Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host Roberta.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning in to.

And by the end of this episode, please remember to subscribe, give a rating, and a review.

Now, our main focus on this podcast are communication and soft skills, even mostly for leadership positions.

My guest today, Jim Frawley, who is the CEO of Bellwether, based in New York, is here to talk to us about some revolutionary ideas of what it takes to be an effective leader, how to build thriving teams, and not to just regurgitate what we find on Google every time we look for what makes a leader, what makes a great team.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hi, Roberta.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you for being on our show today.

Please introduce yourself.

Sure.

My name is Jim Frawley.

I run an organization called Bellwether.

We do executive development in many different forms, but typically it takes the form of executive coaching, getting people ready for the C-suite.

We do business coaching, group coaching, and workshops for different types of teams.

We've been doing it now for eight years.

Prior to that, I had about a 15-year career, primarily in the financial industry and business strategy, executive communications, public relations, and corporate training.

So how do you move from finance?

Did you get those big bonuses?

How did you move from finance to coaching, leadership coaching?

Well, when you work at corporate and you hate it, you look for other opportunities.

And I did not enjoy my time at corporate.

I was always very frustrated.

I didn't think I was getting everything that I could out of corporate.

I didn't realize it until after I had become a coach.

That was pretty much my fault, even though I would blame other people.

I actually went to a coach and I said, I put together four or five different business plans.

Do I go out on my own?

And I found Columbia University had an executive coaching program.

And when I read about executive coaching, I said, this is it.

This is exactly what it is that I want to do.

And the thing that pushed me towards that was I was never really thrilled with the coaching product that was out there.

I didn't think it was good enough for what they were charging.

And so that really launched Bellwether.

I knew I could do it better and I knew that I could do it more fair.

And I knew that I could bring a lot more value than what I was seeing out there.

Right.

You identified the gap in the market.

I also have a corporate career.

And the reason I started this podcast was I saw that the gap that was there is the fact that nobody tells you how crucial communication and soft skills are in addition to the technical you learn in college at university.

When you say you were frustrated, is that something along those lines?

Yeah.

I didn't know the questions to ask.

I was frustrated I wasn't getting the feedback that I was supposed to get.

I wasn't getting the promotions I thought I deserved.

I wasn't getting any of these types of things.

But in retrospect, it was all because I didn't say what I wanted to do.

I knew that I was bringing value on.

I had the president of the business come to me one day.

He says, I will have you run any business in this company.

You tell me what it is.

And I said, I don't know what it's going to be.

And I just kind of left it.

It was my own fault.

But I literally didn't see where I would fit in that.

Now, afterwards, now I could go back and I would completely change the game.

It would be very different.

You know, we don't realize in corporate how much control we really have over our particular situation.

If you want a promotion, rather than saying, I'm not getting the feedback, you know, how do you change the way that you get feedback?

How do you ask different types of questions to get the type of feedback?

Do you go to different places to get feedback rather than just waiting for someone to give it to you?

I grew up in a place, and most of us did, where you're told if you work hard, people will notice and you'll get your promotion.

But that's not the way that it works at all.

You have to be the squeaky wheel.

You have to say, I want the promotion.

You have to say, I want the big bonus.

You have to say, this is the value that I'm actually bringing.

And if they're not hearing it, then you have to go other places so that people will hear it and do it in the right way and understand the bigger picture and how you actually fit into it.

I think millions of people who are listening, that's exactly the position they find themselves in.

Work very hard, graduate magna cum laude and think, I'm the best at my job.

But they don't know how to ask the right questions, as you say.

They also don't know how to literally chart a career course, career path that when the executive company approaches them, they will have the answers.

So what can you say to them?

Yeah, I didn't know what my career course was going to be.

I had no vision as to where I wanted to go.

Some people do, and they are on the fast track.

And a lot of organizations, they put them in the high potential kind of category, and they get investment in coaches, and they get mentorship, and they get offsites, and they get different types of leadership training and all this type of stuff.

