Leadership Expert Nathan Jamail on Coaching Vs. Managing - Learn How You Should Lead Your Team!

0:00I believe as leaders, belief not only determines what we're willing to do, belief determines what excuses we're willing to accept. Nathan Jamal is going to blow your mind with some of the strategies, coaching versus management, how he takes the whole belief factor and turns that into result. Our belief will determine exactly where we're going to be in life and what we're going to achieve. Everyone wants to blame another team while their team's not successful. Yeah, that happens. Nathan Jamal's given us his opinions on what it takes for you and me to have more success. Nathan, let me ask you then your definition of success.

0:36success? You know, I think it's an internal thing for me. My definition of success is being who you are, loving who you are, doing what you love doing. In my case, you know, I tell people all the time, I do speeches for a living. I'd do it for free if it didn't pay so well. And my wife didn't have a love to spend money. But I think it's me. I truly do. I think it's a mindset of loving who you are, loving what you do, being able to do it and doing it with the people you love. I do. I think it's that simplistic in concept. So the word love seems to come up a bunch in your definition of success. Was it always that way or did you gradually shift to that?

1:20Like as a young man, how did you view it and how did that shift? Probably my wife, probably books. I'm a reader, which is funny. I don't like to read, but I love to learn. So I think I've matured into that in my old age. But I think it's always been love. I just probably used a different word. But yeah, I do. I think you got to love. And more importantly, I have three daughters. I think success starts with loving who you are and loving yourself. Fantastic. So where do you think in your life you chose to be above average for success? Like where did you choose success in life as a kid? Was it somewhere in schooling when you got older?

2:06Where did you choose that? Yeah. If you ask me, I'm going to tell you, I've always chose success. And let me be clear. I was the backup quarterback on the B team. I mean, so, you know, I wasn't athletic. I was always a C minor student. But I've always seen my success. I mean, I'm going to date myself. But I mean, you probably don't remember who Alex Keaton was, you know, from Family Ties. But I definitely remember Family Ties. Yes. You know, my brothers used to call me Alex Keaton. I've always had this kind of desire to be successful in business. And I think it's the only trait, you know, real gift God gave me.

2:44But I've always seen myself as successful in that area. I've always had a drive. I, you know, I've been working full time since I was 15 years old. I, when I was in middle school, I'd sell snow cones in the parks. I mean, I've always had this drive that I don't think I created it. I don't think I built it. I just think it was inherently given to me as a gift. And, I mean, I just chased it. And I think I'm too – I don't think I'm smart enough to realize that I'm supposed to fail. I think my ignorance is bliss. You know, they say ignorance is bliss. Yeah. I think, like, I really believe I can achieve anything.

3:23Like, I see you do something, like, I can do that. And everybody's like, you can't. I said, no, I really can. So I think I chose success a long time ago in the sense of what I'm willing to do. As a young leader, I used to tell people all the time, there are significantly more people smarter than me. But I'm going to do my best to make sure no one's going to outwork me. So what is the formula or methodology or what are the ingredients you see that makes success happen in life? I think the first thing you got to do is get rid of your ego. Tell me more about that. I think people are so afraid of what other people might think of them or they're failing that they're afraid.

4:05I'll give you a perfect example. I'm checking to a hotel, do a speech. The guy says, hello, Mr. Jamelle, welcome in. We're waiting for you. Here's your stuff. And we start chit-chatting. He says, you know, I would love to do something different like you do, but I have kids and a wife. And I said, don't use them as an excuse. Like your kids don't care how big your house is. They care that you're around. Don't don't use that. And I think people are afraid to take a chance. You know, I have on my wall here and I tell myself every day, you know, be bold. I think success is be willing to take a chance.

4:40And and suck, I mean, and fail. And and if you and I tell a quote I use on my clients is the difference between an idiot and a genius. is success. You know, when Bezos was going to invent Amazon, they said, hey, I'm going to go to a bookstore on the internet. All his friends are probably like, I don't know this from personal experience or anything, but you're an idiot. Well, now he's a genius. And so my goal is to be an idiot long enough to be a genius. I can, yeah. I'm just sitting there thinking, you know, we've compared Alex P. Keaton, Jeff Bezos. We're now like we're definitely getting an idea of how Nathan's brain works at this point in time.

