Episode 238 Transcript:

0:00:00 Ramona Shaw: In this episode of The Manager Track podcast, I have Christian Muntean with me. We’re going to touch on a number of really interesting topics that I’m sure you want to hear because they probably relate to your own leadership journey as well. We’ll talk about accountability, follow through, time management and priority management. We’re going to talk about perfectionism. We’ll talk about transitioning into a leadership role or adopting a leadership mindset, your self image, and how to cultivate an environment that supports your leadership growth. Christian is a business strategist and an advisor to entrepreneurs.

0:00:31 Ramona Shaw: He’s helping them through transitions, including exits and succession planning. He’s also the author of numerous books, including Train to Lead, which piqued my interest and sparked this conversation. So, without further ado, let’s welcome Christian to The Manager Track podcast. Here are the two questions this podcast answers. One, how do you successfully transition into your first official leadership role?

0:00:53 Ramona Shaw: And two, how do you keep climbing that leadership ladder and continuously get promoted? Although the competition and the expectations get bigger, this show, The Manager Track podcast, will provide the answers. I’m your host, Ramona Shaw. I’m on a mission to create workplaces where work is seen as a source of contribution, connection, and personal fulfillment. And this transition starts with developing a new generation of leaders who know how to lead so everyone wins and grows.

0:01:22 Ramona Shaw: In the show, you’ll learn how to think, communicate, and act as a confident and competent leader. You know you can. Welcome to the Manager Track podcast. I’m excited to have you here and to talk to you about a lot of different things related to leadership, about the connection between sports, being an athlete and leadership, and specifically mentioning a lot of the wisdom and thought you put into writing the book Train to Lead. This piqued my interest.

0:01:48 Ramona Shaw: I saw a lot of things in here that I think our audience would love to hear, and I as we’ve just talked about before hitting records, we have a long list of items that I’d love to hear your thoughts on. So I’m excited for this conversation. Thank you for being here.

0:02:03 Christian Muntean: Yeah, thank you, Ramona. I’m glad to be here.

0:02:06 Ramona Shaw: Well, you chose of all the different things that we could talk about leadership, you chose to connect it to athletic training and athletic performance. How did you make that connection? What really piqued your interest in exploring the topic from that angle?

0:02:21 Christian Muntean: Yeah, so the connection came from my own personal background, which I’ve always been involved as an amateur, but I’ve always been involved in athletics and sports and fitness and for about 12 years as kind of a hobby. I was a strength and conditioning instructor. And so one day as I was driving home from the gym, I wondered, why is it that we can train athletes predictably? You can take an athlete and train them to peak out right before their event.

0:02:52 Christian Muntean: And any good trainer knows how to do that. Peak them out the day of the event. Perfect timing with that. But with leadership, almost always with the leadership development programs or training or so on, somebody just gets dumped into a leadership role. They’re given a fire hose of ideas and concepts, and then, good luck, don’t screw up. And I thought, what if we applied some of what we know works for physical development, for fitness, and just as a thought experiment, how much of these concepts seem to apply to leadership? And as I started playing with it, I realized, oh, there’s something here. Like this works really well.

0:03:29 Christian Muntean: And so I like the structure because a lot of people, many people get put into leadership as you know, and they realize this is not what I was expecting. This is different, and it feels different. And preparation isn’t just about knowledge, it’s about me. And so I wanted to create something that helped more reliably, more predictably prepare people to lead and how.

0:03:55 Ramona Shaw: I mean, I love the concept and clearly, you know, I’m trying to spread this message. Message and shout it from the rooftops. The importance of not just letting people go with the sink or swim approach, but prepare them for a leadership role and support them during the first few months, if not year, in our first leadership role, because it’s such a big transition. When you talk about preparing for that peak performance, what does that look like? And I know that you’re breaking it up by different seniority levels or different transitions, but what was what. What is. If you, in a nutshell, you’d had to explain that, what would it sound like?

