2250 - Essential Leadership Principles to Retain Top Talent and Inspire High-Performing Teams with Maxwell Leadership Institute's Chris Robinson

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1:05With us right now, Chris Robinson. Chris, you are the Executive Vice President with the Maxwell Leadership Institute. That's exciting. Chris, you have a personal website. It's chrisrobinsonspeaker.com. And then, of course, there's maxwellleadership.com. But it's great to have you. I think nearly everybody on the planet knows the Maxwell Leadership Institute. Thanks for being here. Hey, well, so grateful to be here with you, Josh. Thank you so much for your time. I want to just tell you, in the moments that we've had leading up to this, your energy, your passion for life, for learning, man. It's contagious.

1:38And you got me excited to be on here today, man. Oh, good, good, good, good. Yeah. Fun things happened in the green room. So to anyone that's listening, listen, if nothing else, come be a guest on the podcast, just so we can hang out in the green room beforehand. That's right. Max are out of this world. And so anyway, hey, Chris, before we kind of get going and talking about your work with Maxwell Leadership. In your personal life, what have you been kind of geeking out on lately? What are you into? I don't know if you're watching anything or into anything lately. Well, a lot of things I'm passionate about, you know, number one, you know, I love pickleball.

2:14Absolutely love pickleball. I think when you relocate to Florida, I think the state line, they issue you a pickleball. Well, I started in Missouri. I started in Missouri. I I fell in love there, then came here and continued to play, ended up getting certified as a teaching pro for pickleball. You know, I love golf as well. I love boating. So boat about once or twice a week, if possible. And then, you know. Do you go out in the ocean? No, I'm an intercoastal guy. Yeah. I'm an intercoastal guy. So I stay inside. You've got so many options here in Florida. What kind of boat do you boat on? Well, it varies.

2:57So I'll either use a fishing boat, which is a dual engine, or I'll use a deck boat, depending on what we're doing that day. So I'm part of a great boat club down here that allows for me to sign up for one on a tee time, go there, not have to dock it, store it, none of that stuff. That's a life hack right there, Josh. Do you ever get to, do they have the kind of the swamp boats with the giant props on them? No, none of those. What do they call it? The airboats, right? The airboats, yeah, no, none of those. I was going to say, if you want to go out to the Everglades, you know, boy, it's a certain, it's a different vibe.

3:35You got to go out and compete with Cletus out there. No, I'll pass on that one. I'll pass on that one. But I've done it before, Josh. I've done it before. As have we all. If you've been here any length of time, it's fine. Well, Chris, let's talk about Maxwell Leadership. Tell me about the work that you do. Yeah, so I'm Executive Vice President of Maxwell Leadership, and basically we are a leadership coaching, training, speaking certification program. And so this program was started back in 2011, where John just really had a mission to pass the baton to people that wanted to speak, coach, and train, and equip them with tools and resources to help them become speakers, coaches, and trainers.

4:14So I became part of that program. I built a business utilizing their tools and resources. They eventually hired me to be a teaching faculty member, then the president of the faculty. And then in 2020, they asked me to become the vice president of the company, which was great timing, you know, right, you know, three months before COVID happened. So, you know, I got a chance to get my, you know, to test my leadership skills for sure. Yeah, yeah. Well, for folks that don't know, obviously, you know, in Maxwell Leadership, I obviously do a lot. The organization does a lot of speaking. But could you maybe just take us through how, like, the work?

4:54And, Chris, make sure I – I just want to make sure I understand. I want to work with you personally, or I want folks to work with you personally. So make sure – let's aim in that direction. Sure, sure. If you could, maybe talk about, like, the value that you bring. Yeah. So right now, currently, the only thing that I'm doing outside of Maxwell is keynote speaking. You know, I've got a brand new book that's coming out called From Drift to Drive. And so I'm delivering keynotes for conferences, events, and organizations talking about complacency. And I'm loving this topic and how complacency is holding back companies, organizations, and individuals from having the results in life that they want.

5:33And so that's primarily what I'm doing outside of Maxwell Leadership is just keynote speaking at this point, because my time is just consumed with what I deliver for Maxwell Leadership and our current members. If you were to take your core message that you bring to audiences and you were to distill down maybe a couple of high-level things that you believe in your heart is so important for leaders to hear today, would you mind maybe just giving us a little bit of a taster of your message? Yeah. When it comes down to just core philosophy of leadership, I've got a real simple philosophy. If you can take this philosophy and apply it to life, then you'll go far as a leader.

