2052 – How Personal Challenges Shape Effective Leadership with GTM Flow’s Joelle Kaufman

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1:05With us right now, it's Joelle Kaufman. Joelle, you are the CEO of GTM Flow. Your website is gtm, as in maryflow.com. Well, Joelle, it's great to have you. Josh, it's wonderful to be here. Thank you. Yeah. Well, give us an overview of the work that you do, how you help teams, and just the impact that you have in the world. Well, that's probably longer than 15 minutes, but I'll try to keep it succinct. Well, maybe not all of the impact you have in the world, but at least pertinent to GTM flow and our conversation. How's that? Sounds great. So look, I am a revenue catalyst. I work with CEOs and their leadership teams, sales teams, marketing teams, sometimes even product teams, because I'm in the world of technology and in healthcare.

1:51And what I do is help them operate as a team with focus, with clarity, with momentum. and ambition with purpose and with a mindset of continuous learning because the world is always changing. And if you can't lead using those five levers, which by the way, I've created into an asset for your listeners at GTM flow slash up my influence so they can go get it. But those are five levers that every leader needs to pull. So I use my 25 years of building brands, categories, companies as a CMO and CRO and my 30 years concurrently of really optimizing how do you lead effectively. And I make it very practical.

2:42So when my clients work with me in the team performance amplifier, we do a diagnostic of their team and match it up with their goals and their progress. We then coach the leader and the team specifically on the areas where the team is not firing on all cylinders. And every team, and you know this, Josh, you've been an entrepreneur for years. Every team always has room for improvement. But just as when the Yankees lost Derek Jeter or A-Rod, the Yankees didn't become a useless function, a useless team. It's the same for your teams. They have to have integrity and momentum and purpose, even as people change and we as leaders have to be continuously facilitating that, that is what I do.

3:31And the impact is pretty profound. People see fairly significant increases in both efficiency, i.e. they're not spending as much, and the results. They're driving more pipeline, they're driving more sales, they're creating more shareholder value, and that's the name of the game. Yeah. So take me through, if you wouldn't mind, what you see working or what trends you see in leadership, you know, kind of team, you know, kind of operational leadership, you know, kind of what's going on culture-wise. You know, we're, again, well into the second half of 2024 here, kind of approaching close to the end of the year.

4:17What's going on? What trends? What's hot? What's being talked about? Or maybe kind of addressed from an accelerating issue that you seem to be seeing more of. Anything come to mind? Oh, there's plenty. But I think the important thing is to know your employees, your team, are people living in this fairly isolating, divisive, and anxiety-ridden time. And we can't lead as if the world isn't happening, as if we're not in the midst of an election, and we're not in the midst of different military situations. We are, and your people are, and they may have personal reactions at stake. But certainly, we don't want to talk politics at work.

5:06We also, so while we have anxious people who are emotionally volatile. Number two is we're overwhelmingly hybrid or remote. So our best ways of understanding if somebody's presenting their best is because we see them and we interact with them and we can feel their energy. That's gone. We're on Zoom. So what I'm seeing really great leaders do is slowing down, taking a breath for themselves, focusing on leveling themselves emotionally from whatever's going on in the company, in the world, on the team, and really tuning in to where their people are and getting everybody, if you will, level before we dig into the crisis of the day or the opportunity of the day.

5:53And it doesn't take long. Sometimes you have to appreciate something someone accomplished or recognize that you're really glad somebody showed up and that you offer your own vulnerability. Hey, I'm really having a tough time today because of X, Y, Z. I may not be my best self, but I'm really going to try. So by being deliberately more human, we actually make it safe for people to be themselves. And that ends up bringing their best self, even over this horrible modality we have of we're staring at screens. Yeah. You, you know, just kind of going through some of your content, which, again, kind of in your thought leadership, you know, there's quite a few things here.

6:41You have a pretty valuable blog. Do you mind maybe sharing, like, for example, like, what's the curveball method, which I know you talk about? so um so i'm a baseball mom but i can't really hit um i'm also a generational cancer survivor with 10 cancers in my family including my own in 2023 wow and so cancer is the and i'm fine now thank you so just so people aren't worried um i do have a book coming out but that's not the purpose of our our call we can cover that at the end the cancer is a curveball it is unexpected it throws you off balance. And my experiences since I was 13 with cancer framed how I lead.