0:04:30 Christian Muntean: I guess it’s the size of the nutshell you want to give me for that, but using a little bit of a larger, larger nut. The. So at the very core, something I mentioned in the book a lot, is that you lead out of who you are or that leadership development is personal development. And so there’s a lot of skills and techniques that leaders should learn and need to learn to be effective. But at the very, very core, learning to grow as a person into the kinds of traits, and I would say emotional maturity and relational maturity, so that you can handle yourself and the dynamics that you’re in well, is really the foundation of an effective leader.

0:05:13 Christian Muntean: And so I spend time focusing there, at least at the early parts of the book. And that’s really when I talk about train to lead or to become a leader. I am teaching skills. But much of the book is really about how to become the kind of person who can competently step into a leadership role, which is different than just having leadership skills. And so that’s kind of the nutshell, I guess, is walking people through that.

0:05:40 Christian Muntean: The other side of it is what I’ve realized and what I’ve learned is that not all leadership concepts kind of fit at the same time. There’s a certain foundation of concepts or perspectives that are needed before other ones can really be built on. And I wanted to make sure that I introduce them in an order that actually makes sense to somebody, especially for newer leaders or leaders that are experiencing new levels of responsibility to help them understand, like, certain things do come before others in terms of your ability to perform.

0:06:18 Christian Muntean: And if you’re having a struggle in a certain area, even though you may have sat on a class on a certain topic, you may have to revisit some of the personal growth elements of that. And I just want to help people understand that and see that. So that’s how I laid the book out, the way it’s laid out.

0:06:35 Ramona Shaw: I’m. I’m thinking about weight training here, and I think about you. You know, you do the back squat before you do a front squat. Certain building blocks, most definitely. And I think that it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the amount of information that we can absorb and we have at our fingertips about how to be a good leader. And. And I fully agree that it is tempting, and it can pull us into two ineffective directions. One is we try to learn everything at the same time and don’t realize there’s actually, you know, building blocks that you have to go through.

0:07:07 Ramona Shaw: And two, and. Which starts with that personal development. And, you know, we often refer to this as the leadership mindset that we have to cultivate and the foundation that we have to build there. But two also that it. It starts to seem a bit like a checklist of, oh, I need to have one on ones. I need to learn how to give feedback. And if you go through this checklist and think leadership is a set of behaviors versus understanding. No, it’s a way of thinking that then leads to a different way of behaving.

0:07:38 Ramona Shaw: Just like, if I think of myself as an athlete, I will not just show up differently during that training session. I will show up differently in how I sleep, how I rest, what I eat, how I stretch. Right. How I think of myself and my body. And that is what leads to this sustainable, more authentic way of leadership.

0:07:59 Christian Muntean: I agree with that. I think it’s very hard to just try to switch leadership on and be effective in that capacity as a. I mean, we all need to do that to a certain degree. Show up in a situation and you have to be on for it. It may not be your comfort zone, but I think if you become the kind of person, just like you mentioned with athletics, the way you eat, the way you sleep, the things you do, it all has a huge impact in terms of what actually shows up, you know, wherever you compete or train or whatever you do. And it’s the same thing with leadership. And so, yeah, I love that, that connection. In athletics for good training, you don’t practice everything all at once. You go through cycles of training and a good trainer or good instructor will take their athletes and just bring them to the point of starting to get some change in an area and then they switch the training.

0:08:54 Christian Muntean: As if you stay in one spot for too long, you’ll plateau. But also you can only really get so much out of it in one area. And so that there’s a combination of things of one is having a short term focus, you know, spending in fitness, spending usually a few weeks on a certain area like strength building or conditioning or wherever you’re focusing and then moving on. But you can do that in leadership as well. Focus on a specific area for a period of time and then shift. And I think that helps people maintain momentum and it should free them up from the idea of feeling like they need to have the very false idea of believing they should have complete mastery over one topic before they move on to another.

0:09:41 Christian Muntean: Or because I’ve been introduced to the topic, I have mastery over it. Or you know, whatever they think, maybe they feel like they’re not good with it. So it’s not something that’s their leadership style and then they just skip, move on. So it’s this idea of kind of revisiting these concepts, Right.

0:09:57 Ramona Shaw: Or that they think it’s complete at some point, right? Oh, I’ve checked the box then that’s it. No, it’s an ongoing cycle that you go through when you’re to make this a bit more practical for the listeners who haven’t looked at the book. The way that you pulled this out is sort of like having development plans in place to prepare those leaders. Can you give us an example of how you would help someone prepare, let’s say someone who’s moving into their first leadership role.