What I try to pitch clients, and the smart ones, I think, do it is, there's a much larger population, which I call the other hypo, the hidden potential.

If you grab any manager in an organization and say, give me one of the people on your team that's really, really good, but nobody knows it yet, every manager could say, this is the person, right?

This is the person, they're the rock star, they bring everything up.

They will pay me for this person to leave.

Everybody's got one of those, those are the people we should be investing in.

And the type of investment, I love that you said it was revolutionary.

This is the type of coaching that you get real ROI on.

How do you have them articulate their value?

What do people gain by working with you?

When you're able to answer these types of questions, all of a sudden your conversations on development, your conversations at your year-end review, your conversation on what your goals are going to be, it suddenly changes around to the value you're bringing the business, not just about what I do.

I always thought that I was working hard, but it was really just anxiety and stress.

It wasn't that I was bringing real value to the business.

Now, when I think about going back to how much harder I could have worked and how much smarter I could have worked, we get caught up in, oh, I've got so much work to do, but it's really anxiety and stress driving what you think is a lot of productive work.

And so when we think about where we want to go, ultimately we have to focus on us as an individual on what value we are bringing to the organization.

You're right, because we do get caught up in the tasks and think, you know, if I have a pile of papers on my desk, I look very busy and productive as a result.

The hard work and that's how you get promoted.

That's not how that works.

And you sit there not getting work done and you say, oh, well, this idiot didn't do this and this person didn't do this and I have to wait for this person to work.

We're blaming other people.

But what organizations are realizing now from a learning development and communication standpoint is we want entrepreneurs in resonance.

I run my business.

If I don't get it done, it doesn't get done.

I can't just sit and wait for somebody else.

If I have a deadline, I have to create the work that has to get there and I can leverage other people, but ultimately I'm responsible for doing it.

That's the accountability that we want to build within an organization is we need entrepreneurs.

What are you waiting for?

You can't just wait for somebody else and then blame them that your project didn't get done.

You're ultimately responsible for this.

And how are you creating new work and creating new value for the organization?

Those are the people that are going to get the promotions and the big bonuses and everything else.

And when you're competing against 1,000, 2,000, 10,000 other people for a set pool of money, you're now in a competition of who's creating the most value.

Those are the people that are going to benefit the most.

That's the ROI.

That's the ROI.

If you're a marketing VP, you are the CEO of that department.

You are the CEO of your job.

If you're a marketing VP making 200 grand a year, when you go into your year in review, how can you tell them with a straight face that you brought them $500,000 worth of value?

If I'm making $200,000 a year and mailing it in, you're eventually going to get caught up.

People are going to catch you saying, you're not really worth $200,000.

How do you make yourself worth it?

Because ultimately, all a job is, and we're rethinking the way that we think about employees now, what are we paying them for?

Are we paying them to sit at a desk for 50, 60 hours a week?

Or are we paying them to create something that's going to bring value for shareholders and everything else?

A business only really exists to make money.

That's its only purpose.

And we forget that because it's humans making money, right?

We work with humans.

And it's very important that we have feelings and emotions and logic, and we want people to be taken care of.

And it's a family, but it's not really a family.

The business only operates to make money.

You have to put yourself in a position so that the business can make money and see value out of you, which is a harsh thing to say.

We don't really want to look at it that way, but that's the reality.

Hansa said you're revolutionary because a lot of people don't want to admit that.

No, it's the element in the room.

We know it.

We do want to admit it.

That's right.

Now, talking about leadership, one of the things that leaders are accused of not doing so well is giving constructive feedback, not being able to communicate what they expect.

Because, like I said, one, the employees don't know how to ask great questions, but the leaders also don't know how to give great feedback so that I come out of your destiny.

Okay, I know exactly what Mr.

Frawley expects me to do.

I like what you just said is it comes down to expectations.

So nobody likes to have difficult conversations, which is why nobody ever gives the feedback because they never probably set expectations.

