Coming up on the Leadership Growth Podcast. If I'm mentoring someone, they're very much in the executive suite. That tends to be the people that are going to want to go through that type of mentoring. And a lot of times they'll come to me and say, or their leader will come to me and say,"we want this person to be the next CFO. They have the knowledge, they've got the experience." However, and you know exactly where this is going to go, the way they communicate it in their previous role, it won't work for this. Or it'll be a COO or someone else in that C-suite position saying to me, I got this new position, but I'm realizing the way I communicate it doesn't work that way. And it's that interesting concept of, you know, I'm so passionate about this. Why as a leader or anyone that shows up in a communication situation, why wouldn't you put the number one focus on how people experience you? Because that, it will determine, do you influence them? Do you connect, engage? Do you build relationships? And all of that ties to influence. Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the Leadership Growth Podcast. I'm Daniel Stewart, along with my brother and co-host Peter Stewart. And today, we are very excited to have a fantastic guest with us. Stacey Hanke. Stacey, thanks for joining us. No, thank both of you. Thanks for trusting me with your followers. I'm really looking forward to this. Absolutely. Okay, folks, we're in for a treat. Let me share a brief background on Stacey. Stacey Hanke, renowned executive mentor, Hall of Fame professional speaker, and best-selling author of Influence Redefined. Be the leader you were meant to be, Monday to Monday. Through her research-backed method, she has transformed numerous Fortune 1000 companies, igniting sales growth, enhancing productivity, and fostering a cultural fulfillment among employees. Stacey, welcome again. Thank you. Thank you both. So, with all of the leaders that you've been working with over the years, let's start off with a question for you. Sometimes we as humans, we can overestimate or underestimate our impact on others. Tell us, what have you kind of noticed? Why do sometimes we think we as humans are more influential sometimes than we think? Yeah, I get asked that a lot. And it really comes down to two concepts. When you think about as a leader, depending on what title you have, there is that misperception of any feedback that you're going to get is pretty flawed. Because who's going to tell the CEO, you take too long to get to the point? You're really boring. You're going on whatever it might be. You just get to that level. And I know the two of you, based on the work that you do, you experience this. I'm sure with your clients, we don't get the real feedback. The feedback that we can actually use and develop. That's error number one. The second is rarely do we get a chance to truly see ourselves, to hear ourselves through the eyes and ears of our listeners. Now, this is a little different because we're recording this. The three of us, we're going to be able to go back if we choose to, right? Go back and take a look so that we can make a connection of how we feel versus what reality states. Our bodies don't like to be uncomfortable, which goes to, I guess, point number three. I told you there are only two. Point number three is a lot of times a leader will say, well, I've been doing this work for a long time. I've worked hard to get to this point of my career. If I feel good, if I know my message, all of those reasonings does not guarantee that you're influential. What guarantees you're influential is truly when you've got the courage to be vulnerable on a regular basis and really take a close look through the eyes and ears of your listeners. That was a really helpful insight, Stacey, as we start to dissect and kind of break apart this concept of influence and really what gets in the way. And it sounds like in many ways, it's our own ego. It's our own fear of avoiding the discomfort, our kind of fixed versus a growth mindset, you could even say. Totally. You know, and I think too, so many times, whether I'm mentoring a leader or maybe my team, they're in one of their workshops, leaders will pull us to the side and say, "why hasn't anyone told me this?" I had a leader not too long ago. She's been in a very high profile position for 10 years. And after one of our workshops, I approached her to just get her feedback. And she said, first, I'm so embarrassed. I've been a leader for 10 years. I should know how to do this. And I'm like, well, should versus what reality states are two different things. Just because you have a title or your years of experience, none of that has ever proven to suddenly be influential. And Peter, that's really the part where we love to unpack it for a leader to say,"I'm not saying you're not influential. I'm saying as a leader or whomever you might be, what role you have, there's always opportunity to improve how we communicate." And that's two categories, right? How we communicate verbally and how we communicate non-verbally. We just can't stop learning. And I don't know why in the corporate world we get to that point and it's just this mindset of, all right, I'm good. I know