Balancing Views for Leadership

Show Outline: Today, Pete Mohr delves into the concept of perspective and how it influences purposeful leadership. He likens running a business to being in an auditorium, where you have to oscillate between the dance floor and the balcony. Down on the dance floor, you’re absorbed in the nitty-gritty. From the balcony, you get a broad view. Pete emphasizes the importance of mastering both views for successful leadership.

Here are a few things Pete covers:

• The dance floor vs. the balcony analogy in leadership.
• The importance of perspective when pivoting, like during COVID-19.
• The need for understanding your team's perspective.
• Utilizing time blocking for strategic business reviews.
• How perspective allows adaptation to changing market trends.

It’s time to take action:

Start time blocking in your calendar for "balcony time." This dedicated time helps you review and strategize from a broader viewpoint. If you find yourself stuck on the dance floor, reach out for help at speaktopete.com.

Are you looking to make some changes in your business and your life in 2024?  Head over to speaktopete.com and book a chat with me to see if we're the right fit!

Transcript

Pete Mohr: 0:36

All right, today we're gonna dive into point number nine of the 10 part series here all around the 10 pillars of purposeful leadership. And our topic today is perspective. First things first, let's talk about what is perspective. I guess in simple terms, it's your vantage point, really, it's your frame of reference. And if we imagine your business as an auditorium, and down, you have the stage and the dance floor, and then you have the up above the balcony. And on the dance floor, you're deep down in the action, you're focused on every pivot at every twirl every step, you're thinking about the music, you're thinking about all the different things that are making the production happen, you're up and close with your team and your clients. Because the audience is there, too, right? It's the microscopic view of things. And the other vantage point is from the balcony. From up here, you see the entire layout, you see how the steps fit into the dance, you see how things are merging together, that's sort of the telescopic view of things. And to run a successful business, you really need to be proficient at toggling between these two viewpoints. Because too much of one you miss the other. And balance truly is the key to successful leadership on this sort of stuff. And as we've been doing throughout this entire series, I've got a little activity for you. And we'll just call it the balcony and the dance floor here today. But take a moment to jot down three to five priorities that you're managing down on the dance floor level of your business, they might be things like staffing or product quality may be service interactions, whatever it may be, and then to the same for the balcony. What are the things that you're thinking about on a bigger picture, right? Maybe it's expansion plans, maybe you're going to make a move, maybe you're thinking about digital transformation and a new CRM or new point of sale system or something like that. And once you've got it, then think about what are you going to do about right? Maybe you run a local retail store, like we do chew topia, and you're used to foot traffic and in person sales. Well, when something like COVID 19 came along a few years ago, and suddenly, we had to really make a pivot. And the online marketplace became our only lifeline because we were closed for literally, I think it was 22 weeks where we couldn't have people in our store at various different times in Ontario, if you'd been so focused on the dance floor stuff, and how are we going to get people back in our store, all of those weeks later, we would have never had anybody in, we had to have sort of a balcony view of how else we can make some crucial shifts here. The change of perspective opens up a whole new avenue of business. And I'll just relate based on our own experiences before COVID, we were doing about 2% of our overall volume on our webstore. And now we're doing about 12%. So it's represented quite a significant amount of growth and opportunity in an area that we weren't even looking at that much before this happened to us. So you can take things that happened in a bad way and turn them into good along the way here with perspective to right. So looking back at the time, it wasn't fun to go through. But as I look back now, I'm saying, hey, you know what, we have a whole lot more webstore business now than we did at that point in time. And the perspective is glass is half full, because that extra business will continue on forever. Now that we've made those changes, right. Let's talk about your team for a moment. They have a perspective as well, right? Are you familiar with their perspectives? Do you know what motivates them? Because understanding these kinds of things can help you lead more effectively to write this series is all about leadership, you'll be able to set goals that resonate with them, if you're including them in the conversations. Here's another way of looking at perspective, is it short term or is a long term, they aren't just buzzwords, you've got to strategize for short term while keeping the focus of the long term there, right? It's that promise, it's