So when people don't meet the expectations, you now have to tell them that they didn't meet the expectations that you didn't give them.

So it's this roundabout circle, you know, self-incriminatory type of feedback that you just don't want to give.

And we don't want to have to defend this type of feedback because people are going to get defensive and everything else.

So when we talk about leadership and communicating expectations, that's one of the first things that we will start with in terms of a leadership development program is how do you articulate, one, your expectations on other people, but your expectations also on how you like to receive information?

How do you communicate your expectations when you expect projects to be done?

From a project to interpersonal to anything else, then the organization, you as leader of that group, you need to set and drive those expectations, one, but then uphold those expectations publicly, right?

Because if you don't meet those expectations for whatever reason, other people will notice how they're treated.

If they don't meet the expectations, what are the consequences for not meeting expectations is probably the better way to say it.

Those are incredibly important, and the way to do that is to ask really, really good questions.

It's not just to dictate from the top, this is what I expect.

When we are able to ask really good objective questions, everybody knows there's nothing worse than going in front of a CEO and explaining to them that you didn't meet their expectations.

It's the worst.

The first time that happens, it will never happen again.

I worked in finance where you'd get something thrown at you.

People shout and foul language and everything.

It was a different kind of world.

When you have to look at anybody, whether it's a boss, a CEO, or even family members, that you know what the expectations were.

You were very clear, and you didn't meet them.

Nobody wants to admit that and say that to a group of people.

So when you ask them, did you meet the expectations, and they have to say no, that will never happen again.

Communicating those expectations and communicating the consequences of not meeting them are very, very important.

And now let's talk about teams.

Okay, so do team training as well.

What would you say are the top two or three key elements that go into a thriving team, a team that works together, synergistic, they just work together, they just blend?

Yeah, so we hire people for a reason.

And we need to give them the space and agency to bring the value that we hired them for.

And so when we're piecing together a team, some people might be really good at strategic thinking, some people are really good at project management, some people are really good at the interpersonal, making sure people are working well together.

We need to figure out what those skill sets are for the team and make sure that people are leveraging those in the best possible way.

The thing I speak most to clients about who are off from a team perspective, people generally aren't able to speak in the way that they are most productive.

And so psychological safety is a big topic that I'll bring up.

Most people dismiss psychological safety because it sounds really soft and it sounds ridiculous.

But when you explain it to what it is, most leaders are just saying, oh yeah, that's exactly what we want and that's what it is.

Everybody should have a voice.

Everybody should have an ability to talk about their expertise.

Everybody should be able to come up with an idea.

The most productive teams are the most psychologically safe ones where everybody's comfortable to do that.

Now, that can take different forms, right?

I know really productive teams where they're shouting at each other and screaming and putting everyone down, but everybody on the team just works really well for that.

Other ones are a little more kumbaya and let's have a little more patience and let's open the floor and be a little more collective.

So it can take many different forms, but everyone should be comfortable about being vocal to bring their particular value to the team.

And it's up to the manager to solicit that and encourage that.

That would be priority number one for getting your team together.

So obviously, even during the hiring process, if you know that, okay, this is the environment where the shouting and the screaming, but hey, that's what I'm comfortable with, or you want the more wellness, meditative type of work environment, if that's what resonates with you.

Yeah, I work with executives a lot, or say, and look, we got to fix culture.

We have to fix the culture, and I'm being told we have to fix the culture.

And, you know, you talk to people and it's usually two or three people may not fit, right?

They don't like the way that everybody shouts or whatever.

For some reason, it's not generally what I tell the executive is, you can have whatever culture you want.

It really doesn't matter.

If you want people shouting and being amped up and throwing things, you can do that.

It may not work for everybody, but if that's the one you want to encourage, perfectly fine.

Who are we to say it's right or wrong, but you're going to have to attract those people who are going to thrive in that type of environment.

If it's not, you know, there are other ones where you could say, we want it to be much different.