everything. I'm good to go. Yeah. And you know, so building on that, it's fascinating to me that when somebody gets promoted and they get a title, they either feel like they should now know everything or more often, everybody else automatically expects you to know everything. And yet you are still the same schmuck, the same person as you were yesterday. It's not like you just were given from heaven or whatever else, this immediate enlightenment. Yeah. And so managing these expectations of yourself and then how others reinforce, giving a little bit of grace, a little patience, because we're all learning. And we should be learning. Yeah, please. Yeah. How do you respond to that? Yeah, we should be learning. And it's the misperception. So maybe part of it is this title. There's a misperception with titles. Playing off what you just said, Daniel, is, well, I should know this, right? I've learned this all my life versus so many of our clients. If I'm mentoring someone, they're very much in the executive suite. That tends to be the people that are going to want to go through that type of mentoring. And a lot of times they'll come to me and say, or their leader will come to me and say, we want this person to be the next CFO. They have the knowledge. They've got the experience. However, and you know exactly where this is going to go. The way they communicate it in their previous role, it won't work for this. Or it'll be a COO or someone else in that C-suite position saying to me, I got this new position, but I'm realizing the way I communicate it doesn't work that way. And it's that interesting concept of, you know, I'm so passionate about this. Why as a leader or anyone that shows up in a communication situation, why wouldn't you put the number one focus on how people experience you? Because that, it will determine, do you influence them? Do you connect, engage? Do you build relationships? And all of that ties to influence. I'm working with someone right now, in his previous life he was a professional rugby player. And he said it best because we were doing a lot of practicing. He's now in the corporate world. We were doing a lot of practicing and I was recording him often on his phone. And finally, at one point he says, I'm thinking and reflecting about my executive team. How when we've got a challenge around our development, we'll put together a whole PowerPoint deck. And then we'll present it to try to sell it, to get a budget around. He's like, when we were, when I was a professional rugby player, when we knew we had to develop, we never put a PowerPoint slide together. We got out on the field and we practiced it over and over. And I know it's a little different, rugby versus corporate world. But when you pull and look at the mechanics, it really is the same thing. If you want to develop, you've got to practice and continue to do the work. It's somewhat analogous, Stacey, to this notion that, oh, I need to build this skill. I'm going to just read a book about it and then automatically I'm perfect at it. Or I'm going to go attend a webinar or a workshop. And it's this notion that somehow if we get the information in our brain, then that automatically translates into changing behavior and habits. Which we know fundamentally doesn't happen. You both get it because of the expertise that you have and the companies that you run. When I talk about influence and how to communicate with influence, both verbally and non-verbally, we elevate it to this level of, if you're truly going to have influence, it's Monday to Monday. Which means how you show up. It needs to be consistent. But in order to that like and aptly, you have to practice over and over in order to improve. And the great news when it comes to building your influence is every conversation you have is really an opportunity for you to practice something. Is it how you deliver? Is it how you connect or don't connect with people? Is it your messaging? I think that's really the power of a lot of the work that I do is it's not, all right, you have to carve out an hour on Tuesday every week and sit down here and practice. It's not reality. But when we can really help leaders get into the mindset of you're already busy. They have no room on their schedule. It's getting them in the mindset of take advantage of your multitude of meetings in a day. And every interaction, that's an opportunity where you can be thinking about how can you develop these skills. Yeah. So let's build on that influence. Because I know you do a lot of research as you work with so many different leaders over the years. What— go back in time. How would we have defined influence? How to communicate? How to be influential back in the day? Pick a day. You know, years ago, months ago, whatever. And what has it shifted to to today? You know, give us a contrast. What are the things that maybe we thought were needed? And what is it now needed to be really influential today? Oh, I'm nodding my head because I love this stuff. And that's really Influence Elevated. The third book is all about that. It's the four years of research that we've done because of all the changes that have really occurred in four years. And what's the difference? So the number