5:27What are the other ingredients to success in your mind? What are the other ingredients? The ego, take that aside and be willing to make the mistakes. What else? I think you got to think to your point, you got to get your mind right. You got to get your other way. You got to be bold. You got to take chances. And then you got to do the work. I mean, it's listen, I believe to really be successful. You know, they say work smart, not hard. I think you got to work really hard as smart as you can. I don't think anything gets in the way of effort. I talk about this. I was doing a keynote yesterday. Effort and skill development is, in my opinion, is the key to any success.

6:05And knowing that you're going to fail and it's okay. But I think that effort, that resilience, you know, everybody says the overnight success for 10 years maybe. Um, but I think, I think that's what it has to be. And, and, you know, at the same time, and you said, I love the word love. I think you have to be like, I'm grateful for where I am in my life, but let's be clear. I'm not near done. Like I'm not content. Uh, I want more. And I think you have to have that. I think you have to have the, my, the correct amount of achievement that matches your hunger for it. And so my hunger for success and your hunger for success can't be the same, but we've got to make sure that we feed that.

6:52And so I do, I think you have mindset, effort, fearless, being bold and just do it. So you mentioned failing through that. What's your philosophy on the relationship between failure or failing and success? Man, I don't know if there's anything really different between them other than the outcomes. The actions are the same. You know, I mean, how many people say who have achieved success said, yeah, that was actually an accident. I didn't mean to be successful. That was actually a failure and actually worked. Right. I mean, how many things were invented because they found out the what they're trying to do with the item didn't work.

7:32And now we're using it for something else. um i i think i think you've just man you think you gotta try it you know when i went out on my own my accountant told me i'm an idiot i left corporate america and he's like let me get this right you're gonna leave this job and this money for to go do this have you seen how much money you make um and and what you're going to and i don't know i figure what's the worst can go wrong um so to your point what's the difference between failure and success i think they both require obstacles. They both require effort. And the only difference is that the end result, what's the outcome?

8:09But here's what's funny. Whether you have success or failure, if you want to continue success, you don't get to stop. I mean, the worst thing you can do is succeed and stop. That means you're going to be good. You're never going to be great, or at least never be better. Hey, just a quick one. When I look in the back end of this, something that's quite surprising to me. I noticed that it says that 82 % of you who watch the channel regularly haven't hit the subscribe button yet. So it'd be a great favor if you could hit that subscribe button. Let me tell you why. See, over the lifetime of the channel, we scale the show and get better guests, better production, better everything by having the number of subscribers.

8:51So if you hit subscribe, it helps us, plan better, do more, get better guests, and so on. See, I love that word better. And I think that philosophically, the word better needs to be spoken about and used a lot more often. The job is not to fail or succeed. The job is just to keep getting better. At everything. As a father, as a leader, as a human. I use the word practice in my speeches there's a lot I write about in my books. And one of my quotes I always tell people is, practicing is important for all of us, no matter how good you already are. Very important. Actually, let's touch on that a little deeper then, because one of the things that you put out there is people spend a lot of time learning new stuff instead of practicing, or scrimmaging, I think is one of your other favorite words about getting great at what they're already doing.

9:44Tell me more about that philosophy, because I think that's something real interesting we need to dive into? Yeah. So I, if you read my books, there's a lot of sports principles. And again, five foot three in ninth grade, I'm not an athlete. I have three daughters. I can sing every Frozen song there is. I write my books and I teach my lessons on sports principles because I believe in sports, it's not the person who knows the most about the sport. It's the person who achieves the most. It's the effort. It's the practice. It's the success. And in business, I believe it's the exact same, but the greatest leader doesn't know the most about leadership.

