FULL TRANSCRIPT

Gordon Shepherd: If you are a leader who is ready to take action and you want to learn from a successful business coach who shares her experience climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, then stick around for this episode of the Meeting Leadership Podcast.

Are you a professional who wants to become a more effective leader? Then get ready for practical tips from the coach with the experience and inspiration to help you succeed in any leadership situation. You’re listening to the meeting leadership podcast with Gordon Shepherd.

Welcome to another episode of the Meeting Leadership Podcast my name is Gordon shepherd. I just want to say thank you for being here. Thank you for supporting the Meeting Leadership Podcast and being the type of person who really wants to make sure they take their leadership game up a notch. You’re here to pick up a skill, you want to pick up some inspiration, maybe another strategy that you can take out and implement right away to grow your leadership skills and learn how to run outstanding meetings it is really good to have you here. And I am pleased to let you know that this episode of the Meeting Leadership Podcast is brought to you by the Meeting Leadership Academy. Now there you’re going to find some really solid live training options for you and your team from one on one coaching to half day workshops to full day workshops.

These are hands on. This is like getting right at the front of the room as a facilitator. It’s getting into those leadership situations when you have to manage tough conversations, getting those skills down so that you can be more successful in every team that you lead. And you can learn all about this and a whole lot more by visiting meetingleadershipinc.com/academy. And now let me take a moment to introduce today’s episode. It’s called how every leader can take action and our guest is Leanne Brownoff. Now not only is Leanne a successful business coach, author and speaker, but she has also climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and she learned a ton about that experience. And thankfully she wrote a great book that every leader can learn from and catch this title. It’s called Freezing My Ass Off on Kilimanjaro, the entrepreneur’s survival guide for building traction on a changing business terrain.

And one of the core concepts in this book is how Leanne explains her use of the word ACTION itself as an acronym to make sure that you don’t miss a step when you are taking yourself and your business to the next level. And with that in mind, I’m not going to hold you back any longer here’s the terrific interview with Leanne Brownoff.

Leanne, welcome to the show.

Leanne Brownoff: Thank you so much Gordon. I’m really excited to be here today.

Gordon Shepherd: Well, I’m really glad to have you here as well. And I’m just going to say one thing about you before I ask you to introduce yourself and that is the title of your book is called Freezing My Ass Off on Kilimanjaro and I can’t wait for folks to hear about your perspective from your authoring of that and your experience there. But for the folks that actually don’t know you, how would you introduce yourself?

Leanne Brownoff: Well, I’m a business coach Gord. I have experience working with a range of businesses and organizations from international companies to startups and pretty much anything in between. My clients connect with me usually at a place of pain. And so I recognize that they need to focus and get their direction on developing strategies and that’s kind of where this book came in to help them to develop those strategies. And one of the things that I say about myself is I’m kind of an awareness trainer. Every day there’s a new puzzle to be solved and I kind of work with teams to be active participants and that’s basically what I do. I see myself as a bear poker and a cage rattler and not really keeping to the frame, but really knowing how to color outside the frame.

Gordon Shepherd: Help me out here then with giving us a good feel for what you do. So without naming names, you could just refer to a client example and a strategy that you would have developed with them and give us a flavor of your style if you say you’re not working, say within traditional frameworks.

Leanne Brownoff: Well as I said, people usually come to me when they have a pain. They’ll tell me that they can’t find the right people or they’ve been running a business for 10 years they can’t seem to get some traction to move ahead. Or they’re seeing their competition is coming and they don’t really know what to do with it. And when they come in the middle, I call it the middle because when I work with them on the action plan, it’s a step process that goes through awareness, commitment, team implementation opportunities and next. And usually what they’re asking me is jumping right into implementation, come and help me. So it might be an organization that’s not sure whether they want to expand, maybe they wanted to build their business into another city that’s jumping in the middle. What I need to do is take them back and say, “How aware are you of the landscape right now? Is this the right time? Do you have the right people? Do you have the ability?”