one, Daniel, there's more noise than there has ever been before. And when I mean noise, it's virtual, hybrid, social media, emails. That's just the work environment. And now when you're trying to influence someone who's in their home, you have no idea what noise is going on there. And because of all this noise, it's interesting. We're more connected than we've ever been before. Yet somehow we're more disconnected than ever before. And this whole idea of influence. To me, I've always been teaching influence. But this idea of what's happened now and how we elevate it is it's more critical than ever before. Because you have leaders who are seeing employees in the office and leaders that have never, whoa, never see their employees or they see some of them. That's a whole other challenge. This idea of showing up on virtual as if it's just this casual and your brand has nothing to do with it. I'll give you an example. Yesterday, because it's fresh in my mind. Yesterday, we met with several leaders of a very large company. I can't share the name, but we were doing a recap of the training we do with their team. And one of their leaders, you'll appreciate this, shows up. The camera's set up. I can look up her nose the entire time. She is chewing her gum so hard. And then I know she must have a monitor over here. And she's catching up on email the whole time. And I thought, well, at this point, I love this to some degree. Because now, for me, it's research, right? And I'm going to have a little fun with it. So I asked her, because she's not paying attention this entire time. And I said to her, I go, "so what have you heard from your team? What feedback did they give based on the work that we've done?" And she says, "well, I haven't talked to them yet. But if you want me to, I will." And I'm like, well, I feel sometimes like the virtual world has really created, trying to find a nice word, but I feel lazy. It's just this laziness that we've put into, and we've lost how to connect. We've lost how to engage. We've lost how to communicate with empathy. And call it, you know, common sense skills. But it also has proved that what is common sense is not common practice. You know you should get your teeth cleaned, what, every six months? How many people do it? They do it when they've got a toothache. And now they go to the doctor. And sometimes we'll get calls from clients. I have a big presentation next week. I have a big sales pitch next week. Can you coach me? And my first response is no. Not now. Like, it's too late. I'll coach you for the next one, but there has to be a timeframe that's long and far enough out. So it's more needed than ever before that this idea of being consistent, of how you show up in all these platforms, that's really what's going to drive influence Monday to Monday. Versus I've got influence during the sales pitch, but when they see me in person, I'm a little bit different than I am here. So many great thoughts to help us think more about how we show up, you know, how people experience us. To go back to a phrase that you used earlier, I think that really helps encapsulate so much of what we're talking about in terms of influence. Then as you're elaborating on the reality of the context, how that's changed, how the noise has increased, the so many distractions and so many things are trying to get at people's attention. But at the core, it comes down to that ability to connect at a human level. Right. It seems so common sense, doesn't it? We had a call earlier today prepping for a session we're going to do in a month. And when I asked the leader, I said, "so what's causing you to reach out to us? What currently is happening?" And we're going to talk all about how can their senior leaders build stronger client relationships, both virtually and in person. I know that sounds so common sense, right? And when I asked them, "so what's the gap?" And their response was, "most of these senior leaders were hired during 2020-21." They've lost the ability to truly connect and engage with our clients. And I do. I think we need to take a step back and look at what we want when it comes to influence. You know, if I asked both of you, when it comes to influence, what do you want? Fill in the blank. I think we first have to identify that. And then we have to stay true to what is our personal brand? How do we want people to define who we are? And a great action step for your followers is ask. Ask someone in your personal life and people in your professional life that know you really, really well. And just ask them, how do I come across? How would you describe my reputation or my brand? And if those two, from your personal and professional feedback from your peers, if that's really off, I think you need to go back to the drawing board and just take a moment to really identify what is it. How would you define how you want to come across? Yeah. So with this virtual world that we're operating in, just to get really practical then, as we have listeners out there saying they might be 100% remote in terms of their organization, maybe it's this hybrid. What are two or three things that a leader can do to manage, to promote, to strengthen their influence in a virtual hybrid setting? First