0:10:24 Ramona Shaw: What would they begin with yeah.

0:10:27 Christian Muntean: So using the parallels from the book, when you begin looking at getting fit, the first thing you want to focus on is actually not anything you would do in a gym or on a track. It’s focusing on nutrition and your environment. So this has to do with what you eat, how you sleep, getting enough water, some basic things like that. And so the correlation to leadership is looking at the influences you have in your life, the key relationships you have, the media influences, the podcasts you listen to, the news you listen to, the things you read and recognizing, and there’s a lot of research behind this, and I introduce some of it in the book, but recognizing that the people you spend time around, you can’t help yourself because of mirror neurons, which is something I introduced in the book.

0:11:17 Christian Muntean: But the way we’re designed is to actually be influenced by people that are, that we’re around. And so if we’re around people that are inspiring to us and are living lives that are similar to who we want to become, it helps pull us forward. On the other hand, if we’re around people that are not, it keeps us stuck or pulls us back. Same thing with listening to podcasts like yours. It’s bringing in good nutrition, good ideas, good concepts, inspiration versus other things which may be, you know, whatever, more cynical or discouraging or distracting or something like that, that kind of the junk food of podcasts or other media.

0:11:58 Christian Muntean: The news, for example, is often that way. And so just paying attention to that and curating that, because these are things that construct and inform how we see ourselves and how we see the world around us. And leaders to a very large degree have to be interpreters of reality so you can help people navigate it. And if we don’t see it from a perspective that’s optimistic and constructive and sees potential, it’s very hard to lead people towards anything of value. So that’s where I would start. And then you go on from building that to basic skills which have to do with self management, what I correlate to conditioning.

0:12:37 Christian Muntean: Then you build in strengths, which is the ability to move people and that power, which is the ability to move people or change directions in situations quickly. And then long term endurance and resilience, like how do you stay in a role for a long time and stay healthy yourself? So that’s kind of the cycle that I walk, walk people through in leadership. It’s also the same cycle that you train through as an athlete. And you, and you go through it, you go through the cycle, then you start back kind of at the beginning and keep moving through it.

0:13:07 Ramona Shaw: You know, when I first wanted to bring you on, I didn’t realize how much of an overlap you have in this perspective. But as I was diving into your book and listening to you, how we see the world the same way in terms of leadership development that actually creates sustainable, lasting results. Where it all starts with what you call the personal development, the clarity around, like, what are the influences?

0:13:32 Ramona Shaw: How do you see yourself? Who are your role models? What is it that you want to achieve? What are those influential factors? Self leadership, emotional management. And then from there, it’s really where you start to build the skills. And that again, also has to come in a certain order. That’s how we go about our programs as well. Very intentionally designed in order to provide the best possible outcome. Yeah, I love that. So let’s talk about something maybe less fun.

0:14:02 Ramona Shaw: We’ll see you talk about leadership toxins.

0:14:06 Christian Muntean: Yeah.

0:14:06 Ramona Shaw: What are those?

0:14:08 Christian Muntean: So right now we’re in election cycle in the United States. And so a lot of the news and a lot of advertising and campaigning just tends to. Smart campaign managers understand that anger and fear triggers people to act in certain ways. And so a lot of advertising touches on that. A lot of political conversations touch on that. And it’s intentional. It’s to try to provoke a reaction from people. Anger and fear are not fantastic motivators for leaders.

0:14:40 Christian Muntean: They. It. It creates a distortion in perspective. It pushes you towards fight or flight responses as opposed to more critical executive thinking. And it just kind of undermines the quality of leadership you can provide. So that’s an example of, I think as Americans, we should vote. I think whatever country you’re in, you should participate in your processes. But I think being aware of how certain messages try to manipulate certain responses out of you that aren’t necessarily healthy for you or for your perspective or where you try to lead or where you need to be able to lead.