So I take them through the whole process. So as I say, it can be international companies. I’ve worked with companies that have started up here in Edmonton and then have moved to Calgary. A little bit of a bigger kind of perspective. I’ve worked with pharmaceutical companies in my career where I started off in pretty much a ground level position in sales and within two years I was directing the sales, training and working with marketing in a very large international company by using this particular acronym. And those are the kinds of things that I find is really helpful just keeping people on track of those six positions of awareness, commitment, team implementation, opportunities and what are you going to do next?

Gordon Shepherd: Okay, so take me to the first moment with you. So I’m a senior leader, I’m sitting in a meeting with you and I have said, “You know what? I want to jump to implementation,” cause you just said folks are jumping to that zone, but you’re actually going to take me back to the A in your ACTION acronym and help me out in this very moment when you’re like, “No, no, no. Let’s slow down,” and explain what the A is and explain an example of what that would be. So let’s say it was in a pharmaceutical expansion example that you were saying, there’s a pharmaceutical company in one city, they’re moving to another, I’m the leader. I’m like, I want to jump to implementation, but you’re taking me back to the A. Take me back to the A help me out in that moment.

Leanne Brownoff: So what I’m going to be doing is I’m hearing from the original discussion points that there is some kind of pain. So I want to explore that a little bit more in my dialogue, I’m going to be framing it around awareness without the person necessarily being aware of that that’s what it is. I’m going to be framing it with why is this pain happening? So is it a sales perspective? Are you seeing that you’ve tapped your market right now and you believe that by expanding to the next place, that will be the thing that will move your business to the next level? What I’m going to be asking is things like what is it that you know about your current reason for thinking that you’ve tapped your market? I’m going to be asking questions of what does your team have right now? What are their skills?

What are their capabilities? What is your product that you’re selling and is it truly viable as a market in five years? What do we know about all the different things that are going on? So it’ll be a very long process. The thing about awareness when I take my clients through them, once they start asking these questions, they start going, “I get it. I’m not quite ready to jump in yet.” And this is something that I find is as applicable to businesses that have been around for 30 years as it is to a startup company coming to me saying, “I got a great idea,” cause I’m looking at them saying, “Why you? Why would anybody buy from you? And just because you got a company that has a really good track record, that’s awesome, but the world is changing and loyalties have changed with consumers. So you really have to look at yourself constantly as being at that forefront, ready to be aware of everything going on and to be relevant to today.”

Gordon Shepherd: Well this is actually magical cause it sounds like you have in that moment the experience and the confidence to help them start to shift their mindset.

Leanne Brownoff: Absolutely. I believe everybody I’ve worked with has always had the keys to what will as you say, unlock their potential towards their business and how they will know what their answers are and they always know what’s holding them back. I can use a small example of a client who’s really doing really well and has been around for seven years and they come to the conclusion that actually what’s holding them back is they’re holding a team member that isn’t serving their business. Maybe it was somebody that started off with them at the very beginning and they just haven’t been able to grow. I’m not a big fan of letting somebody go, I’m always a bigger fan of saying, “If that’s holding you back, let’s reposition that person in a better role if possible and let’s move ahead.” Once they realize what the stumbling block is, let’s move it ahead and see what we can do about that.

Gordon Shepherd: Well, this is super high value and you can hear this sort of whole org approach that you have to helping senior leaders and making sure that they go through these steps. One of the things that we like to do here on the podcast for leaders is take people’s good approaches like yours and actually break it right down to the unit of a meeting itself. So I can hear already that you would have been in senior leadership rooms with not just the CEO, but you’re in the room with a bunch of folks and they’re actually going through a meeting process.

And I actually really enjoy the listeners that listen to this show and working with senior leadership teams to help them make their meetings better because so often the ego is so high, they’re kind of often getting in their way. But if we took your ACTION acronym and applied it to a senior leadership meeting for this company, that’s thinking about expansion, let’s just imagine they’re having their monthly strategic planning session, whatever that is, couple hours. How would you then start them at the awareness level, breaking it down to the meeting itself to then use some of your good wisdom?