one that comes to mind is brevity. Do our meetings really have to be 60 minutes every time? How many of our meetings take about 10 minutes to really get to the important stuff? How many meetings there's more people on that need to be? Oh, I was on a call last week and I'm thinking, I don't even know who half of you are. I'm not even sure why you're here, right? It's brevity, brevity, brevity. We fall into the trap. I'm guilty of this. I get so passionate about what I'm saying. I start to think, you all want to know everything that I know. It's taking the brevity, going to the next step, Peter, and really constantly adapting your message on the fly. Really listening to what lane is your listener in. And when you can adapt to what's important to them, I think you really tap into their why. Why should they care? Why is this conversation happening right now? So that's big step one. I'll give you three. The second, this is going to sound so common sense, but I'll demonstrate. How many times have you been on a virtual call and the person that you're trying to talk to is so disconnected and they're not really connecting with you, which is possible through your eyes. So we talk a lot about eye connection rather than eye contact. Simply put, only speak when you see eyes. You start looking in other places. That's a great time to stop talking. And this applies whether you're in person or you're in virtual conversations. Because eye connection is the only skill that ties to trust. And you and I both know that without trust, influence won't happen. Not consistently. To make sure that happens, I would highly, number three, recommend your followers to start taking a look. Start, whether it's audio recording, you want to kind of take a small step first before you go to the big one, and that's video recording. And I'm not talking about watching yourself on Zoom. There's something to be said about when you start recording yourself. Because your phone, your device, it's really the eyes and ears of your listeners. And so many, you can imagine, I need to write a book, just comments from people that we've had in our sessions or my mentoring. When they see themselves on a playback, they'll go to this place of denial sometimes. And they'll be telling me, that's not me. No, that's not me. And I'm thinking, I think it's you. And it looks like you are. Exactly. But just starting to have some courage to be vulnerable. I would lie to you if I think that's an easy process is watching myself on— I was just watching something last night of myself, and I was ripping it apart. But the idea is you become more aware that when you are in these high-stakes conversations, however you define it, you know when you're either saying or doing something with the body language that's causing a distraction, distracting your listener from paying attention, from connecting, and then influencing. So, okay, this feedback component is what I'm hearing from you, is giving yourself some time to look at yourself so that you can have some better sense of how others experience you. Okay, let me go to this next level and get your thoughts on this, Stacey. What guidance do you have for the leader who, as they see members of their team, and they look at their team and go, hmm, I would love to help that person adjust, reshape, increase awareness. I'll give you a brief example. I was in a meeting last week with a bunch of business owners. One of them brought one of their directors to this meeting and she sat there twirling her hair the entire time. Now, not to put any judgment on that, the question I had was, is that behavior of hers helpful for her as a leader within the organization? And as a VP who reports, you know, has her on the team, what would that VP say to her to invite learning, whether it's that specific experience or not? What are ways to help a leader engage in that conversation? Because those could be sensitive, challenging topics for all of the reasons we've talked about. It's ego challenging, you know, but yet we all will show up differently. What guidance to have for that leader as they help their team show up the best? Yeah. I'll give you two examples because it depends on what that leader's relationship is with her. Is that the sensitivity piece? If it's a situation where he's given her feedback in the past, they've got a really strong, open relationship, I have no concern with saying to them, I want to make sure I help you grow as well as a communicator. Are you open to some feedback? Like invited. I don't just jump at my team member and say, hey, Dan, I'm going to give you some feedback here. Right. But we on my team have a very clear understanding that, hey, if we're talking about people getting each other feedback, we have to do it internally. If it's a situation where they are not that strong of a relationship yet or for whatever reason, what I've done before is I might ask you, Daniel, well, here's what I'm working on. When I'm in board meetings, will you just watch to make sure I don't fidget? I tend to fidget a lot. Will you just kind of watch for that? Now, most likely you're going to agree to help me out. When you agree to help me out, you just opened up the gate. And I may come back and