Episode 35 | Transitioning from push to pull leadership with Mark Terrell - Founder, Reluctant Leader Academy

This is an extremely insightful discussion into the concept, values and intricacies of leadership. Well worth listening if you lead a team as a business owner, entrepreneur or manager. Our guest is Mark Terrell, Founder of the Reluctant Leader Academy.

 

We kick things off discussing what leadership means to Mark and this is around setting a vision, communicating this vision to your team and being consistent with everyone. As a leader its important to be clear on these things; what are we doing, how are we doing it and why it's important?  Then in combination with a clear vision, it's about supporting your team to achieve goals relating to this but also finding the balance between challenging them too.

We discussed supporting teams and helping them to know when they are making a difference and contributing to the outcomes and goals of the business. Mark shared a very effective way of doing this by recognising people doing things right, having an honest conversation and simply feeding back to them on a job well done, either verbally or with a note.

Lastly, we go on to discuss the change from a push style of leadership to a pull. In the early stages in a business, leaders need to get teams progressing on their tasks, pushing them in the direction that the business is trying to go in and making sure everyone has clarity.  Then it's about transitioning to a pull style, where the team take on more responsibility, you're investing in their skills development, the team are growing by being outside of their comfort zone, and in effect you are aiming to make yourself redundant. You change from the biggest cog in the machine to become the oil.

 

We wrap up with the importance of being explicit, having solid self-awareness as a leader and helping your team to grow by placing trust and confidence in them.

 

An essential insight into leadership, thank you to Mark for taking the time, enjoy everyone.

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The podcast is brought to you by Rebecca and Callum Jenkins and sponsored by RJEN - helping companies to achieve high-performance growth.