Leanne Brownoff: Well thanks Gord, because actually this is something that I love doing. I’m an observer, I just absolutely love seeing what is out there right now, what people are doing and most of the time I’m happy to announce they’re doing a lot of really good things. But you say like as you mentioned, sometimes our egos get in the way. Sometimes it’s a time crunch, we’re just not aware, we forget to be aware and awareness has to follow you through all areas of this plan action it never stops you just keep building it. So bringing it into a meeting perspective, I’m just going to share a little story about Kilimanjaro because I think it would be really helpful in its leadership transitioning to meetings.

But when we were climbing Kilimanjaro, we had two leaders. We had a senior leader and a junior leader and the senior leader took us through most of the climb. The easier part of the client was very enjoyable. He was at the front and we had a chance to chat and have a really good dialogue with the junior leader. Over the course of time as the climb got harder, colder temperatures, steeper climbs, we were climbing at nighttime. It was minus 20 degrees at the top of the hill when we got there, the little hill called Kilimanjaro. But what we were noticing was on the last days, our senior leader Dismus had taken not the leadership role at the front as he had, but he chose to be at the back and I thought that was really interesting. So I’m in business, I’m seeing that there are the typical roles of leadership being that you lead from the front. You take a look at the terrain and you take people to places that perhaps had never been. You need to have courage.

You need to have wisdom to be able to have followers to take you. Dismus certainly had that we were following him. The other leadership positions we know in business is to the side. You move to the side so that you can allow somebody who has the ability to grow your business as a leader as well give them a chance at the reigns and that is something that Dismus did as well. He took some leadership to the side allowing the junior person to take some role. But when he went to the back on the most important times of our climb, I had to ask him, “Why did you do this Dismus? Like why would you go to the back?” And he said to me, “Because as a senior leader, I must take leadership from the back because that’s how I can see how my team really is operating.”

And I bring that back to my businesses and I talk to my leaders about if you’re going to run business meetings, this is a perfect opportunity for you to develop your team. Meetings to me are a great litmus paper for our litmus test for determining your business’ pulse and a litmus test in science has the base or the acidity of a substance. It’s the extremes and everything in between. And so with a meeting, if you are absolutely putting yourself in the back, letting somebody else lead the meeting, let more than one person lead the meeting. You have a chance to observe how your team’s interacting, how your team is taking this information. Because one of the things I really encourage, awareness must infiltrate your business. So every person you have on your team has the ability to learn how to be a leader in their own position. So they should be coming to the table, trained from your perspective as a leader to get them to come to the table with fresh ideas, new insights, things that they’re seeing in their own backyard, in their community, something that they heard.

Bringing it to you to say, “This is something new that we should be considering.” And that’s how you bring the awareness to a meeting from a leadership position, being at the front, being to the side and being at the back

Gordon Shepherd: That is a hear it once story and remember it forever. I mean that is unbelievable, awareness must infiltrate your business. If people just turn the podcast off right now and took that back to their business what a great phrasing, what a great insight that you’ve got into there knowing now that this A, this awareness is sort of a building block that you’ve helped to put in place. You move on to the C in ACTION. What’s the C in ACTION in your acronym?

Leanne Brownoff: The C is commitment. So again, regardless of whether you are in the middle of this plan can work in absolutely everything. In fact, Gord I useD this plan to plan our trip to Kilimanjaro and it just fit. So you’ve got your awareness going, you’ve got information, you constantly have things coming to you, you’re evaluating where you’re at and what’s going on in the world around you. Commitment is, okay, I’m really going to do this. I am actually committing to this because we all know in business, not everything is roses and rainbows. Things are really tough and so you have to be able to really buckle down and say, “Even in the tough times, this is going to work. We’re really going to make this happen.” And the commitment has to come from the leader. That real excitement from them saying, “I got this great idea and I need help.”