We want everyone to work in a different type of way.

Some people aren't going to fit in that.

They might be too aggressive.

They might be too difficult.

The one thing I will say across all of those is while we're making money for a business, you're still working with human beings.

You could shout, you can yell, you still have to be civil and you have to be respectful.

And that's it.

No matter the type of culture.

So if people don't feel respected, they're not going to give you their best.

And so you can have it in different forms.

We kind of miss, not miss, but we make the mistake of, you know, things like psychological safety has to take this form.

And we have to do it this way.

And we have to set it up this way.

We have to have these town halls.

And it doesn't have to be that set kind of way.

But everyone does have to feel respected as human beings if you want to get their best.

Right.

So you can have a trading floor, everybody shouting NASDAQ numbers, but still be able to respect their colleagues and be cordial with them at the same time.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, look, when was the last time you were excited at work?

Nobody gets excited at work anymore.

But sometimes you go to the place and you get a bunch of people really excited about doing something.

But they love what they do.

Absolutely.

Let it go.

They let people scream.

Who cares?

Just don't be a jerk.

So they are fit for that culture.

So the two or three people who think they're not a fit, obviously, they can be moved maybe to a different department or something.

So it could just be a question of style.

And that just may not be their style.

But if they feel like they fit, then that's okay.

And so one of the things we'll do is, you know what, this is the way I like to give information and receive information.

So a lot of the times when we see conflict at work, some people like to think about things in very different ways.

I like to think about what's possible, but this person thinks about how things are going to get done.

They don't work, right?

At all, right?

However, when they both know that they like to think that way and the other person thinks differently, it gives them a path to have a conversation saying, I'm going to really annoy you right now, but this is what I'm thinking.

And you could set it up where it's a productive type of workplace, even though you've got these different modes of thinking.

So we want to give people a platform to say, I hear you, I'm respecting you.

I know the way that you like to think and work and do this.

I'm coming at it from a different direction.

What's possible in the middle?

Because when we let emotion take over our work, we get defensive and emotions ruin everything.

If we think about it, when we talk about it logically, this is what we're looking to co-create together.

This is the project we have to work on.

I'm going to do things very differently and you're going to do things very differently.

And it's going to hurt my feelings when you don't want to do it my way.

But we have to talk about objectively what's in the middle.

That is a platform that you can teach people to do, but they have to have the ammunition in order to do it.

They have to know how they like to think about things and how other people like to think about things and what are the different ways we like to think and operate and do all of these things.

We have to give them that ammunition so that they have the ability to communicate and talk about the way that they would like to move forward to accomplish some particular task.

Speaking of conflict, as we said, yes, the business first and foremost is here to make money, but you have humans and their emotions and different ways of thinking.

And then you have diversity.

You have all these elements coming in.

And yet, let's be honest, as humans, it's easier to just deal with somebody who's like you.

Just to get to the other side and get things done.

Like, let's just get there.

You know what I mean?

But then the diversity aspect comes in.

What can you say are the benefits, if any, of having a diverse staff complement when you lead people?

Here's my challenge with diversity.

Is that people don't want to be patient to get there.

And what I know about diversity are the most diverse companies, and there's research supporting this, the most diverse companies are the most profitable.

And the reason you want that is because they bring a different type of cognitive diversity.

Their experiences are different.

They've got different angles.

They've got different thoughts.

And so the big challenge is organizations are waiting.

So we need more diversity, but where are you going to find it?

So there's a process we have to go through in order to get it.

It's incredibly valuable.

It's incredibly important.

When I think about diversity too, it's not just diversity.

It's diversity at the decision making table is where it's really important because these people are helping to dictate the vision of where you want to go.

These people are helping to dictate what's the people strategy and where you're bringing people in.

People misinterpret diversity as we need 25% this, 25% that, 25% that.

That's not what it is.

It's more of we need these different perspectives to challenge the way that we're doing things.