7:25So the curveball method is about the curveballs that come at you as a team and helping you as the leader and your team develop and practice an approach. Your approach, what are you focused on? Do you see the curveball? Do you know what you want to do? What are your strengths? What's your mindset? Are you coming in looking to play? Are you looking to play it safe? You're looking to play it all out. I always prefer let's play it all out. What are your resources? So now you're at the plate and you have a moment to choose not the pitch, but how you swing. And curveballs, the higher up you go in an organization, or if you are an entrepreneur and you're leading it, count on continuous curveballs.

8:10So invest in having an approach. Because when you have an approach to a curveball, you can actually turn a curveball into a home run. Not every time. But I'll tie this together. I had a very distinctive approach to my cancer. Fabulous medical care and a mindset of confidence. I knew what I needed and what to ask for. And I set tripwires that just released little increments of happiness all along the way. And I had the most amazing thing, Josh. It was one of the happiest years of my life. I have never felt so loved, so connected, so supported. And I'm a super independent, hard-charging, confident woman.

8:51But it was so amazing to be held and to be supported and loved just because I exist. Yeah. In your work with clients, I'm sure you've seen some really great transformations. Anything come to mind? Maybe a client that you worked with over this past year and they were coming in and really struggling with something. And what I'm curious about is like what you discovered that may have not been immediately visible to them. Because I I know, I mean, that's one of the greatest things, you know, the greatest aspects of hiring a consultant is a consultant can see what we're not able to see because we're too in it or we're part of the problem.

9:37Well, usually it's a little both. But I had a client who had to do something that's hard as a leader, which is he was coming into a team. The team preexisted. He didn't get to build it. They're not his people. The person he replaced was deposed. and here he comes and he's younger than most of the people on the team. He's not from the same country. So he's got a different accent. And I started working with him and he said, I've never even done this job. He's super smart. He's super committed to learning and to getting great results and he cares about people. And so one of the first things we had to do is figure out who's on or off the team.

10:20Because the first thing that happened to him is he takes on this team and a couple people give their notice. They're going with the old guy, the other guy. And he's like, okay, how do I stabilize this? And so together we created an approach for his first offsite or onsite, as it were. He brought everybody together except the people who couldn't travel from Europe. And he had an approach to how are we going to lay out what this team's going to be about and how was he using his own style and his own personality how is he going to ask for their commitment and ask them to let him know if that wasn't something they could give because when you're running your team you need to know who you have on the field and so he found a lot of confidence in having a way to set that up, ask those questions, have those dialogues.

11:17And ultimately, he actually invited me to join. And I had side sessions with people where we could together say, this is what we're seeing. And it led to restructuring the team. He didn't lose any more people. And he was able to get people into roles that better suited their aspirations and their skill set. And the result is his team is running at about twice the efficiency and delivering the same volume of opportunities, again, at half the cost. That's a big win. Indeed. Yeah. If you're looking into your crystal ball, what should leaders be mindful of in 2025, do you think? And you may not have like a perfectly crystal crystal ball, but if you were to start thinking about, listen, here's what I recommend for all leaders to be a little bit more cognizant of when we're talking about people or operations or, you know, success in the year ahead.

12:21I will say, I don't think our world is going to get less noisy. Yeah. Right. There is going to be more and more competition for attention and your teams will get distracted by that. So my recommendation to every leader is you cannot under communicate. You must communicate with clarity what's important, why it matters and how we're doing over and over. You do it in Zooms, You do it live. You do it in Slack or Teams. You do it in writing. You do it over and over because people need that beacon, that light of I know what's important and I know why it matters. And that helps filter out the noise because all kinds of things pop up all the time.

13:16And we want to over communicate. And when you're over communicating, realize you're talking to people, not computers. So take a breath and try to check what does this person need right now so that I'm not just a broadcasting machine, but I'm actually in relationship. Because you know, when a team is in relationship with their coach and it's a positive relationship, that team does magical, incredible, unprecedented things because they are led well. Yeah. Your website is gtmflow.com. To our friend that's listening, you had mentioned that you had some resources earlier. You had a resource that you were sharing as well.

