How to Build a Leadership Bridge with Patrick Veroneau

we spend a lot of time trying to think about it in terms of how do we get people to trust us and he sort of flipped it to say that really trust can go the other way of letting people know like I trust you in terms of your ability to get this done or work through this problem and and oftentimes what we find is as uncomfortable as that might be at times for people especially if we like to have control over things that it's almost counterintuitive it it can motivate the other person even more so to want to make sure that they don't let you [Music] down Patrick thank you so much for joining me on the Leto business podcast thank you so much for having me I really appreciate the the time to be here sure so our listeners are used to when I I have a guest that was introduced by another guest I always say that's the purpose and that's one of the beauties of the show we get great conversations with one guest and they said you know what you got to bring on this Mr so and so on the show so you were introduced by someone that was already on the show so I got to see a little bit of the work you do I would love our listeners to get a little bit of feel of what you do I know that you worked 15 years in biotech and now you do all about leadership Consulting tell us a little bit about the past and what got you with what you're doing now yeah sure I I will tell you leadership and and personal development I would say the both have always been something that's been important to me and when I was in the Biotech Industry for about 15 years I was in sales I was in training I was in management what to me was so valuable about being in that industry is that everything that we did was based on on Research there was a study that generally would validate why we were asking somebody to do something and as I started to get involved with sales training or leadership development I took the same approach was that there was research that would back up why certain Behavior certain things that we did created either engagement or disengagement in in the employees that reported to us and certainly those that are familiar with sites like uh Gallup or pres gany they're involved with surveying organizations globally and what they look at is engagement numbers on a standard set of assessment questions and we'll find that there's a trend or has been a trend I would say for probably 20 years now is that in organizations about a third of employees are engaged and about two-thirds of employees are disengaged and if you look at at some of the research there it suggests that about 70% of an employees engagement or disengaged engagement in terms of how they show up is the direct result of who they report to directly so when you look at that to me training and developing leaders to be able to inspire and engage employees is vitally important and I would say even more so in today's environment where there seems to be so much more of this fight for talent right and not only getting talent but then retaining it that's where behaviors become so important yeah and it's such an important point and I think a lot of business owners are putting a lot of effort in putting out great offers to attract new talent and and they don't focus enough on the retaining part and I think what you just mentioned is so important which is vital and so we look I'm working with a large organization right now about 7,000 employees and they have about 500 managers that we're um working through in terms of all the way from front line up to the Executive Suite and uh talking about the the importance of onboarding how important that is right it's so difficult to get people well we know again a lot of the data that's out there in terms of when you don't onboard people properly when they don't feel a connection to the group that they're with they immediately start to question did I make the right decision exactly right so to me it's the best investment we can make is making sure that when we bring people on board one is on boarding really starts before they show up it starts in the interviewing process but that we make sure that when people get there they immediately start to feel a sense of connection to the organization I want to start with a question on this topic obviously we already started but I you know to put you know start the conversation about digging into leadership is I want to start with the title of your book the leadership Bridge yeah which obviously is not a typical title and using the word bridge probably there's something behind it so so give us a little bit of explanation that what do you exactly at what's the metaphor of bridge sure there is actually I mean there is certainly a connection there and if you think of it this way is that every relationship we have with somebody else I think of it is it's a bridge that we build with that person so if we were to use the example of let's say the Golden Gate Bridge well if we look at that one cable that runs Tower to Tower it's about 3 feet in diameter but in reality it's about 20,000 plus individually wrapped cables and to me that's it's the same as the relationships we have with other people and that the more we behave in ways that are positive with somebody else the stronger that relationship becomes with them so to go along with that leadership Bridge what I did was I developed a model that I use called cables which is based around six research behaviors that to me these are the behaviors that when we model these on a consistent basis we build this bridge either with co-workers or with people that report to us or family members it to me it doesn't matter where it is the beauty of these six cables that we talk about the bridge build better wherever we're modeling these and I see it in my own personal life with my kids with my wife with my siblings that the more I behave in a way that's that demonstrates these cables or models them the relationships become stronger would you mind um sharing some of those cables with us sure so again we think about this as an analogy we're building a bridge and we build this bridge with cables so each of these six behaviors the first one being consistency is that we walk the talk is what we say what we do the same thing right and and I think that's so vitally important that's our first cable the next Cable in that is around what I would