So it spreads. It gets other people really excited and their commitment grows. So if you have a leader that’s committed but your team’s not, you’ve got to stop and go, “Wait a minute, what did I miss out?” You look back to awareness cause you missed something. Your team needs to feel that same commitment. There’s always a big discussion point about people having and in meetings you’ll see this as well where maybe leadership seems to be out of step with the people who are implementing or maybe sales is a little bit of out of step with administration. When you have awareness and hearing what everybody else’s issues are and situations are, you bring them together at the table. Commitment kind of is that cement to make sure everybody understands all of their roles for the big picture.

Gordon Shepherd: Well, and I love what you’re talking about in the details and also the tone that you’re talking about it with. And I’m going to botch this, but someone was recounting a Maya Angelou quote and the idea is people aren’t going to remember what you said, but they’re going to remember how you made them feel. And I can hear what you’re saying then if a leader is going through this process to make their meetings better at this senior leadership level or wherever in their organization, they’ve built the awareness and in their commitment they can actually allow that to be there. That enthusiasm, that fire that they’ve got for it and bring that to sort of each meeting that they lead so they can create that excitement for the team. Now we’ve gone through the A and the C, we’re getting onto the T. What is the T in the acronym?

Leanne Brownoff: The T is your team. You can’t do it by yourself in fact, one of the first things I tell the leaders that hire me, the business owners that hire me, I tell them that it’s really critical that they fire themselves because they can’t do it all. And they look at me like, “What do you mean?” Seriously business owners start off thinking they can do it all and they think they can do it better and eventually they do bring on people, but there’s always that overhanging feeling that, “Oh, I don’t know why they did it that way. It should have been this way. I told them a million times.” That’s not what we want to see we want to see teams that actually hold up the business in pillars of your best attributes. Those are the kinds of things that I really stress the team has to be a critical component.

Gordon Shepherd: This makes total sense from what you’re saying and again I hear often leaders are frustrated in meetings and they’re wondering why people aren’t doing the things they want them to do. But you’ve just given them sort of a solution to help to figure that out. And you know, including letting other people participate, raising leaders within your organization. So we got through A-C-T, what’s the I?

Leanne Brownoff: The I is implementation. So if you can imagine you’re in a meeting, you’ve been building awareness with your team, you feel the commitment and now you’ve got what I was going to mention there’s four pillars for the team. If you can make sure that in your business you have visionaries, that you have strategists, implementers and evaluators you have covered the four major pillars of a good solid team. Now take them into a meeting room where you now are strategizing they will all bring their skills to make the best plan that you can create at that moment. So implementation is that the creating of the strategies and trying them out and evaluating them and changing them up and moving on a dime when you have to. That’s when implementation works its best and so you can see why when people hire me and they want to jump into implementation and they haven’t really thought about awareness, commitment and their team implementation might work but it might not.

Gordon Shepherd: I’m not surprised and how lucky to have you there and be in again the right moment and time to bring someone like you in to really respect those early stages which sets the ground for implementation where you can start to knock it out of the park. And I’m sure we could talk about best case scenarios in terms of folks that have actually really respected those first three. Again, we talked about implementation and I just need to get on to finish off the acronyms. So what’s the O?

Leanne Brownoff: Opportunities. Once everything starts moving, you get your head out of being in the business all the time. You get a chance to sit up and look around and see what’s happening. Opportunities are around you and I see there’s two types of opportunities. The ones that show up and you get to evaluate whether you’re going to take them on or not if it’s not the right timing, don’t take it. But there’s a bigger chance of building an opportunity. Those are your opportunities to create with your team and in those implementation meetings, opportunities can be created.

Gordon Shepherd: Yeah, I mean you can see of course where opportunities are going to come from because people now are in the best shape they can possibly be in. So you’re putting yourself in the best position to be, therefore the opportunities as they arise. And finally, there’s the N in your ACTION acronym and what’s that?