10:18They read books. The person who is the best leader, the best coach has the biggest impact on their people. And I believe that we need to learn. When I do a speech, I start off with, think of this with a growth mindset. Don't say, do I do it or not? Ask yourself, how do I do it better? And that's that constant growth. Listen, we all do things. We as leaders, we have different conversations with people. how do we do better? How do we make sure our intent matches our words? I think the only way to get better at it is not to do it in real life, but to practice it. And I have a saying that says training is learning something new.

10:54Okay. So if I do a workshop, it's a training. Practicing is getting better at something we already know. And if you want to simplify that, go into sports. Baseball players right now are practicing, catching grounders, hitting balls, building pop flies, right? They're all the same things they've been doing for 15 plus years. And the reason why they're practicing it, because seconds matter. Little improvements make big differences. And that's the same thing in life. And quite candidly, I deal a lot in business. It's the same thing in business. So I believe that practicing is not doing, practicing is preparing to do.

11:31Because a lot of people say, Nathan, I do it every day. That's not practicing. Because in real life when you're doing it, there's a consequence. Practicing there's a consequence. So I think we train decent. I think we practice in business today and as humans very poorly. You're on the Big Success Podcast. Make sure you hit that subscribe button. We'll be back with Nathan. We're going to get into Serve Up, Coach Down, all the leadership stuff. Getting rich is a lot simpler than most people realize. Billionaire in Training by Brad Sugars puts you on the fast track to wealth creation through buying, building, and selling businesses and doing it at a faster pace than you ever thought possible.

12:09Pick up your copy of Billionaire in Training today. And we're back. Nathan, I got to ask you the question about getting results and starting with belief. I really think that your four-stage philosophy there is something everybody should learn. Listen, I think everything starts in our brain. I think belief is absolutely, you know, to say if you believe you'll achieve, I believe if you don't believe you have no chance of achieving. Everything we believe, if we believe in something, it creates conviction. If we have conviction for it, we'll do the effort. If we do the effort, we'll have the results.

12:45It's funny. I use a bit about kids do chores very poorly. The reason why kids do chores very poorly, if I tell my kid to load the dishwasher, their goal is to get the dishes out of the sink and throw them in the box, upside down, right side up. It doesn't matter. When we load a dishwasher as adults, we load it because we want the dishes to get clean. And my point being is in kids, check the box as adults. If we don't believe in something, you know, I just I just do the activity. I just check the box. Yeah, I believe as leaders, belief not only determines what we're willing to do. Belief determines what excuses we're willing to accept.

13:22And so our belief will determine exactly where we're going to be in life and what we're going to achieve. I don't believe it's some kumbaya moment. I think it's the core of what we become and who we are. So when you look at the servant approach, and you started on the servant approach back in some of your other books on the sales stuff, but you've really hit it on this one. And I think one of the things that you look at in there is serving multiple audiences. Tell me more about that philosophy and how that plays out on a day to day. In the book, Serve Up, Coach Down, I contradict the servant leadership model and just in the sense of what people perceive it to be.

14:06Yeah. I believe we serve our employees by coaching them and making them better, helping them get promoted, not removing their obstacles and making their life easy. That entitles them and we see what happens when we entitle children. I think we need to coach them in the way we serve an employee is by coaching them. I think the way we serve up in an organization is in belief. Believe in our people that we follow. Believe in our leaders. Believe in the organization. Believe in our product services. I don't think you can successfully work for someone you don't believe in. And here's what's funny. If you look at the greatest competitive advantages of business today, there are two.

14:45Organizational alignment and the speed of change. And serving up allows you to eliminate that. And here's what I challenge my leaders to be. We're all leaders in the middle. If you're a CEO, you report to a board. If you're a president, you report to a CEO. We're all leaders in the middle. Everybody thinks leader in the middle is the frontline manager. That's not true. A leader in the middle is someone who has a boss and has employees. And here's what I try and encourage. I ask leaders all the time, do you love your people? Yes. Do you care for them? Do you want the best for them? Do you want them to trust you and believe in you?

15:16And they all say yes. All I'm asking and serve up is to give your boss the same respect you want your people to give you. Treat them the way you want to be treated. And when you do that, your people will learn that behavior. We learn how to parent from our parents, whether we agree with it or not. And so as leaders, we learn from our leaders. And here's the thing. In a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People by Bill Carnegie, he says in that book, and this is written in the 40s, by the way. We are wrong 80 % of the time. Yet we'll argue we are right 100 % of the time. And the reason why is because we argue perspectives.

