Discover Your Leadership Style with Melanie Parish
Most entrepreneurs don’t start out thinking of themselves as leaders. Besides an entrepreneur, you might see yourself as a product creator, service provider, coach, marketers, copywriter, or any other number of titles.
Then your business hits a point where you can’t do everything yourself, you bring on a team, and next thing you know, people are coming to you with decisions that need to be made. Suddenly, you’re a leader.
On this week’s episode James and Dean welcome Melanie Parish, author of The Experimental Leader, to break down what makes a good leader and how to discover your leadership style. If you feel like parts of your business aren’t operating as well as they could be, tune in to hear what you, as the leader of your business can do about it (and hear the leadership mistakes to avoid that could be contributing to the problem).
Outline of This Episode
- 4:50 Is leadership harder for entrepreneurs?
- 8:30 Characteristics of a good leader
- 13:03 The Experimental Leader
- 19:01 What it means to be neutral as a leader
- 22:02 How do we measure success?
- 27:13 Don’t try to fix everything yourself
- 33:02 Hiring and firing
What makes a good leader?
Melanie advocates a neutral leadership style, where you don’t react to what’s happening around you. It’s not that you shouldn’t have standards for your business and team. It’s that you stay neutral so that when your team brings you decisions that need made, you’re able to take things in, ponder them, ask questions, and send it back to your team. By approaching leadership in this way, you’re helping people move tasks forward vs. being a micromanager.
Leaders are willing to experiment
A lot of people get so attached to their ideas they’ll insist on sticking with the bad ones for months, even years, longer than they should have. Melanie, on the other hand, sees leadership as a willingness to experiment. Any time you want change to happen in your business, you’re trying something new to see whether it works. Whether it does or not, you have data you can use to conduct the next experiment. Approaching idea implementation as experimenting protects you from clinging to the bad ones and helps you flesh out the good ones.
Pass the buckets to your team
Think of the tasks your team members are assigned as buckets. For example: Scheduling out an email sequence. Your role as the leader isn’t to take charge of your team’s buckets (in this example, to schedule the email sequence). It might be to approve the sequence, or perhaps write it (if that’s something you handle in your business). But not to schedule it. When your team hands you a bucket, make the decision and pass the bucket back.
Stop fixing everything yourself
When someone on your team is responsible for certain tasks, and they aren’t fulfilling their duties in the correct way, it’s tempting to fix it yourself (i.e. put yourself in charge of the bucket). The problem with doing that is, your team member never learns how to solve the problem themselves. Remember: As the leader of your business, your job is NOT to collect buckets. It’s to make a decision and pass the bucket back. If a team member isn’t performing, they might need more training, more feedback, or it might just be they’re the wrong person for the job. Tune into the episode to hear where to draw the line between investing in more training for your team member and recognizing they aren’t the right person for the job.
When firing someone is a gift
In this episode Melanie shares a story about a job she once held that didn’t work out. She was good at the job and the money was good, yet she was miserable. Leaving the job was actually a relief. Firing someone on your team is uncomfortable, but if that person is miserable, and is bringing that energy to your entire business, you’re not doing them – or your company – any favors by holding onto them. Let them go so they can find a place where they are a good fit and enjoy what they do.
Resources & People Mentioned
- The Experimental Leader physical book: http://book.experimentalleader.com/
- The Experiment Leader digital book: http://digitalbook.experimentalleader.com/
- The Experimental Leader podcast: https://www.melanieparish.com/podcast/
- Melanie Parish on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanieparish/?originalSubdomain=ca
Music for “Just The Tips” is titled, “Happy Happy Game Show” by Kevin MacLeod (http://incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