Leanne Brownoff: N is basically next. So if you’ve gone through the process, you’ll have three roads ahead of you. You’ll either be one road saying, “Yes, we’re on track keep going, it’s good. We’re not finished yet, but it’s good.” You’ll have another track that’ll go, “Wait a minute, we’re not hitting our goals. Something’s wrong.” You step back and take a look at those other letters and see where did you miss? What did you forget to do? Go back to it, correct it and continue. The third next is we did it, we did everything now we’re on a totally different venture. We’re building this business in another city, everything is working well and it takes you right back start action plan all over again. What do you know? What’s your awareness? How committed are you? And it continues. Action plan never stops it just keeps moving and that’s kind of, that’s motion. That’s action needs traction so you just keep moving with it.

Gordon Shepherd: Wow! Action needs traction. This is just a great framework that again you were talking about earlier saying maybe it’s nontraditional and it’s fun cause we’re not talking about Jim Collins or the five dysfunctions of a team or this kind of thing. This sounds really all encompassing and again you can take it to apply it to a larger organization, a small organization and my guess is if you want to climb Kilimanjaro, how did it work out when you applied it there?

Leanne Brownoff: It was perfect because the way we worked at with awareness, it was, can I do this? Do I have the capacity to do this? Do I have the funds to do this? Do I have the time to do this? The commitment was, yes I really want to do this. I want to do this with a group of people, I found the best people that I want to work with. The team was the people that I climbed with, but the team was also our leaders the people that helped us here in Edmonton and supported us. Implementing was clearly the whole trip itself from beginning to end.

The opportunities we experienced was while we were there, we raised money for MS because we thought, why not? I’m always of that mindset of opportunities should be out there for us to be able to take and to create. So we looked at how many different ways we could make a difference while we were there. And the next was this was such an amazing experience. Standing on that top of that mountain at sunrise as we had planned, seeing the sun at the top of the highest freestanding mountain in the world was absolutely amazing. So when we came back down we said, “What are we going to do next? This was great.” So yeah, it worked for that as well.

Gordon Shepherd: What a great gift. I just am so glad that you’ve taken the time to really thoroughly explain this. And I think when I come to sort of helping leaders with meetings these days, what you’ve just done is you’ve given us something that if they wanted to listen to this and take a bite size approach, now you’ve got a thing that could actually help them with their entire organization. But if they actually applied it to a meeting and started to experience your acronym or say even work with you to do that in a small unit and then realize the value of having this structure, I think that could take people a million miles.

Leanne Brownoff: There’s so much traction that’s built from this. It really is and that’s really why the second part of the title of my book, as you said it’s a Freezing My Ass Off on Kilimanjaro. The second part of that title is The entrepreneur’s survival guide for building traction on a changing business terrain. And it’s because our businesses the terrain’s changing. We need to be okay with changing with it and we need help with that. Our teams can help us and meetings can be a perfect way of making sure that that happens.

Gordon Shepherd: Wow! This has just been outstanding and you know just put a nice bow on it there at the end there. Thanks for that quick summary. I’m just going to go into now the last part of these interviews that we do with wonderful guests like yourself and it’s with a simple question like this. What inspires you?

Leanne Brownoff: Challenges. Crazy as it is I don’t shirk from challenges. I love the idea of when people tell me that they’re having a challenge, I want to help. My most inspirational where I get the goosebumps is when I hear people who have faced a fear and overcome it. It’s not even so much that I need to know whether they were successful, it’s that amazing moment when there’s the story where somebody has had to look fear in the eyes and decided to challenge it and go for it. So for me, it’s the story behind the story. It’s the things that make people really face it and go, “I’m going to make this happen.” And I think that that’s something everybody has. We all have our successes and some of us have amazing more successes than others. It’s not an evaluation or comparison, it’s what can you do so those stories that come from people who said, “I was really afraid to do that and I did it,” that really inspires me.

Gordon Shepherd: I’ve just got to ask, you don’t need to name a name, but can you give me a specific example of one of these ones that inspired you?