call appreciation and that's recognizing people but in two different ways we recognize people for what they do right for their contributions that they make but we also recognize or appreciate people for who they are and that speaks to the diversity of organizations right that we celebrate that that we come with different backgrounds and experiences and all of those things that go into diversity the next that we talk about is belongingness and this is about really the need to create a sense of connection with somebody else either a family member or a you know a team as part of an organization then we move on to listening is the L cable that we talk about and and I talk about this really in four specific ways is in terms of how we listen one is when we're really listening we listen with our eyes first so we're watching for what other people do body language facial expressions and and when we're trained on them in that regard Guard we're really very focused on on listening to them in terms of who they are right we're not distracted by doing other things and looking at email or who comes into the room so that's the first then we listen with our ears and when we listen with our ears we're listening for tone of voice the word choice that somebody uses and picking up on Clues there in terms of what they're saying right yeah next we listen with our mind and that really is about listening from the standpoint of curiosity and when you think about listening from the standpoint of curiosity it requires me to put any value judgments that I have almost aside because I'm trying to listen to you from a standpoint of trying to at least understand your perspective where you're coming from and it gives me an opportunity maybe to question you know this is what I hear you saying is this what you mean and then lastly we listen with a sense of heart or we listen from a standpoint of empathy and that's we listen from the perspective of imagining if the roles were reversed how would I want the other person to listen to me and if you think about when you listen on all four of those levels which I think is difficult but doable it to me it's a skill that we develop is that our ability to resolve problems and conflicts becomes so much more doable when we're listening on all four of those levels so the e in the in this cables model is about empathy by itself there there's so much need for our ability to just put ourselves where somebody else is and this doesn't mean that empathize to the point that we aren't able to be decisive or assertive on things but we need to be able to position ourselves into thinking where somebody else is and the last cable that we talk about in the cables model is around specifics and that's a a two-parter as well and the first part is about setting clear expectations Clarity uh and and the other part is about holding each other accountable accountable to to the clear expectations and when I go into organizations often times if there are issues that uh are causing problems the specifics is the issue either we set clear expectations that we're really good at that policies procedures but what we're not as good at is holding people accountable to following through on those this is great and I think it's so important I want to ask you a followup question which is based on your expertise working with leaders where do you see people lacking the most of these different you know from the cable system so to speak yeah so there are two that I would find one is listening I think is very difficult for us and I would say even since covid I've probably seen a trend to we listened to respond and listening to respond is really I'm just waiting for you to finish so that I can tell you my point of view and why I'm still right and I think that's actually devolved to we now listen to undermine in a lot of cases where people will then say you're stupid you're this you're that you're ignorant oh w we don't really listen to understand so listening is the first part and again I would say setting clear expectations and and holding each other accountable to those is is the other challenge yeah it's amazing let me ask you speaking about leadership one of the things is we've seen a trend in this will um be different on smaller to midsize companies versus large corporations that you have a better you know process of getting promoted to leadership role let's call it these small mom and pop businesses maybe they have 10 employees 50 employees 100 employees a lot of those leaders are just people from within that have grown to become leaders and they didn't go to formal training as far as now I'm going out from being you know doing a project to becoming a leader of a project and I have people reporting to me uh where would you say is the places where those leaders should focus first in in making sure that they're setting themselves a proper Foundation to become a leader in terms of their development yes yeah so for me what I have found most valuable is right I have this model called cables there's a step before that that I think is really important we talk about social needs and there's a model that I came across well over 10 years ago that was developed by a a neuroscientist named David Rock and the model is around what's called scarf and I've kind of tweaked it a little bit and how I use it present day but the basis of this is to say that we as humans all have these social needs and it's not as though everybody has the need to fill all of these buckets the same but I think it's really important as we interact with other individuals is to understand that we do all have these social needs so if we were to just use the scarf model which is the one that rock introduced the first need in this scarf modelist acronym is about status and it's about another person's need to feel valued appreciated respected right so to think about that as a leader I think it's important for us to recognize that we all have that on some level the next one is certainty and that's the need for people to feel as though they understand like what what are the rules of the road so what are the expectations of me and when we're in environments where it's vague or inconsistent that creates problems for us the next one is around autonomy in this model that we all have a need on some level to feel as though we have some control over our destiny which is interesting right