6:14And the philosophy is this, treat people like people and adults like adults. Now, you can, you know, read any of the rest of the thousands of books. But at the end of the day, if you answer those two things, can I treat people like people and adults like adults, you're going to go a long way. And then also, you know, followers are always asking three questions. And if we can get a yes to these three questions, then you'll be able to lead people well, too. The first question that people ask is, can I trust you? The second is, can you help me? And then the third is, do you care for me? Now, if you think about any organization that you've ever left or relationship that you've ever left, one or more of those three have been violated.

6:55And so if you just treat people like people, adults like adults, and get a yes to those three questions when leading someone, oh my goodness, you'll be on the rise of leadership for a long time to come. Well, you know, I was just having this conversation. We're actually internally, we've been building a platform for the podcast guesting world. And unfortunately, in the podcast guesting world, it's devolved into a very kind of spammy, transactional, kind of treating both guests, hosts and audiences like transactional chess pieces. And it feels yucky for those of us who have been around. It's not been like this.

7:37It wasn't like this at the beginning. But I think far too many bro-y marketers have stepped into this. And I'm telling you, Chris, like just what you're talking about, you know, when we fail to treat people like, you know, we fail, you know, in the value of human connection, when we fail to treat people like we want to be treated or we, you know, we don't treat them like adults anymore, it devolves. I mean, it's not sustainable. and you know and so you know you've seen this a lot kind of in the lead gen world there were platforms that used to be good like lead gen used to be a phenomenal way uh to to connect with people now it's just way harder same thing with cold email outrage oh way harder because unfortunately far too many people disrespected others in those platforms and ruined it for for a lot of us.

8:30Yeah, absolutely. You're absolutely right about that. I mean, I think one of the worst right now is LinkedIn messaging. I mean, it is the absolute worst from being a transactional interaction with people. If I go back and I look at my last six months of messages, there's probably only three to four authentic connection messages in there. The rest of them our templates or bots or this and yeah and ai is i mean the tools are the tools for spamming are becoming phenomenal but the tools for everybody are becoming phenomenal it still fails the basic test that you are not you're treating people um as a means to your ends of what you immediately want as opposed to hey let's just look again treat people like you want to be the golden rule here, Chris.

9:25I don't mean to keep going on and on myself, but I'm just, listen, you're lips to God's ears. Right. Yeah. Yep. Got it. Okay. So, and maybe I could just let you take the stage. What are the consequences if we fail to do this within our organizations? And I want to make sure that people also know, there's some people that might be nodding long ago, well, yeah, duh, of course, you know, treat people like that, but they might not be. Do you mind maybe getting a little bit more tactical in this principle? Yeah. You know, when it boils down to it, what's going to happen are the consequence of not treating like people, adults like adults, not getting a yes to those three questions that you're going to have an increase in turnover.

10:09The number one thing that's going to happen when you mistreat people is turnover and people do not realize the cost of turnover. Now, if you really want to take a look at what it costs you to turn over a new employee, I'd encourage anybody, just go to Google and just type in retention calculator, retention calculator in Google. And what that's going to do is allow for you to put in some basic metrics of what you pay an individual. And then it's going to tell you a staggering number of what it costs every single time you turn someone over because you had a highway, my way or the highway mentality.

10:43And you treated them wrong and think, I'll just get the next person. But if you begin to invest in people, if you begin to help people get what they want, because they're not coming to the job because they just love work. They're coming to the job because they have goals, dreams, and aspirations that they're trying to achieve through your opportunity that you're giving them to work. So we have to find out why is Josh coming to work? What's he trying to achieve personally? What's he trying to overcome in his family? And if we can do that and I can help Josh in all of those areas, I keep Josh for a long time.

11:18Josh is fired up to come to work because I'm helping him for the primary reason that he's coming and waking up and trading his life for this every single day. Yeah. Wow. What a different world, Chris, this would be if, again, we made this just a part of how we operated with everyone. And it's tempting, right? I think it's tempting to be Machiavellian because, listen, everyone's got their own pressures. Everyone's got their own stresses. You know, the boss has their own, you know, they've got their own things that they're challenged with and they're really maybe upset and stressed about. And it's easy to forget the humanity of someone else in that moment.