say, are you OK if I would you also be open to feedback? So this is where every word matters and the messaging is absolutely critical. So that would be baseline, right? Now, here's something that a leader that I had coached years ago, I thought was brilliant. He'd gone through our workshop and he went back to his team and they were meeting once a week and he said,"I'll be video recording myself." And he just did it on his phone. I'll be recording myself in the meeting. I'm doing that because I want to make sure as a leader, I am the best possible leader that can show up for you. So he did that for a couple of meetings. Suddenly, his team starts to see the benefit in him. Right. You will make changes, enhancements. You keep watching yourself on playback. Well, lo and behold, he was then able to turn that recording on his team. So what they do at every meeting, they just have a recording. Now it's easy because Zoom, you just record Zoom. And his team members are asked to watch the playback before their next meeting. And once in a while as a team, they give each other feedback as part of their meeting. I think, I think, Daniel, there might be some misperception of what feedback is. And for so many years, feedback was you're doing something wrong. I need to correct you. And when we do feedback, I never, you know, I always say to someone, you know, take advantage that your company is actually going to invest in your development. Whether it's you just have a coach or you're going through a training session, whatever it might be, take advantage of that because they want to invest in you to make sure that you're the best that you can be. I want your followers to think of like an athlete. Think of how much an athlete practices over and over. And I live in Chicago and there's some really great documentaries on Michael Jordan. He's someone that I always think about really got into deliberate practice. If you've seen any of his work, he talks about how he'd do 1,000 shots, you know, in the hoop, 1,000 shots a day and 6,000 a week. No one's born just naturally an amazing communicator. I've never met them yet. The difference is someone who's an influential leader is someone who's self-aware Monday to Monday and who's willing to get uncomfortable because they know that what doesn't challenge them will never change them. These are great insights. And you're reminding me, Stacey, so last week I was with an executive team and we were talking about executive presence, you know, about how they show up, how others experience them. And as we got into some of the specifics as they were identifying their own leadership brand, you know, that unique value that they each want to bring to the situation and what they can do to promote it because they were managing and leading very different areas within this organization. To find that common area where it was really similar got us on a big tangent. And it was really focusing down on the fundamental principle of non-distraction. And that's where you find that commonality of like, what can an individual do to not distract, you know deter, to take away from what they're trying to communicate? And it's as you think about how they experience you, how that message is received, that's what really helped click for them to get past some of the arguments over, well, this works for me here and this works for me here. Great. Find what works. Do it your authentic way. But it's that underlying understanding of you just don't want to distract from what you're trying to say. I love that. And that that's really what it is, is because I get going back to where we started, you know, what's the biggest change? The fact that there's already so much noise out there. And sometimes we can't see it because I don't know what's going on in your head. I don't know what happened to you this morning. I don't know what you have on your plate today after this call. There's so much. And I do know that influence, part of that definition is the ability to move someone to take action long after the conversation has occurred. And this idea of when you show up and you're doing something that's distracting or it's pulling from your message. And not only that, you get off the call or you leave that interaction. Are they going to remember you versus the many conversations that person still has to have in that day? It's become, I think, the virtual world, as many positives as it's given us, that we can connect with anyone in the world. I mean, it's the fact that we get to connect, right? There's so much power behind that, that finally we've been given this gift. Don't destroy it. They take an advantage of, wow, you get to show up for so many more people. I also think, you know, I know that there's a lot of noise right now, right? There's a lot going on in our world. And something I always share with my audiences is there's one thing you will always have control over. And that's your development. No one really could take that away from you. And to some degree, the other thing you have control over is how you show up, how you connect with people, how you follow them, or how they follow you to make sure that when you show up, you're never wasting anyone's time. I never want my clients, I