The Ryan Leak Podcast

Having served as the Chief People Officer at NorthRock Partners, Lacey has profound insight on something she's done most of her career to help her be successful as a follower and now as a leader. Show notes can found at ryanleak.com/followership. Lessons from Lacey: As a follower, you have to appreciate the challenge your leader is carrying. Give them grace. Leaders have a way of making it look easier than it really is, but it’s not easy at all. Often times, leaders are building the plane while flying. Followers can’t be obsessed with what’s next and forget to celebrate what’s current. You’re in control of your emotions and how you show up to work. You get a choice as to what Monday through Friday looks like. For years, Lacey has sent a Friday email every week to almost every manager she’s ever had. In that email, she laid out what she had done that week, 5 questions that will help her have an even better week the following week. Some of those questions are: Can you provide clarity on various projects? If this is where I’ve failed, can you provide feedback on how I can get better? You can’t bank on your leader thinking about you every Monday morning, but if you’re in their inbox every Friday, you’ve positioned yourself to be a better follower. For more notes go to ryanleak.com/followership.

Joel Manby is a dad, a 25 year CEO, an author and a speaker. As a former CEO of major organizations such as Sea World, Saab, and Herschend Enterprises, Joel endured my fair share of each of these situations. He's learned a number of leadership and life lessons and have found solutions to each of these concerns. As a result, he's built strong teams and created corporate cultures that have thrived amidst major adversity. Highlights from today's episode: Undercover Boss URL: https://www.cbs.com/shows/undercover_boss/video/owrUga37IMHm4Sjw9haRh1xo0snCmzHJ/undercover-boss-herschend-family-entertainment/ Lessons from Joel: Leaders lose faith in followers that would tell me what they want to hear. Leaders wish followers would bring them recommendations over problems. Followers should always try do the right the thing and do the best thing for the company over any personal agendas.

Sometimes you're stuck with a mediocre leader, but Ryan Skoog teaches us that a bad leader can actually be a gift.  Ryan Skoog spends half of his time running a couple of for profit travel companies and the other half of his time running a non-profit organization called Venture. Venture is an organization that serves in areas of the world that are the least reached and least resourced by partnering with local leaders in those communities to end some of the worlds greatest injustices. Through their organization, you can raise money for injustices by doing tough things like running long distances, hiking mountains, or biking. You can learn more about Venture at venture.org. Show notes for this episode are available at ryanleak.com/followership.

Welcome to Followership with Ryan Leak, a podcast designed to help followers follow their leaders, and to help leaders understand their followers. While leadership is often a more popular discussion and billions are spent every year consuming leadership resources, most of us will spend most of our careers doing more following than leading and we need help to do it. Take some of the the largest employers in the world like Walmart, who employs roughly 2.3 million people around the world. How many of those people would we say are leaders? Kroger reportedly has 453,000 employees with 2700 stores spread across 35 states. How many leaders does it take to run each Kroger grocery store? Let’s say 15. That’s generous, but let’s go with it. That’s 40,500 leaders which is less than 10% leaving the majority of their workforce… following. Amazon has 840,000 plus employees. Let's say 80,000 of them are leaders. That still leaves 79,999 people following Jeff Bezos and his leadership.  And how many people do you know that can say they work for a GREAT leader? In fact, working for a GREAT Leader is pretty rare. But just because you may not work for a great leader doesn’t mean you can’t be a great follower. Everyone has grandiose ideas of what a leader should and shouldn’t be and should and shouldn’t do and should and shouldn’t say. But most of us live with a lot of opinions about leadership with virtually zero control over how they actually lead. This is a podcast to help you do your part well.