your future focus. And all of those things, if we take it into the Dance School analogy, your immediate concern might be an upcoming recital. But your long term view could involve opening another location or potentially even franchising your studio down the road and having other owners as part of, you know, it's so interesting when you look at long term and short term, you look at all these different perspectives. And your job as the leader and the owner of the businesses to consider all these different things, right. So how do you cultivate all of these different perspectives, I like to take a step back every now and then zoom out and allocate time in my weekly calendar to visit the balcony and maybe I allocate maybe even a little too much time. When you go up to the balcony. Look at the business from a strategic lens, you know, secondly, you want to seek other perspectives from mentors, industry, peers, or even customers, get their take on things. And lastly, never stop learning. Read industry reports, attend webinars, consult experts, go to your trade shows, go to your industry shows that are going to help you and get other people's perspectives so that you have a broader perspective for your own business. Moving ahead, right. The objective here the business owner breakthroughs to help you move from being an operator down on the dance floor to an owner more up in the balcony spending a little bit more time up there, right. And if you're stuck on the dance floor, and you can't find your way to the balcony, I'm here to help. All you have to do is go to speak to pete.com and set up an appointment, we'll have a quick chat. Trust me, you know, a balanced perspective isn't a luxury as a leader, it's a necessity. So let's talk about a couple more practical tips here. We talked a little bit about time blocking. So you need to chunk some uninterrupted time to look at your business from the balcony. Right second. Do you conduct annual reviews for your business? And if not, it's time you started? It's it's more than just looking at whether or not you've hit your sales targets? You know, it's about understanding market trends, consumer behavior, what things are changing? Look at all the API's that are out there. Now look at all these different things. How is my industry changed over the last year? Or the last quarter things are changing so quickly? Right? How often are you doing this? How can I adapt my business to keep up with those trends. And third, listen to your customers. A new perspective really often means someone else's perspective, not yours. And there's no better way to get that than directly from the people that keep your business alive, write the check writers, simple surveys, casual conversations, feedback mechanisms. Dan Sullivan, from Strategic Coach, one of my coaches along the way says to test your ideas on check writers. And although not a lot of people write checks these days, the idea really is a good one, because you want to make sure that people will put their money behind the things that they think will change their lives. And something that you may have been doing for a very long time, if you're seeing it starting to recess. And not as many people are, you know, handing over money for that service anymore, you might need to make a change. And that change is probably going to give you a lot more legs for the future, right? These days, we're not just competing with business down the street, we're competing with the world. How do you want to be viewed as a local leader? Or do you want or need maybe more reach than that? I mean, if you're a local franchisees of a subway or, you know, a local restaurant, yeah, you really need to be the key player in your area. But so many other businesses have a wider demographic than that these days. Take this business, for example, simplifying entrepreneurship all the way live in a small town here in Ontario, only about 8% of my income comes from local business, and probably even only 15% of our business. With simplifying entrepreneurship comes from Canada, most of my businesses in the US. So if I look at 85% of my business coming from the US, it's a different perspective than if I was just trying to reach out to local clients here in my area, or even in Ontario, or even in Canada. It's really important to engage in business masterminds, or maybe go to industry seminars and read and learn. I love Tony Robbins has this sort of framework about never ending learning. And it's something that I've always remembered since I first saw him back in the 90s. But never ending learning is an important piece to being a really good leader for your business, right? You never know where that golden nugget of wisdom will come from a changes your entire outlook and perspective. Perspective isn't just a fancy word here, folks. It's a necessary skill and it's almost a survival skill for today's business owner. So get off that dance floor once in a while, climb up into the balcony and take a good hard look at the big picture. Because a new perspective can be a game changer for your business and for your life because we talked about all time they're intermingled and when your business is humming your life can be too. You know what comes next. Now go and make it a great day.

Buzz Burbank: 9:31

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