think about this every day, I never want my clients to see my name on their calendar for the day that they have to meet with me. I never want them to look at my name and think, ugh! You don't want to be the meeting they dread. Right. This is going to be the biggest waste of my time. Oh, she's so annoying. I never, I really do care about that. Years ago, one of my first coaches, when I started the company, one of my first coaches said, "you know, one way that you're going to be successful first, always show up on time and always follow through and you'll be the top 1%." And I always thought, well, that's it for running a company? I can do that. And then he said, "just make sure that when people leave you, even if it's a complete stranger, give them that moment of wow. I don't know how she did it, but there was just something that made me feel really good." And it's getting back to some of the basics here, right? Oh, this is great. And you mentioned you have a new book. That's, I know we're recording this before it comes up, but when this drops, it is going to be out and people be able to access this. Yeah. And you have a great story as to why you wanted, you felt so passionate to build and write this book. Give us a highlight around that story and some of the things in it so folks can then benefit from it. Yeah. So Influence Elevated is the third book and the subtitle is Maximizing Your Connection Monday to Monday. It's a continuation of Influence Redefined, which is a previous book. What made me want to do it is seeing the struggles of our clients for the last four years and them constantly asking, how do I connect in this hybrid world? And I want to confirm what hybrid is. Hybrid is I've got a team that I meet with in my office and then I got people located all over. That would be one example. Or hybrid is you're meeting with me virtually right now. And let's say I've got a boardroom in front of me and a bunch of other people are here too So it was the desire to help people because they're really, I don't want them to lose this connection and this engagement. And I think it's a real issue. I wanted to share with clients the facts, the data that's out there when we're not connecting, when we're not engaging, when we're not showing up here to the best that we can. And then yes, Daniel, in the book, there is, it starts off, there's an assessment. We call it an impact IQ. And I highly recommend people taking that assessment first. And it's just going to give you clarity of what type of influential leader you are or you're not. But to me, you just got to understand what you want. I asked that I want question in there. And then throughout the book, it is practical, immediate how to's of what does it mean now to elevate your influence, to drive that influence Monday to Monday. So very practical. Influence Redefined was designed this way as well. You don't have to read it covered cover to feel like, okay, I'm good now. Just grab chapters. There's a whole chapter on how you run hybrid meetings. There's a whole chapter on storytelling. Like the whole book is really created of just what our clients have shared with us and what they're challenged with. Because I'm guessing if my clients are challenged, your followers have some questions around those challenges too. That's a great one. So as we kind of wrap up, let me give you a Lightning Round question, Stacey. As with all of the leaders you've worked with, what's the one thing? What's the one thing that leaders need to be able to do to help improve their ability to be influential? What would you say? They have to take a look. Take a look at how they're coming across verbally, non-verbally, recording themselves. And then don't just do it once because there's a good chance. There's a chance that when you look at it the first time, you're like, oh, I'm better off if I never communicate again. No. Oh, hopefully it's not to that level. But then to just keep doing it and to understand that that one step of recording themselves, that's going to be a reflection of the ability for their teams to connect, to engage, to have influence. And doesn't that all tie to profit, results, ROI? That's fantastic. Awesome. Stacey, thank you so much for being our guest today on the Leadership Growth Podcast. This has been fantastic. You're welcome. Thanks again. Thanks for trusting me. I've been following your podcast for a while, and it's impressive, the people that you've brought on here and what you've done with it. So thank you. Absolutely. Thank you very much. Well, folks, all of our listeners out there, thank you for joining us. Please like and subscribe. And we look forward to having you at a future episode of the Leadership Growth Podcast, where we talk about the tools and ideas to help you elevate your ability to be a successful leader. All the best. Take care, everyone. Bye. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend or colleague. Or better yet, leave a review to help other listeners find our show. And remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode. For more great content, or to learn more about how Stewart Leadership can help you grow your ability to lead effectively, please visit stewartleadership.com.