Now, to get a diverse leadership team in place takes time.

Because, let's be honest, most of the time it's been just a bunch of white guys running businesses.

And that's it.

And it's going to be a bumpy road over time because now you're looking at a bunch of white men who are expecting to go into leadership positions.

But we kind of have to put the brakes on that a little bit to say we need diversity and leadership.

So to be honest, white guys are kind of like, well, what's next for me?

Right.

I'm happy to be patient.

Diversity is well and good, but don't slow down my individual path.

And that's a real challenge that organizations kind of have to face.

But it's necessary for an organization to survive and thrive within the future.

You're going to need these different types of perspectives to be nimble enough for the new economy.

So it's a bumpy road.

It's going to be a case by case basis, but it's a necessary one.

It's one of those things that we really have to go through.

Market share, market share.

Let's increase market share.

We're not penetrating new markets.

So obviously, if you only have one perspective, how likely are you to know what even these new markets you want to tap into are looking for?

Right.

And it becomes inauthentic.

Right.

But it's not just even market share.

It's representation.

I have a friend who wrote a book about women in male-dominated industries.

And one of the stories was about a woman who became an executive, and they had never even thought to put a women's room on the executive floor.

So she had to leave her heels outside of the bathroom so no men would walk into the bathroom.

And so when you get such a narrow focus, and I love the story.

I don't love it, but you know, it's wild.

What are you missing, right?

What are you missing in your little bubble of we've got a bunch of white men in our leadership team, and that's it.

And you know what?

It's more than just kind of putting a token woman up there or you know, you can't just do that.

You need real conversation to say, guess what?

You forgot this over here and you're missing this aspect over here.

The marketplace isn't going to wait for you to catch up.

The marketplace is going to dictate it.

You need to set up your teams and leadership teams in a position to be prepared for that when it comes.

And we saw the pandemic just blew companies up.

Those ones who could be nimble were the ones that are able to adapt, almost, I call it adapting in motion.

How are you adapting while you're in motion?

You need those varying perspectives in your leadership team, on your board, to help you make those decisions very, very quickly.

Right.

Speaking of the pandemic, I know you made a video about quiet quitting.

I had heard of it on TikTok, obviously.

But quiet quitting, what are your thoughts on that?

I quite quit the hell out of my time in corporate.

And it's not new.

And I feel like a lot of what we're doing is we live online, and it's a bunch of clickbait kind of articles.

We need to take old ideas and give them new names so that we can do it.

So there's quiet quitting, there's quiet firing, there's quiet hiring, and I forget what the new one is.

I would say quiet quit away.

Just do it.

It's fine.

I mean, when I think back to the movie Office Space, he quiet quit.

He said, look, I could put in an extra two hours of work every day, and the company might make another thousand bucks, but I don't see another dime.

What's the point?

What's the point in going above and beyond?

And it goes back to the original question, which I ask a lot of leaders, and what are you thinking about your employees?

What's the point?

Are you paying for 60 hours a week or are you paying for value?

If I can give you $200,000 worth of value in 10 hours a week, would you pay it?

Now, it's very difficult to monitor that and measure that in a very large bureaucratic organization, but it's possible, right?

And a lot of companies are now creating these libraries of what are the skill sets and how do we almost put together these SWAT teams to do the type of work that we're actually looking for.

I hate to admit it, but I quite quit, but I brought value.

There were things that I did that nobody else could do.

It wasn't like I was being lazy.

Quite quitting isn't being lazy.

Quite quitting the way I see it is I will give you the value that you're paying me for and then I'm taking the rest of the time and spending it on family and everything else.

There's nothing wrong with that.

It's about creating boundaries.

And so we expect everyone to just constantly go above and beyond and do more.

I watched a video the other day, a person asking, why does everyone have to just get up and just run a marathon?

Why can't you just go for like a one-mile jog?

Why do we have to do all this like so much crazy work?

Maybe it's okay, right?