0:15:17 Christian Muntean: And so being able to identify those and then limit those so you’re not getting too much of that into your life if you can’t eliminate it completely is part of what I’m talking about. Some of this also has to do with relationships. And this is very difficult, but it is actually one of the key elements of people who are able to take off in their career trajectories or in their leadership roles is not.

0:15:43 Christian Muntean: This wasn’t a scientific statement, but it. But there is science behind it. Jim Rohn, who is a motivational speaker from like a previous generation used to talk about, you were the. We are the average of the five or six closest relationships that we have. And there’s some really good studies, like the Framingham Heart Study, that actually establishes the scientific basis for that concept, which is that our closest relationships shapes us.

0:16:10 Christian Muntean: And if as a leader, your closest relationships are people who are not visionary, who aren’t that motivated, who are cynical, are critical, aren’t really trying to grow, it’s going to impact you in some way and not in a positive way. On the other hand, if you’re surrounding yourself around people who have great ideas, who are motivated to better their lives, who are motivated to better the lives of others, who are constantly trying to grow and learn, that’s going to impact you in another way.

0:16:41 Christian Muntean: And so as you’re looking at the relationships that you surround yourself with, you have to think about what are the influences I’m bringing in and are they toxic? In other words, they’re somehow causing me to be sick or to be weak in some way? Or are they health giving, life giving and being able to curate those? I don’t mean necessarily that you just get rid of certain relationships. You can’t always do that.

0:17:06 Christian Muntean: But I do think you need to pay attention to how much time you spend around certain influences. If they’re not healthy, encouraging, uplifting influences. And in my experience working with high performers, it’s the norm that they curate their relationships. The higher people perform on a typical level, the more they pay attention to who they relate to and they actively seek out people who will push them further. And you get this in athletics too.

0:17:35 Christian Muntean: You can’t run at your fastest if you’re training with people who are slow and don’t show up to practice all the time. You train at your best when you’re with people who are a little bit faster than you.

0:17:45 Ramona Shaw: And it’s interesting because there’s that aspect of like, who we bring into our lives or our inner circles as leaders. But then there’s also that same concept applying to teams where the dynamic that we set on the team or sort of the culture that we foster and cultivate, that starts to impact people’s performance very much. I was on a team once where we had a lot of work coming our way, like in, you know, so many other people can relate to. But what happened on this particular team is that our leader was very in tuned with people and was actually a very empathic, very connected and supportive leader.

0:18:28 Ramona Shaw: The side effect that I experienced being on that team was that every time we came together, there would be sort of a download and the dump of how it’s hard for everyone on the team, how they’re tired, how they need a break, how it’s too much. And I realized how I suddenly started to shift my perspective from being inspired by sort of the, the pressure and, and feeling good about it. And that’s how I usually respond to kind of the high workload.

0:18:59 Ramona Shaw: Suddenly I started to also feel drained and also feel like it’s, it’s too much and we’re not quite feeling ready and feeling there and feeling, you know, like we’re succeeding. And that was a really fascinating experience for me to see that directly, that, that principle directly apply to a team setting. And I think sometimes we may forget we have these one on one relationships with people where we can, in one on one, we can inspire them or like bring them back on track.

0:19:27 Ramona Shaw: But then we don’t realize that there’s also a whole dynamic on the team that either elevates or dissents the morale.

0:19:36 Christian Muntean: And leaders, I think, need to pay attention to that. I’ve been through. As you were talking, I’d mentioned before we started the show that 20 years ago I used to do international disaster relief. And one of the first teams I was on, the leader was a very caring guy, but we would, at dinner, we, we all kind of would eat together as a team working in the Balkans. And it was kind of a dump each time, kind of like you’re describing. And it was part of, it was described as, well, this is part of how we distress, it’s part of how we diffuse and kind of manage our distress that’s happening. But it would have the cumulative effect of creating sort of a negative perspective amongst the group.

0:20:16 Christian Muntean: Then I was working on another team in East Africa and it was led very differently. And it was interesting because it was much more encouraging. There would be positive stories about staff, cool things that were happening in the communities we were working in. And the reality was the East African context was a much harder context to both live and work in. There was an act of war, it was much poorer, it was just a tougher place.