14:07To our friend that's listening, where should they go from here? If they'd love to see if there's some alignment here, you know, maybe you can solve some problems that they may or may not be aware of exactly where it's, you know, the challenge might be organizationally. Absolutely. So the resource is a GTM flow slash up my influence because we're on up my influence. And that resource will share the five growth levers leaders need to pull every day. And we've already talked about them. So it's a reminder of what we've talked about and ways to do it. I'm very pragmatic. I don't want to be esoteric.

14:46I want to give you a do this. Right. Try that. If people want to work with me, there's opportunities through that to connect with me at GTM flow to connect with me. I am more than happy to share the team performance assessment with your listeners. They can take it with their team and get a high-level report on this is where your team is thriving and this is where your team needs help. If they want the recommendations and how to deal with that, well, that's a paid engagement, as you can imagine. But I'm happy to give them the insight. Wow. Well, that would be valuable, like to get that report card and something that sometimes, again, can be challenging to do from within, right?

15:34It's easy to taint the data when it's us. It is. And, you know, there's an interesting thing when my clients deploy the team performance assessment, because it's confidential and it's quick. This is a five minute thing. There's 23 questions. It doesn't take people very long, but they like having been asked. And then they like that you share the result. And the results, even if you don't work with me, you can figure out how to take action on those results. Because the worst thing is your boss, you do a 360, you do a culture amp, some sort of culture study, and all this data comes out and nothing happens.

16:19Like that's worse than not asking in the first place. So what I say to people is we, if we do this assessment, commit to doing one thing with the data, just one. Yeah. Again, gtmflow.com. Joelle, I know, do you mind sharing? You tease that you have, you do have a book coming out and it sounds like it's, yeah. Do you want to, you know, know when that's coming out or what your plans are on. So the first time you see cancer, it's disorienting, it's confusing. But what's really interesting is the second time it isn't because you know what to expect and what to do. So the first time you see a curveball, you have no idea what you're looking at.

17:01And then you figure out, oh, I've seen that curveball. I kind of know how it's going to move. So my book, Frushing the Cancer Curveball, a playbook for the newly diagnosed, their families and friends is just that. This is what the newly diagnosed should know, whether you're in the prevention, you're in diagnosis, you're in treatment, you're in surgery, or you're in recovery. There's no medical advice because I'm not a doctor and I don't think people who aren't doctors should give medical advice. In addition, just breast cancer, which is my family's specialty, there's 120 varieties of breast cancer.

17:42So even if I gave you, well, this is what worked for me, without your pathology, who knows what that would work for you. So you know what, see an oncologist, but how you live through cancer and what cancer gives you in a instant prioritization of what matters in your life. Which by the way, you don't need to wait for cancer to do that. Like do it anyway. So you read the book and the book is positive. It's not positive because cancer is positive. It's not, it sucks. But look, the death rate from cancer has gone down by a third in the last 20 years. If you have a diagnosis of cancer, it is highly probable you're going to live through it.

18:31And even if it's terminal, you're going to have time. How do you want to live? And what crushing the cancer curveball gives, promotes thoughts and has, as you would imagine, it's me, Josh, specific suggestions of how do you want to live? I'll give you an example. There's a whole chapter on the, what can I do? Because one out of two people will be diagnosed with cancer. I guarantee all of your listeners know somebody. And the first thing people say is, oh my God, that's awful. What can I do? Well, as the patient, I really can't be in the business of coordinating all of you like that. That's too much, but I do need help.

19:12So chapter 19 of the book gives you a whole list of things you can do. You can offer, right? You can offer if you're not nearby. Can I send a door dash meal for your family? Can I do that for you? If you're nearby and they have young children, because the fastest growing group of cancer patients are young people below the age of 50. So if they have children, you don't want to rock their world, say, hey, can I take your kids for the weekend for a play date? What a gift. What a gift. Oh yeah, oh yeah. That is a real world life upgrade right there. Listen, it's been a great conversation, Joelle. Joelle Kaufman, CEO, GTM Flow.

19:56your website, gtmflow.com. Do you have a title for the book? Crushing the Cancer Curveball, and it'll be available on Amazon on January 28th. Congratulations, Joelle Kaufman. Thank you so much for joining us.

20:15Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

20:57I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed.

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