because as an organization well we can't just all show up and do whatever we want to satisfy that need for autonomy and it doesn't need to be that way right we can have both whereas a leader I could simply say this is what needs to be done by the end of the week but then ask the individual doing it how do you think you'll be able to accomplish that by the end of the week that provides autonomy for them because I'm not sort of dictating exactly how things need to be done the next one is in this model is around relatedness and it's again this need to feel connected to an organization to other individuals and then the last one is around fairness right so people want to feel as though it's we have similar rules right we everybody sort of held to the same standard ards so that's one part that I think is really important for new leaders the other part that I think is probably equally as as important is personal development in in leadership and what I mean by that is that if I'm not in a place where I feel a sense of well-being for who I am and a and a level of comfort in terms of my own place it's very difficult for me to be there for other people if I'm not comfortable in my own skin so to speak sure and i' I've seen it and I've been involved in different companies where you have an unhealthy leader on the personal development side and you know you can't grow your business if you you yourself can grow yeah yeah and and again that's why so in the leadership Bridge the book that I wrote the first section of that book is all about personal development needing to find out who you are individually before you can be there for other people wow I I want to dig in a little bit on the personal development side but I want to go back to what you said about the scarf model and one of the things which obviously we touched on which is autonomy I think this is an important point and I've seen a lot of leaders suffer or they just don't understand the leadership role when it comes to you know starting to give over responsibilities and delegate projects to their team and I think it's a twofold one is it's a problem with the person delegating understanding what really delegation looks like and and the other side sometimes it means that you know the the team member wants the autonomy and I think what you mentioned before is is a great point where the autonomy is you know what you need to do but you're asking the person how they're going to be doing it as you mentioned before I want to see if we could go a little bit deeper in that because I think I've seen this as a huge challenge for leaders especially in the early stages where employees today's day and age are looking are are just thirsty for the autonomy and feel that that this is my project this is what something I have achieved but sometimes it's too early in the process that that employee has not yet um demonstrated that they could run the project on their own and becomes like a free-for-all how do you balance that yeah so it's interesting when we talk about that I think of cables again right that last behavior is around specifics and it's clear expectations these are about conversations with this individual of maybe making them aware of wanting to be able to give them more autonomy right more leeway to be able to do this but it needs to come in steps of the expectation of I I need to see a little more in terms of progress here it's not that I don't trust you but just in the nature of this type of project here are some Milestones that that I'm going to expect that we hit so that when you hit those that provides more ability to take this on your own right yeah so I understand that and the question is only and this comes down to the culture of a company and sometimes leaders and especially I would say in the last few years when hiring became a bigger challenge retaining became a bigger Challenge and you have sometimes leaders that are afraid to make move or to be very decisive and say the the specifics as you mentioned before and sometimes that also is you know the empathy kicks in as you mentioned before let's say somebody's going through a rough time personal and then the work is lacking and as a leader you don't know like to what extent do does my empathy need to go to far the ultimately the company is suffering because I'm not getting the output that that we need to get from this individual how do you lead how do you how would you train a leader to know what to what extent does the empathy have to kick in versus at one point you have to say you know you have to stand up for the success of the company you bring up a great point because when we talk about empathy right especially I think it's it's more one of the words that we hear more often now in terms of leaders needed to demonstrate empathy exactly with that though and and I speak of this in in the groups that I work with are saying that empathy has a has sort of a a liability to it as well when we empathize so much that we are not able to make decisions that we need to make right I can empathize with you in your position that you're in and the struggle that you're having but at some point I also need to balance that with the survival or the the responsibility of running the business yeah right and again I go back to having conversations around listening right where I'm having questions about asking the person what are the challenges are facing right now how can I support you in terms of making sure that we're able to hit these Milestones that we need to be hitting right I think the clear we can be of saying I I appreciate your the challenges that you're feeling but we need to find a way to balance that with work that still needs to get done here and I would put it back on the other person to say from an autonomy standpoint right is how do you think you're going to be able to do that got it so so you're bringing in that person into the conversation as far as make sure got it because if you think about it right they're they're the only ones that can really solve it if it's their problem I will be there to support them but I I want to hear from them how do you think you're going to be able to work through this and when we do that I think back to an interview that I had with um stepen mvy who wrote a book last year called trust and Inspire yeah and one of the interesting things in that book is when he talked about trust he said