0:20:38 Christian Muntean: But the attitude was much more encouraging. And I think it had a lot to do with just as simple as leaders not encouraging or giving permission to that kind of negative distressing. And it was interesting how the negative distressing didn’t help.

0:20:56 Ramona Shaw: Although super well intended, right?

0:20:58 Christian Muntean: It was well intended. And. And I don’t think there was any. Yeah. Any malicious intent in it. I just, I think it was misunderstood because it feels good in the moment to gripe about things, but it doesn’t overall create health. And it, it actually Feels better. You know, talk about cool stories of successes and wins, but that takes a little more energy up front.

0:21:21 Ramona Shaw: Let’s shift from that conversation into something that’s connected. You talk about the self image.

0:21:27 Christian Muntean: Yeah.

0:21:28 Ramona Shaw: How does the self in an image tie into leadership effectiveness?

0:21:32 Christian Muntean: Yeah. So this is huge. Most of my clients are owners or executives, so they’re kind of on the. Maybe the other side of the leadership trajectory of where they’re going. But when they’re struggling, it’s almost always tied back to these very basic things that we’ve already been talking about in the conversation. So this is not like, new leader, experienced leader stuff. This is like, across the board. Leaders wrestle with this, and they often never really spent time on this. When they get into senior roles, they discover that this other work needs to be done. And one of the most common things that comes up is that leaders.

0:22:12 Christian Muntean: What hangs them up has to do with how they see themselves. And so, for example, I was working with an executive who viewed working with a coach, and maybe you’ve experienced this, they viewed working with a coach as remedial, like they’re being fixed in some way, like they were deficient. And as opposed to like, I’ve got a coach and now I can move to another level of my leadership or address some issues that because of that, he would hide our conversations.

0:22:38 Christian Muntean: We would sneak around their offices together. And I think because he didn’t want to see himself as someone that was broken and needed to be fixed, which wasn’t how I saw him or how I was relating to him, but he tended to relate to the recommendations or the projects that we would work on or the assignments from this perspective of, but I’m not broken. And so there was this initial resistance to it because he had a hard time seeing himself as someone that wanted to pursue growth as opposed to brokenness. So now I actually, when I start out with my clients, I try to catch. I didn’t do that. I didn’t. This was early on in my career. I didn’t know to do this. Now, I’ll often tell people, like, hey, this is like, we’re working with. You’re already a pro athlete.

0:23:23 Christian Muntean: We’re trying to get you to the super bowl or whatever the next big event is. You’re already one of the best. Let’s get you to another level. And that helps them reframe this idea. But it’s very important. Another area that’s very common for a lot of leaders is perfectionism. Not all leaders struggle with this, but many do. And perfectionism Mostly comes from fear of making a mistake or being seen as a failure in some way. That’s primarily where it comes from.

0:23:51 Christian Muntean: And so if leaders have that as a self image, like I have to always get it right, then that can manifest in different ways. But it can make it very difficult for them to acknowledge making mistakes, which makes it harder to learn and to grow. It can make them want to hide things and resist accountability. It can show up in lots of different ways, you know, being more critical of others, not allowing others to make mistakes because they’re afraid it’ll reflect poorly on the leader, for example.

0:24:18 Christian Muntean: And so these are examples, I guess, of how your self image tends to create reactions which don’t end up serving your team well or serving yourself well. And so if you focus on building a healthy self image, it makes it easier for you, without even thinking about it, to just naturally relate in a way that’s constructive.

0:24:40 Ramona Shaw: I think this is really where the power of coaching comes in. A lot of the tactical work, which is part of our programs too, and I’m sure you do this as well, where we talk about frameworks and guides and sort of behaviors that are effective or practices that are, that lead to the results our clients want to get to. But then the seeing like, oh, here’s how perfectionism then leads me to avoid failure, leads me to, you know, hold the golf club a little too tight and be a bit too controlling.

0:25:10 Ramona Shaw: And perfection is just one of them. But how our self image defines us and restricts our growth if we’re not able to see it and then manage it or let go.

0:25:23 Christian Muntean: Yeah, yeah. I was just talking to a friend of mine the other day who was offered an opportunity for a significant promotion. And he is the kind of person who I think would be a very successful leader. He has a lot of the personality trait and the self discipline. But it was interesting. His comment was, I’m just not that kind of a guy. You know, he’s a worker. He wants to get out there and do his thing.

