this? Or could everybody be coached to be a great leader?
Anton: So, I fundamentally believe that leadership, s leadership skills are not born innately in anyone. Like, and you're not born a leader. Anybody who says that they're born a leader is lying. You're you. You become a leader over time through your experiences. But I also recognize that not everybody is built ready to be a leader. And that's why I'm totally transparent in most of my keynotes.
You know, one of my last slides in my keynote is, do you deserve to lead? you deserve, because you sometimes get put in a leadership role because you outlasted everybody else. I mean, how many people we know that, you know, Bob from accounting has been here 25 years, so we gonna make him director of the accounting department because he outlasted everybody else.
But it doesn't mean Bob is built to be a leader, either wants to be a leader. He got put in that position by default. Okay? And so the question for Bob is, do you deserve to lead? And Bob might say, well yes, I deserve to lead cuz I've been here for 25 years. No, that doesn't entitle you to leadership. What entitles you to leadership is, do you know how to answer the three questions for every person on your team? Are you a servant, Bob?
Do you believe that your role as a leader is to serve the team that you lead? Or is your job to tell them what time to go to lunch, what time to turn in their reports, and when they're able to take vacation? If that's your mindset, Bob, you're a manager, but you're not a leader, and there's a big difference between management and leadership.
So I sum it up and say, Everybody can be a leader, but everybody doesn't deserve to be a leader. And it's okay for you to not be a leader if you don't believe that you are a leader and that you want to fill that role and play in that position. It's okay to not lead teams and lead people. It's okay.
You can be a positional leader, which is, or when I say a position really situational leader, that you can be a leader. By your independent actions and behaviors and what you do as a team contributor, but you don't have to be a people leader. There's no requirement for you to do that.
Mike: I love it and I love that question. Do you deserve to lead, and I'm taking notes. You see me taking notes there. There's some real key questions here. So I love that as we start to kind of round the home stretch of this, tell me what, how do you work with clients? I know you get out there and do keynotes, give us a sense of some of the different ways you work with your clients.
Anton: Yeah. So, here's a pathway. I recognize it that one size does not fit all for any organization or for any entity. And so I do my best to tailor my products and services to meet needs. And so again, we've been talking about a book. For some people, they get this paperback book and they can read it in one sitting. They got a game plan and they just need to implement. That's okay. I'll give you an access opportunity for that.
But a lot of organizations, they start with a keynote speech, which is, you know, we need to motivate our teams. Or we got an annual meeting coming up, or our annual leadership conferences coming up, and we really need someone to level set for the organization what we all should be doing and why we are here. And I get hired in as a keynote speaker and I do a 60, 90 minute keynote. That really gives people the building blocks of how you build diverse, high performing teams in a world-class workplace culture that you can identify because of the great leaders that everybody admires, and because people don't want to quit.
But I also work with leadership teams similar to what you do, and sometimes, it requires a more in-depth executive retreat where the senior leadership team needs to spend a day of getting on the same page. And when I say getting on the same page, Many times we assume that because we brought somebody onto our leadership team that they see the world the same way we do. And I will tell you that's a fallacy if you believe that. But secondly, it is also not in your best interest if your team sees the world the same way that you do.
And so I really unpack how do we define what does working together look like? What is our vision for the organization? And is everybody committed and is everybody answering those four Cs when it comes to building the culture? So that can take place in executive retreat. I also do what I call, long tail work, which is I really want to help you to transform the culture in your organization.
So we can't change your entire culture in a 90 minute keynote speech, and we won't change your entire culture in an executive retreat, that we really have to do a dissection of what's wrong in the organization because you can't fix what's wrong until you know what's wrong.
So it really is assessing your culture. So I do a leadership and cultural assessment that takes me about, 90 days to really review the breadth and depth of some of the challenges in your organization and includes some survey work, a few other things, really trying to understand, what do people think about the place that they work.
And this is different from your employee engagement survey or any climate survey that you do. I have specialized questions that I ask in a different way than others do, and I want to assess your culture. And then after that, when we come back, I'll give you a report on it, and then we lay out, so what do we need to share with the full scope and scale of the organization after the executive team has heard it all?
And then we start to implement some quarterly training for your leaders, because again, I believe that everything rises and falls on leadership. So whether it's the C-Suite team or whether it's that level right below the C-Suite or those mid-level managers who are literally making or breaking your organization. They don't believe it, but they are.
I spend time with helping those leaders answer those three questions for every person and giving them some context of how they can lead and manage better in the organization. And so those are some of the things that I do. I really, believe that the best organizations are really training and development organizations masquerading in their core business is that you might sell some widget or another. But really what you're doing is training and developing your people to be most effective at selling that widget and collecting payment for their services and reinvesting it.
So I believe that I help organizations become training and development organizations developing the leadership competencies and the capabilities to basically execute on their core business.
And you can't do it without a people strategy and a leadership strategy. And that's where I sit.
Mike: Love it. Powerful, powerful stuff. And all this stuff is gonna be in the show notes, Anton, but tell us if someone wants to find out more about you, buy your books, where should people go?
Anton: I'm gonna make it simple and easy for you, Mike, and because I love you and you're just a great guy.
You're doing incredible work. I got a free giveaway for all of your listeners. So if they go to antongunn.com/toolkit. I'm gonna give them access to my Just Lead toolkit. So before you buy the book, if you want to buy the book, you can.
I definitely not gonna dissuade you from doing that, but I got some free resources to teach you the 10 qualities of world-class leaders. I'll even give you all of the nine pivotal points that I share in my most requested presentations, and also give you some tools to help you to know how to people build great teams that communicate well. I put it all in the toolkit. I'm gonna make it free and available for everybody.
You just gimme an email address and I'll send you that toolkit again, antongunn.com/toolkit. And it's a great resource for everyone that will give you some practical stuff that you can use right away, including those three questions. So you might have wrote 'em down, maybe you're driving and you couldn't get this, but I'm telling you right now, you go to antongunn.com/toolkit and get the Just Lead toolkit and you'll get everything that we talked about then some.
Mike: And some advice, do it because if you don't, he's gonna call you like 15 times all your different office. I mean, this guy.
Anton: I'm gonna hound you I'm gonna be relentless, nonstop.
Mike: Excellent stuff, great resource, Anton this was great. Thanks so much for doing this.
Anton: Thank you for having me. I appreciate you very much.