you know as Leaders we spend a lot of time trying to think about it in terms of how do we get people to trust us and he sort of flipped it to say that really trust can go the other way of letting people know like I trust you in terms of your ability to get this done or work through this problem and and oftentimes what we find is as uncomfortable as that might be at times for people especially if we like to have control over things that it's almost counterintuitive it it can motivate the other person even more so to want to make sure that they don't let you down that they deliver on what you're asking them to do yeah one of the things that I've been you know pretty Adam about when it comes to leadership like we have these reviews you know we call it KRA reviews quarterly monthly whatever depending on where you are at in the company and most of those conversations are what the leader has has prepared himself for to share with a team member because most of the times okay we you know call you in from we let's schedule a meeting I I need to review everything we like your ke all serious by us we've implemented a system where like a couple of days before person will get an email that in a few days we'll schedule it and for the employee to prepare themselves just as much as the leader has to prepare themselves because guess what they're in the front lines they're sitting there doing their stuff for the company and they have a lot of times they have very valuable information to share how the company could improve how the communication could improve and everything like that so I think it's just you hit on like this is a very important point to make sure that you really get the feedback from the team members as well yeah and it's along those lines that when I go into an organization especially one that might be having challenges say you know the answers to the problems that you're facing right now are within the walls of this organization for the most part what happens though is that people don't get tapped on the shoulder to to be asked like how do you think you can solve this and especially frontliners they often are the ones that see things at the level that really needs to change and I think there's an an older mentality of well they clearly don't know how to address this issue right they're good at what they do but let's do this sort of serious thinking at at the executive level or at a higher level when in reality they very much know many of the things that would make our jobs as Leaders much easier exactly let's spend a few minutes to speak about company culture how much of that relies on the leader and what would be the responsibility on a day-to-day like on an actional practical advice of a leader cultivating a culture of Excellence yeah I I think it it certainly starts with a leader we often times s in an organization mission statement values people think those are their culture their culture is how people behave doesn't matter what they say on a website or in their you know brochure the the culture is basically how people behave that has to start with the leader at the top and I'll go back to the model of cables is that if we think about this from an organizational standpoint consistency we need to walk the talk right if we say that values that we have that we share accountability and collaboration trust respect yet we have a leader that they don't model those things they don't show respect for people on the front lines then what is that what does that let people know what we say and what we do is not the same things so that that type of culture um probably starts to to become a contagion there's disrespect throughout the organization and again if you think about this from that model of cables the beginning of this the the first C in this is consistency walk in the talk the last one is setting clear expectations they're like bookends right so if we think about it from this standpoint whatever we say our culture is the values that we stand for how we describe our organization to me that's the clear expectations that we've set so now as a leader I need to model that first to say here's the here's me walking the talk and if I'm doing it it makes it easy for me to hold everybody else accountable all the way down the line it reminds me a couple of I've have done some workshops on leadership training and we speak about you know culture core values and one of the things one of the people pulled up the website he was a rental broker a firm and one of the core values was integrity and I asked him let me ask you if you have two apartments that one is better for you because you make more commission while the other is better for the tenant which one are you telling your people to actually show so he says of course the one that I make more commission so he says I have no problem do you doing that but you cannot have core one of the core values integr it's such a great Point here's what when I talk about values you write that is so accurate and I will say If you think about the values that you have as an organization they do two things for you they allow you to provide a compass in terms of the decisions you make where again to your point if we say that Integrity is one of our values to me that's like a litmus test of saying this decision that we're going to make right now is it aligned with our value if it's not one of two things needs to happen either we don't make that decision or as you said we get a we take that value off of our list I think it also does it for behaviors as well where I can ask myself is my behavior right now aligned with Integrity or not and to me those are the two just powerful ways that we can leverage organizational values as opposed to just sort of having them out there on our website or in you know on boarding material that we live those values because they provide such such an opportunity for us when we really leverage those in terms of how we make decisions and if you think about this from the standpoint of social needs if we are if fairness is right is one of those social needs that if we walk the talk if we model our values then fairness probably gets satisfied on a very regular basis just by us aligning ourselves with what we say we stand for exactly I want to go back to personal development as I said before and then I'm not going to keep you too long I know that you have a hard step