0:25:47 Christian Muntean: And it’s not wrong. Not everybody needs to step into leadership or management. But I just thought, but you definitely could be that kind of a guy. I wonder how much of this is really just. He doesn’t see himself in that way. And. And I think we create a lot of, you know, limiting beliefs. He talked about mindsets. We have these ideas, and I’m sure you’re familiar with that, of how people can construct a sense of their self that’s so much smaller than who they could be.

0:26:18 Christian Muntean: And that’s Based off of past experiences and things we’ve been told and so on. But yeah, it’s interesting how that can really play out when you’re working with people.

0:26:27 Ramona Shaw: And hence why sometimes we need an outside perspective who calls it out and tells us, hold on. It’s like that is optional. And this is why you do what you do. And this is also why you’re putting a cap on your growth if you’re not able to manage it.

0:26:44 Christian Muntean: I think another side of this too is I was working with a group of new leaders. They were all running educational programs. So I was working with about two dozen of them. Each one of them had their own kind of school that they oversaw. But it was a new leadership role, like the path between what they did before and what they were doing now. There wasn’t a lot of management other than classroom management.

0:27:06 Christian Muntean: And they were struggling with what I considered very basic management. Things like getting their team to show up to work on time. That was a very common issue. And they were afraid, the group of them as a. Not every individual, but as a tendency in the group. There was a fear about confronting their staff, about showing up on time. And there was a definite domino effect. If people didn’t show up on time, then other people couldn’t leave when they’re at the end of their shift or meetings couldn’t. You know, it impacted the whole day.

0:27:37 Christian Muntean: And so part of the self image was they were afraid that if they confronted then they would appear to be mean and there was a need to be liked and they weren’t comfortable enough in who they were as opposed to what I encourage them to think about as a need to be respected, not necessarily as opposed to being liked, but as more important than being liked. And how if you just step into your role, people will actually probably respond positively.

0:28:08 Christian Muntean: And once we got them to get past this idea of needing their team to like them, which is not a bad thing, but to get their team to respect them and they appropriately, and I help them know how to do that, appropriately confront their team members to show up on time. Their team all knew they were supposed to be showing up on time. It’s not a mystery to anyone. They just started doing it and it turned out to be a non issue. But in their minds, because they saw themselves as needing that affirmation from their staff, it held them back.

0:28:40 Christian Muntean: And then that made actually a less positive work environment for everybody.

0:28:47 Ramona Shaw: Oh, I could, I could add a bunch of stories like that to the list. I think that’s more common than we might think let’s shift gear a little bit though to talk about priority management as well as follow through. So somewhat tactical behaviors for leaders. What are your suggestions here for people to manage priorities well and then second question will be related to the follow through.

0:29:11 Christian Muntean: Yeah, so I want to keep it simple. Like this stuff should be simple. And this is also one of those topics that every level of leadership wrestles with it like it’s one of the most common challenges for leaders at all levels is feeling like they don’t have enough time to get it all done. Which comes down to priority management and energy management. One of the things is that the Stephen Covey idea of big rocks and so you figure out what are the most important things that you need to accomplish, to accomplish whatever your goals are for your job or the year, whatever you’re responsible for, and to make sure that those things happen first.

0:29:48 Christian Muntean: So to really get out a sharp knife, say no to everything else, delineate what is really critical or crucial for me to accomplish and what work do I need to do this week, do I need to do today to make that happen and then put that into my calendar. It’s the idea, the big rocks concept for those aren’t familiar with. It comes from the idea that if you have a jar and you fill it full of all the little things that fill up your time, answering emails, phone calls, that’s like putting sand in the jar or water in the jar, then putting sand in it, then little rocks and then big rocks and you can’t fit all the rocks in.

0:30:24 Christian Muntean: On the other hand, if you put the big rocks in first and then put in the littler rocks and then put in the sand, you could pour all the water in and everything will fit. So it’s this concept of making sure that the most important things have command of not over just your schedule, but your best time in the schedule. Over a typical eight hour workday in the US people’s energy will ebb and flow. And that’s tied to some of our just our physiology. It’s the way our bodies are set up.