You are again, you're in competition with other people, but you could be smart about it, right?

Create your boundaries and create value.

And outside of that.

Yeah, because here's the thing the pandemic has taught us.

People were suddenly at home thinking, I literally am productive for two hours of the day.

And then they just have all these meetings, half of them unnecessary.

Because when you had work from 8 to 430, who said that you're productive the whole time?

Oh, right.

Even when you were in the office, how many times did you sit in a meeting room?

Or like you're multitasking, right?

You dial in, you're always multitasking and doing everything else.

90% of your meetings you don't know.

There are some studies who would say and some people try to practice this.

No meeting should take more than 15 minutes.

Right.

However, I would also say, which we're seeing now, productivity is at an all time low, which is interesting.

Corporate output, I guess, is at an all time low.

So now people are trying to monitor employees and trying to get them to do more because they're all working remote.

You can be individually productive at home.

But the question is, are you productive collectively for the business?

And that's kind of the argument of, are you pushing the business forward?

So you can be productive, but you're also not really there building anything new.

You're on these calls, again, anxiety, stress.

You're so busy doing these meetings, you're not even supposed to be in these meetings where it's not a valuable use of your time.

We've got to rethink all of this in terms of what's pushing the business forward.

It's a terrible thing to say, but most companies could probably cut 50% of their workforce and be fine.

We're doing so much.

Look at Twitter, look at Amazon, look at Facebook.

And that's just in tech.

It's going to happen everywhere else where you realize what's the value these people are really bringing.

And you can ask anybody, look at your calendar for today, your triple booked on Zoom meetings.

You probably could skip all of them.

Everything would be fine.

So they schedule all these meetings.

Is it a way to monitor if people are productive, but then they turn around and say productivity is low since the pandemic?

So they're monitoring them just by how often your mouse is moving or you're really logged in, which I would say is terrible, right?

It's not a productive.

Once people start feeling like they're being policed, their motivation goes down.

How are you communicating the expectations of creating value and rethinking?

And it's a very different way to think about your employees.

So when you think that overall output from an organization is going down, and it took a major spike down in the middle of the pandemic, it went up a little bit in the pandemic and then it came down since like 1947, I think.

It's like 80 years, the lowest in like 80 years.

And they want to monitor employees and they're blaming the employees for not being productive.

It's the wrong focus.

It should come down to leadership and communicating the expectations of where are you spending your time?

It's going to be most valuable for the business.

And I remember being a corporate.

I maybe needed to go to one or two of the 12 meetings I went to in a day.

But I was expected to go there and I was told to go there and everything else.

Finally, I just stopped going.

I found my productivity ended up going up.

You were not being insubordinate for not going to those meetings?

Most people don't notice.

When you don't go to meetings.

So here's another thing too, if you want a quiet quit is just say, oh, I'm double booked and nobody knows.

But if you're going to be doing it, be selective in terms of where do I get the best visibility?

And this is just real talk.

Where do I get the best visibility?

How am I going to be in front of the really important people?

Will this help move anything forward?

Are they going to be talking about anything at this meeting that's going to impact me negatively?

So maybe I should probably go there.

But outside of that, hey, I can't make the meeting.

Can I get a quick update in terms of X and continue with my work?

Create the value.

That's it.

Create the value.

I made so much more progress on this than anybody else.

Take a look.

And that's how you start to articulate this value and bring value to the organization and say, I pushed this forward a lot more than anybody else.

That for me makes a lot more sense.

Of course it does.

Come on.

So is there anything else I haven't asked you when it comes to your executive leadership coaching that you want to share with us today?

No.

You know, we talked right before this.

You know, when I think about the three things that you really need to know from a leadership executive standpoint, you have to know how to ask really, really good questions.

The question is something objective where you don't know the answer.

No judgmental statements.

By doing that, you drive a psychologically safe environment, which we talked about.

That's one.

Number two, you have to think about the steps to get to a goal.

So you're going to articulate a vision.