15:54And in the book, I write, listen, if we're wrong eight out of 10 times, give grace because you're going to want grace. And what we end up doing as leaders is we argue our perspectives from someone else's vision. If I believe in you, Brad, if you're my boss, I believe in you. And you're wrong. Who cares? We do a U-turn. We go a different direction. As long as we're all running the same direction, we'll win because we're running together. And that's what the book's about. It's about getting, you know, I talk about removing the silos. Everyone wants to blame another team why their team's not successful.

16:30Yeah, that happens. Right? I always tell people it's like neighborhoods. We always blame the other parents. We always blame the other kids instead of our own kids for fights and arguments. Fix your own kids. So let's then flip. You go into a big chunk in here about defining the difference between coaching and managing. Tell me more about that. I wrote in the leadership playbook that corporate America is corrupt. And I didn't mean it in a financial sense. I mean it in the sense that we ask our leaders to coach their employees, yet we never teach them how to coach. And coaching and managing contradict each other in five key ways.

17:06The first one is in management, We focus on the employee and coaching. We focus on the environment, the culture. And I'll give you an example. If there is a player in sports, special sports, who no matter how talented they are, if they're bad for the locker room or the team, they get traded. And those athletes, we all can reference some athlete that's been traded from team to team, even though they're the most talented athlete out there. In business, if we have someone who's got a bad attitude but been there a long time, does less work but has a lot of knowledge, We will keep, though, and sacrifice everything else about our culture because we don't want to remove that resource.

17:41And so coaching is about making good, logical decisions that make sense. And so in coaching, we focus on the culture. In management, we sacrifice the culture for the person. There's a couple of other ones I'll give you that are kind of big. In management, we focus on those who need the attention. We focus on the struggling employees, and therefore our involvement is considered a negative, which is why every employee in the world says, I want to be so good, my boss leaves me alone. Yeah, one of the pages I marked on your book, I was going to ask you about, spend time with those who deserve the attention.

18:15That's right. Coaches don't go work with the third and fourth string. They work with the first string. And so now players want their attention. I owe the leaders all the time. If your involvement is viewed as a negative, how can you coach? You can't coach someone who is afraid of your involvement. And it's our fault. And so, you know, everybody wants to talk about it. So, again, the idea was the management and coaching. And management focuses on those who need the attention. And people will take this to the other side and say, well, you ignore them. You don't ignore them. But you focus on those who deserve the attention.

18:51The other biggest piece I'll tell you in the difference between coaching and managing is in management, we get involved at the end. We get involved in this correction. Coaches get involved in preparation. You know, a coach set expectations from day one. They are prescriptive in what they expect you to do. And they're not because they want to micromanage you, but because they know what success looks like. So I challenge coaches to teach your people so they can be successful instead of letting them figure it out on their own and then correcting them at the end. Coaching is about making people better, not the people we have becoming more experienced or letting them figure it out on their own.

19:34There's a reason. You talk about the scrimmage factor of coaching. Tell me more about that philosophy because I think that was an interesting one, especially the role play day. Yeah, no one likes to role play, right? Unless it's at home. But no one likes to role play at work. And the reason why no one likes to role play because we use it as judgment, right? We go, oh, you think you know how to do that, Brad? You think you know how to interview someone? Okay, let's go. And it's a pop quiz. And so we either, we don't say the truth. We say what we think you want to hear, which is why people think they're all fake.

20:10And so I challenge people to say, turn it to scrimmaging. No professional sports team in any sports. And I don't just mean to use sports. You can use acting. You can use Broadway. way, they don't just go up on stage and do a show. They practice every day, all week long for that one show because timing matters. No one in a skilled profession does not not scrimmage. They all scrimmage before a game. And so my challenge with leaders is if you and I were to scrimmage, and scrimmage means getting into character like a role play, but to do it, to prepare for an opportunity instead of to test a skill, how often do we do a better job if we scrimmage first?