Leanne Brownoff: Well, there was a couple of times where I’ve had people come to me and say, “I’d really like to meet somebody, but they’re too important I can’t meet them. They’ll never take me seriously.” And the fear of being rejected really comes in business hugely, or that phone call. I have to make that phone call and tell that person that they didn’t get the job. All those types of feelings where they’re really unsure how they’re going to handle it, when they make those calls or maybe I think probably one that I remember sitting down with a salesperson who needed to make a very difficult call about a sale that went completely wrong and it was the salesperson’s fault.

We talked about how to make it happen, but the person picked up the phone, made the call. When they were finished, they felt so empowered and felt so good that they had done the right thing, that they did not waste time. The emotional drain of sitting and waiting for it or, or thinking about it, they implemented it, they made it happen. Those are the kinds of everyday successes that make me go, “Yes, you just built another major part of your foundation and it feels amazing.” That’s what inspires me.

Gordon Shepherd: Wow! Thank you so much for giving, I’m going to say just in a profound way, a run of the mill example, like breaking it down to something that anybody listening to this show can take on. It’s not like a spectacular Gandhi-esque type thing that we’re never going to do. It’s something that you just said, someone in their daily life can take on and that is really what inspires you and I can hear it. Wow! This has been an outstanding interview and I know that we could go on and on and on, but the big piece I want to make sure that people get a chance to do is if they need to get in touch with you, what’s the best way to do that?

Leanne Brownoff: You can check me out on my website, leannebrownoff.com and my book is available there’s a lot of information in that. It’s available on Amazon, basically yeah, going to my website I think would probably be the quickest way because all of my social media contacts are there as well.

Gordon Shepherd: Super, and just spell the website out for me so I make sure that people get it and I’ll also include it in the show notes. Go ahead.

Leanne Brownoff: It’s L-E-A-N-N-E-B-R-O-W-N-O-F-F .com.

Gordon Shepherd: Leanne, thank you so much for being on the show.

Leanne Brownoff: Thank you so much, Gord. This has been my pleasure.

Gordon Shepherd: Now, wasn’t that a great interview? Can you imagine as a leader using the word ACTION in this way? Thinking about which letter am I on? Have I skipped a letter? Am I in the right place? What a great way to frame and sort of take forward any solid idea that you want to do and then from a leadership perspective it’s one of those things where it’s going to make you make better decisions. I think we can learn from Leanne I hope some of you actually get in touch with her cause then you know you’ll benefit from her directly. And I think one of my key takeaways here is that awareness must infiltrate your business. I couldn’t agree more with Leanne in her approach to things. I know that that definitely works for the client work that I do as well. And to help you along with this awareness piece, I want to point your attention to a few other episodes on the Meeting Leadership Podcast.

Now, episode nine is called how a meeting mentor can improve your leadership skills and you can get that episode by going to meetingleadershipinc.com/nine. And then on episode 43 we’ve got another guest, a fantastic leader, Martin Parnell who also climbed Kilimanjaro except he set a Guinness record doing this feat. That is episode 43, it is called why goal setting is critical for all leaders. And you can get that episode by going to meetingleadershipinc.com/43. And finally on episode 85 it’s called why leadership training is an investment. And I really have enjoyed putting that episode together because I think if we think about it in that way, then we can go to our boss, we can go to our customers, we can tell them why we’re taking the time and investing the dollars that it takes to grow.

And I hope you’ll get a lot out of that episode when you visit meetingleadershipinc.com/85. And of course this episode is brought to you by the Meeting Leadership Academy. Now, I’ve already mentioned there’s some wonderful live training options there for you and your team and there’s also some great online training options as well. So check everything out at meetingleadershipinc.com/academy. And for everybody who is already a subscriber, thank you so much and if you haven’t done it yet, make sure you take the time to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss an episode. And as always, thank you so much for listening and we’ll see you next time on the Meeting Leadership Podcast.

Thanks for listening to the Meeting Leadership Podcast. Be sure to subscribe for more strategies that’ll help you become an outstanding leader. And don’t forget to rate and review so we can bring you even more great content. We’ll see you next time right here on the Meeting Leadership Podcast.