0:30:52 Christian Muntean: And most people will have usually two high, like one high point and then one higher point. And then there’s these ebbs that happen as well. And if you can make sure that your most demanding work happens when you’re at your best energy, because it’ll be around the same time for most people and you protect it, you’ll find yourself becoming dramatically more productive to the point. Personally, I experienced, I do a lot of writing I’ve authored as you know, this One book, I’ve authored two other books. I write a lot of articles and so on. I found that when I first started writing, it would take me about 40 hours to write an article which was so demanding. I didn’t do it very often and it was also awful. But I started learning these habits and I would set aside time during a good time of energy for me. I would free myself from all distractions.

0:31:42 Christian Muntean: And I found that what used to take me 40 hours now takes me about 90 minutes now. Some of that’s getting faster at it and skill development, but a lot of it was I used to try to fit it in when I was tired. When I didn’t have good energy, I would try to fit it in around distractions and all of those kinds of things. And I didn’t realize how much that eats away at your ability to be productive. So my message on this topic for leaders is every leader you’ve ever met has exactly the same amount of time in a day.

0:32:14 Christian Muntean: Some people are dramatically more productive than others. And it’s not because they’re innately smarter or are working harder. It’s it’s because they’re working smarter. But I don’t mean that they have like more intelligence, but they are working smarter. They’re putting the very important things in at the right place of their day and they’re not allowing other things to interrupt that. And just that those two principles on their own. If people learn to practice that, it will dramatically improve their productivity as well as lower their stress. My clients routinely double or triple the size of their businesses within a couple of years while being able to spend more time with their family and on other hobbies.

0:32:54 Christian Muntean: It’s a normal thing for my clients and it’s not really that tricky. It’s just following these principles.

0:33:01 Ramona Shaw: And it takes discipline though, right? That, that is like, it takes discipline. And I think it also ties right back to the self image because if you see yourself as like a busy, productive worker who keeps up with their emails, who doesn’t want to decline meetings, who doesn’t want to push back on work or requests because we want to be liked or because we want to be seen as the go to person or the one who can do it all, all that will get right into the issue.

0:33:30 Christian Muntean: Yeah, half of my clients, half of my clients are in construction and then most of the rest are in some kind of health related industry. And both of those fields culturally place a premium on looking like you’re working hard. So if you’re in construction, I mean being the first to arrive, last to leave, and just working long, long days. That’s viewed with a lot of respect.

0:33:59 Ramona Shaw: Right.

0:34:00 Christian Muntean: Doesn’t necessarily produce more and in fact it often doesn’t produce more. But culturally it’s viewed same thing in the medical world, at least in the States, there’s a heavy emphasis on putting in just ridiculously long hours, not sleeping, just burning in the candle on both ends. And it also doesn’t necessarily produce better outcomes. But culturally it’s viewed as the way to go. And trying to get people to shift when the outer kind of slaps on the back come from really less effective ways of working.

0:34:32 Christian Muntean: And getting people to dial back their work days is tricky until they start producing results and then all of a sudden people the criticism and the fear of criticism goes away, but it’s still there. And that has a lot to do with self image because if you’re earning it from, you know, putting in 60, 80 hour work weeks and that makes you feel like you’re doing a good job, it can be really hard to shift.

0:34:54 Ramona Shaw: Right? Yep. So before we wrap up, let’s talk about follow through.

0:34:59 Christian Muntean: Yeah. So I think probably the single biggest differentiator between now this is for entrepreneurs. For example, successful entrepreneurs and ones who aren’t able to make their business go is the ability to follow through. The ability to keep working on something until they get results. There are many, many reasons why it’s difficult to be successful. The one commonality for everyone who is for the most part is they just didn’t quit.

0:35:25 Christian Muntean: And I think it’s that same thing for anyone that’s stepping into a leadership or management role is understanding that the job will often be challenging or hard. Much of that’s actually more in our mind than in reality. But either way, even if it’s real, the ability to push through things and get to the other side of them is one of the things that really sets apart not just entrepreneurs, but leaders from anyone else.