so on personal development for leaders listening to this most leaders will tell you I'm so busy I I have so much stuff on my I plate how do I get to personal development well some practical advice how somebody could consistently add some development into this schedule yeah love it so there's a model that I created called Power and it's based on some work that was done by a researcher named Shan Aker a number of years ago and I think this was done in in 2008 and I believe it was done down in New York City in in the financial district he worked with an organization down there in 2008 and it was it was basically around creating an environment of Happiness um he called it the 21-day happiness Challenge and what he asked individuals to do is there were five activities people had to every day write down three things they're grateful for they had to do something for somebody else during the day they had to write down what they were grateful for during the day so what went well today they had to go for a walk for about 10 minutes or do some type of exercise but only for 10 minutes and the last thing that they had to do was they had to focus on their breath or do some type of meditation for just two minutes so if you think of that whole process it takes far less than an hour to do that in a day but the power of that is there's so much research behind that so the as I said I wrote this journal that I use with my clients called power and I believe it's on my LinkedIn page so people can download it it's on my website so power stands for those five activities so the p is praise right it's write down three things you're grateful for the O is about others doing something for somebody else the W is about writing at the and generally the action is right at the end of the day two sentence about what went well during the day the E is about exercise again just find some time right 10 minutes is all we need and the r is about relaxation and that's about those two minutes of maybe focusing on just Square breath which is just breathing in for four seconds hold for four seconds breathe out for 4 seconds wait and then do it again just for two minutes you could set your alarm on your phone and do that so in terms of personal development well how does that impact well we know that in the 21-day happiness challenge what they found was that when people completed the 21 days they didn't even have to do all of them every day but people reported themselves as being happier when they went six months out they they surveyed again and they found that those people that were continuing to do several of these activities also found themselves to be happier in and I bring that up because we know that from a personal development standpoint if I'm in a better place myself I'm happier my well-being is stronger I tend to make better decisions so it's sort of like a byproduct of that when we're not stressed we're we make better decisions our brain is not as clouded on things like that so that's just a a quick approach that you can ask yourself and I talk about it so it's like having a Power Hour in the day so that analogy I'll just add this is amazing I'll just add that sometimes it's the small things that count because that gives you the momentum to do okay if this helped so much what else could I do imagine if I just spend another half an hour and a totally different activity and if it's funny when I speak about this to individuals I say look at if you can't do anything anything if you just wake up every morning just practice writing down three things you're grateful for yeah if nothing else and that takes right for the even for the person that says I I have no time I guarantee you have time to write down three things you're grateful for and the we know the a number of studies that have been done you know if you were to go on PubMed which is a a pretty popular research site they're probably over 4,000 articles on the impact that gratitude has on our well-being if you would have just started there and you think about starting your day from a place of gratitude you can't approach challenges the same way as if you're starting from a place of what am I grateful for because when you really start to leverage this what you can start doing is you can start to find ways to be grateful for your challenges amazing because when you're grateful for your challenges it takes a a lot of the sting away from those and you approach them differently right then it becomes an opportunity to grow from that when you're grateful for the challenges that's where growth comes from absolutely I love it I love it where could people find out more about you and the stuff you do so obviously I've got a website emry leadership group which you have to listening to your last guest on SEO I'm probably going to have to take another look at that LinkedIn is also probably the best place to connect with me that's where I post most of my things and write articles and I also have a podcast that I I do as well called learning from leaders is another place where you can certainly listen to what I'm about so those are beautiful for the links resources mentioned this episode check out the show notes at www.p group.com podcast we will link to the LinkedIn and to your website and to your podcast let's close with a four rapid fire questions are you ready yes so I'm ready number one a book that change your life Think and Grow Rich number two oh yeah absolutely number two a piece of advice you got that you never forget read other people with respect beautiful number three anything you wish you could go back and do differently I've thought about this one often and I would say that although there are things I wished I hadn't they have shaped who I become going forward so I wouldn't change them wow and last and final question what's the on your bucket list to achieve uh new book for this year on this one is on personal development not on leadership so this is a personal invite when the book comes out you come back on the show to speak about personal development fully I would love that thank you very much Patrick thank you so much for joining us I know your time is valuable that is why in the name of our listeners we forever be grateful for sharing some of your time with us today it's been blast thank you so much I truly appreciate the opportunity to come on here my pleasure wishing you the [Music] best