12:00Right. Yeah, sure. It is. But the my way or the highway mentality and leadership is over with. Those days are done. I mean, you look at all of these fast food restaurants and places that people aren't just going to take it any longer. And so we've got to figure out how to humanize it. We've got to figure out how to add value to them. We've got to figure out how to give them opportunities to grow, to improve themselves, because they can go anywhere and do it. You know, the days of sitting under the command of my way, the highway leader, that's over with. Forget it. Yeah, not going to work. You're going to keep losing people and you're going to keep wondering why you keep failing and you can't keep up with the competition.

12:42Well, it could be very well that the competition has figured out how to treat, you know, they've worked on culture. They've worked on mutual respect and they've created a culture of that. And that's my kind of my my kind of my last question here before we kind of wrap up here. Yeah. Is how can we embed this in our culture? It's one thing for the leader to come in and say, OK, let's start treating people a lot more patients. I'm going to ask more questions. I'm going to really try to step outside myself. And again, before I respond, ask an extra question or two, you know, just to make sure that people know that I'm listening.

13:17Right. And I, by the way, I mean, seems like a no brainer to me. But how can we then inspire this to our mid-level managers and everybody within the organization? Well, it just can't be a motivational talk, you know, that's coming from the leader of the organization. It has to be modeled by the leader. And, you know, I was doing this today with our staff here as I'm leading them through a study of some of John Maxwell's material that allows us the opportunity to discuss leadership principles, teamwork principles, so that it becomes our common language. And then we have to first live it out because the law of the picture says that people do what people see.

13:59Some things are taught and can be taught by a leader, but some things are caught by what it is that they actually do. And so it starts with the leader itself growing themselves, investing in themselves, and then passing that down in an overflow. It also begins with getting to really know your people. There's a document that I'll get over to you, Josh, that I'll have my assistant send you. There's a document that I use called My Favorite Things. Now, this document is great because you get this out to each employee and on it, it has simple things. You know, what's their favorite candy? What's their favorite sports team?

14:34You know, when's their birthday? When's their anniversary? What motivates them? What doesn't motivate them? It's just a list of their favorite things. And what happens is now I've got a cheat sheet to be able to add value to this individual every day. Their favorite candy might be a bag of Skittles. So in any given day, I might just show up and throw a bag of Skittles on their desk and they are elated because I know and relate to what they value. So we've got to be the example and the model of leading people, but it all starts with the leader. Everything rises and falls on leadership. John teaches us.

15:10But I'll get you that document, Josh, and that way you can have that for a download. I love it. I love it. We will have that linked up for sure. So Chris, for a friend that's been listening to our conversation right now, let's give them some next steps. Yeah. Yeah, so if you're in a leadership position or you're wanting to grow yourself as a leader or in any area of life, you need three things. The first thing that you need is knowledge. So I would begin to look at the area that you want to grow in and begin to get books in that area. area. So that is books, that is audios, that is videos that are all lined up with the specific area that you want to grow.

15:47You need knowledge in order to grow. The second thing that you need to grow in any area is a coach or a mentor. And so, you know, one of the greatest things I've always done, it doesn't matter what I do, Josh, this happened the day I started pickleball. I knew I love this. Two days later, Josh, what'd I do? I hired a coach two days later. Why? Because I knew that I need knowledge. I bought books on it. I hired a coach. And then the third thing, we have to have experience. We actually have to do something with what we're learning. And if we do those three things, get the knowledge, get the coaching, take the action, oh, life begins to roll pretty good.

16:27I hope that's helpful, Josh. It absolutely is. Okay, so chrisrobinsonspeaker.com. If someone goes there, and if they want to connect with you personally, what do they do? There's a button here that says book for Chris. I mean, that's probably a good place to start. That's correct. That's got my email on there, my phone number on there, and then information about the brand new book. And so, hey, we're just here to add value and I want to help people grow. Chris Robinson, Executive Vice President with Maxwell Institute, Maxwell Leadership. Chris, thank you so much for joining us. Love the conversation.

17:00Thank you, Josh.

17:07Thanks 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.

17:48I'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.

18:30I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes every single day. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Movement.