20:52And every person will tell you a hundred percent. Yeah, here's the scary part, Brad. We still don't do it. And do you know why we as leaders don't do it? Because we're afraid to death that our employees are going to find out we're not near as good as we think we are. Yeah, I think a lot of I just definitely struggle with that. I think also there's a disease called just get on with the job. We don't need to practice. Go to work. Don't practice. Take me through your philosophies on that, the allocating time to practice. Yeah, but think about it. You don't have any issue spending 30 minutes going through LinkedIn stalking someone's high school photo, but you don't want to get into character and scrimmage your words to make sure your words match your intent, that you're saying the right thing.

21:42Think about this for a minute, especially in sales. You could do this in operations or anything else, but let's just use sales, for example. If you spent three months getting the opportunity to speak to a customer, a prospect, and then you travel three hours to get to their location, you spend an hour in their office and then three hours to get back, how do you not have 45 minutes to an hour to get into character and scrimmage the conversation? You know everything about them. And here's what I'll tell you why. Because we don't think we need to, because we're good enough. And this goes back to the idea of scrimmaging and practicing is about getting better no matter how good we are.

22:18I write all my own content. I wrote my own books and I do a speech. It's my words. I mean, literally my words. But do you know what I do before every keynote? I go into my room and I scrimmage. You're on the Big Success Podcast. I'm Brad sugars. We're going to be back in a minute. We're going to talk about scaling up good to great. What's the difference? We're going to get Nathan's thoughts. Nathan Jamail has spent the last 18 years coaching top executives and teaching thousands of leaders around the world on leadership, employee coaching, and cultural development. To learn more about Nathan Jamail, please visit NathanJamail.com.

22:51And we're back. Hopefully you've hit that subscribe button. Nathan, you've coached a lot, the military manufacturing technology company, you've coached all across, right? What's the difference between someone who does good and someone who does great in your mind? Yeah, I hate to be redundant to what we've talked about, but putting that all together, I think it starts with the willingness to be the one that makes the difference, the willingness to not be complacent. Yeah. I think it starts off, here's what I'll tell you, the really superstar players, they want to be superstars and they never see themselves as being done learning.

23:31I can tell you, I see successful people in my workshop and I see them all taking notes and they know 10 times what I know. And I see the average people sitting back with their arms crossed because they have to listen. Man, the greatest people, earners are learners. And so I think the first thing they do is they have the mindset that they need to get better. And more importantly, they can get better. And then they're willing to do the work. They're willing to go through the boredom of practice. You know, there's a lot of great athletes as the key to being a great athlete is withstanding the boredom of practice and training.

24:04And so I think they have the willingness to learn. They have the discipline to go in there and do that, that preparation and that practice. They have the humility to see themselves as coachable. And then most importantly, they have the, they're bold enough, they're brave enough to put themselves in that situation to make the call, to have the conversation, to seek growth. And so I think that's what makes them different. They just do the work. They do the prep. They do the work. And they're bold about it. And quite candidly, they're typically the most humble people you've ever met. Yet, you know, I always believe the most humble and the most confident.

24:44That's where I see the greatness. I think they never stop growing. I mean, it's the same in sports. Look at the greatest athletes. They practice more than anyone else. they're committed more than anyone else and they give more than anyone else. I saw a video of Tom Brady the other day and it was an overlay of him running the dash at the combine as a kid and him running it now as a 40 something year old man. And he was about a millisecond faster today than he was back then, you know, and Brady is a perfect example that let me ask you then you mentioned that like the superstars, they believe they're going to be superstars.

25:20If someone's on our podcast today and they don't yet believe that they can achieve superstar status, how do you coach people to actually believe that there is a possibility of superstar amazing status in their world, in their life at some point? I think you have to start off with saying, if you don't believe you won't achieve, you know, it's like I tell my little girls, if you don't love you, no one's going to love you. Yeah. And then, and at the end of the day, you have to ask yourself, why not you? Why not you? What is in your way? Because you have to think you have to get out of your own way.