0:35:52 Christian Muntean: And it’s very difficult. And so that cultivating that ability and so that one of the stories I tell in the book was back from when I was running cross country in high school and I was not a natural cross country runner, like anything over 100 meters for me was too far to run by choice. But I was running, you know, cross country, so running, you know, training for 3 plus mile races, 5k races, and I remember running this trail and I just thought, okay, I just need to make it to the next light post. You know, the next light post is maybe 50 meters away or a hundred meters away and I would just try to get to that. And then once I was there, you know, I realized I hadn’t died.

0:36:29 Christian Muntean: Okay, I’ll try to get to the next light post. And that’s how I would get myself through these long runs is I would just set these shorter range goals that would keep me moving forward. And so that’s one tip that will help many people with follow through is if there’s a goal that feels big to them, try to break it down into, you know, your version of light posts or your version of, of gates to get to.

0:36:53 Christian Muntean: And then when you get to that, you know, take a break, reevaluate where you’re at, but then move on to the next one. And that can help by breaking it down. It doesn’t feel like such a large, overwhelming journey. But yeah, anything that helps you cultivate that, Angela Duckworth out of University of Pennsylvania calls it grit. And anything that can help you develop that grit or that perseverance, that ability to stick with it and make it happen, will very easily set you apart from most of your peers because most people don’t, they hit resistance and they stop.

0:37:32 Christian Muntean: They get tired and then they stop.

0:37:34 Ramona Shaw: Or they don’t iterate where they see progress or the ability to sustain it. Right. If he. I think there’s the burning the candles on both ends and then, you know, something happens where they just feel like they can no longer do it or they, they’re stuck and it’s being in that hamster wheel without ever stopping to reevaluate and to think like it’s not working. I need to change. Yeah.

0:37:56 Christian Muntean: And that, that touches on the relationship between follow through and accountability is. We often look at accountability as a negative word, like you’re going to discipline somebody for not following through. It has negative connotations for many people, but real accountability is just checking in to see, are you doing what you said you were going to do? Are you making progress? Is it the expected progress?

0:38:19 Christian Muntean: And if it’s structured in the right way, it can be incredibly encouraging for people because you’re creating these, as I described, light posts. You’re sort of helping mark those light posts for people and you’re saying you did it. You’re not at the end of the race, but you’re halfway there. Awesome work. You’re doing a great job. Keep going. You got it. You know, you’ve got this next one and you can do that. When you’ve broken down the steps and you’ve defined them with metrics.

0:38:45 Christian Muntean: When leaders shift their mindset from this being a punitive exercise to one that helps people gauge their energy and their distance and their effort and something you can encourage and reward. People around you get a completely different set of results out of it.

0:39:02 Ramona Shaw: I love that. And we’re on a great note to end the conversation, although I do have more topics, but maybe we’ll spare that for another part. Or I would suggest people go check out the book Trying to Lead. I think, you know, I love things that are practical and easy to read and apply and so your book breaking it down into those preparation cycles for different opportunities or different levels is something that I definitely resonate with and I hope our listeners will too.

0:39:29 Ramona Shaw: Christian where else can people go?

0:39:31 Christian Muntean: Yeah, well they can go to my website Christianmuntean.com and I have a ton of free resources there that they can look at and they can read that will help them in their journey. The book itself has a self assessment guide and it has training plans so you can self coach. So those are probably the two primary places.

0:39:50 Ramona Shaw: Awesome. We’ll link those in the show notes. Thank you Christian so much for being on and sharing your perspectives and experiences on the leadership front. I appreciate you and the conversation.

0:40:01 Christian Muntean: Yeah, it was good to be here. Ramona thank you.

0:40:03 Ramona Shaw: If you enjoyed this episode then check out two other awesome resources to help you become a leader people love to work with. This includes a free masterclass on how to successfully lead as a new manager. Check it out @archova.org/Masterclass the second resource is my best selling book the confident and competent New manager. How to quickly rise to success in your first leadership role. Check it out @archova.org/_0:40:30 Ramona Shaw: books or head on over to Amazon and grab your copy there. You can find all those links in the show notes down below.