You have to communicate the hell out of it.

You have to revisit that vision on a monthly, quarterly basis and continually communicate that and understand all of the steps to get there so that you can effectively lead your teams.

Those are the really important things to differentiate a really good executive in 2023 and beyond.

And one more thing, again, summarize for us what makes a team thrive.

Psychological safety in a nutshell.

We need everyone to be respected and feel comfortable so that they can bring the value that we hired them for.

And so no matter the environment that you want to drive, you could drive whatever environment you want.

Crazy, soft, psycho, nuts, loud, whatever.

That's fine.

That's just culture.

Culture becomes something.

Culture is the result of a collective group.

But the people have to be respected.

And you want these different types of perspectives.

That's what you hired them for.

And that's what makes diversity so important.

It's what makes teamwork so important.

It's what makes psychological safety so important is people should be respected and have the ability to speak up when they need to.

Yes, I can relate to culture being something that you create because I'm South African.

I'm from the Zulu culture.

There's eight other African cultures in my country.

Everybody's different, different languages.

And that is something we create.

Doesn't say be a copycat of the other culture.

You create the culture, whatever it is.

That's right.

That's right.

And everyone, our belief system internally is based on these perspectives from throughout time and our communities and everything else.

Because you have a belief doesn't necessarily make it true.

So my Irish background in the Bronx informs a lot of my perspective.

It doesn't mean that it's a truth.

It's just something maybe that I grew up believing.

And then beliefs can change over time and you would do that through good questions and everything else.

And so that's why it's so important to get these different types of perspectives really challenge the way that we think.

And that's development that's growing as individuals.

And when we learn something from these different perspectives, that's what gets us really jazzed as individuals.

I've learned something and I could tap into that.

And it sounds like that not only applies in the workplace, but in our personal lives as well.

Society, if we are at that level, it would be so different.

Oh, it would be amazing.

It would be amazing.

Just think about the political world.

It would change everything.

Oh my goodness.

You're right.

It's work and life are the same, right?

You're spending half your life at work anyway, more than half your waking hours.

It's all the same.

It's all the same.

Any last words of wisdom before we ask you for your socials?

The best quote I've ever heard, and I tell this to all leaders, changed the game in the way I thought about leadership.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his book Confessions, How can anyone be satisfied in life if they aren't satisfied with the one person they can never be separated from?

And much of the work that I do with executives, they won't admit it, but it comes around in security.

And so focus on you as an individual, dealing with macro change, dealing with macro anything.

You have to focus on a micro individual, and you're not going to be able to fix anything until you fix yourself.

And that's where your number one focus should lie, whether it's sales training, whether it's executive coaching, whether it's public speaking coaching, all of it.

It has to start with the individual and it has to start with you.

That is very powerful.

And the reason it is is because a lot of the time when people have those exit interviews and they say, no, we're going to give you more money, please stay, they say, I'm not staying for more money.

My boss was horrible.

And it's not that they intend to be.

Half of them, they will admit, I don't even know what I'm doing.

I came here because I'm really good at my job.

But this managing people think is, you know, it's out of my comfort zone.

That's a nice kind of differentiation, too.

You're doing a job.

And managing people are two very separate things.

They're very, very different things.

And so we have to understand the motivations and desires and everything else and really good questions to get other people to bring their best.

Again, beliefs.

You believe this is the best way to do it, doesn't make it a truth.

Let other people in the way that they believe, it could also be a good way to do something as well.

Words of wisdom from Jim Frawley, the CEO of Bellwether, the executive leadership coaching and team coaching company.

Thank you very much for being with us today.

This has been an amazing conversation.

You've changed a lot.

Thank you so much.

So much.

Perfect.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

My pleasure.

Before you go, where can we find you on the socials?

Jim Frawley, N-Y-F-R-A-W-L-E-Y.

And the website is bellwetherhub.com.

bellwetherhub.com.

Thank you very much, Jim.

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