The Content Leader

Guest Speaker: Kim Izaguirre-Merlos, ACC.

We’re gonna use these terms to produce a behavioral and performance profile today. If you find your curiosity intrigued mid-sentence, this glossary is for you.

Talent — A naturally reoccurring pattern of thinking, feeling, or behaving that can be productively applied. Talent is always the most important factor in our profiling. Because talents are innate. They can’t be learned or acquired, like skills and knowledge. 

Investment — Time spent practicing, developing a skill, building a knowledge base and awareness in a specific role.

Skill — The steps involved in executing a specific activity. The how-to. Skills are learned.

Knowledge — Facts, like the content you learn in class, and experience, like the tips and self-awareness you pick up on-the-job. Knowledge is learned too.

Strength — The ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance in a specific activity by investing in the most dominant talents.

Talent x Investment = Strength — The formula for developing a talent into a strength.

Meet Carson

I want to introduce you to Carson for this exercise. I met him in the Northwest League this summer when he was the interim manager for the Everett Aquasox - this is where the Seattle Mariners typically send their players to make their pro debut.

But I’d heard of him before this. Because he’s one of the youngest field coordinators in the game. That’s a really high-ranking leadership position on the player development side of an organization. So, naturally, I was curious.

This gathering of information and identifying the main player in story is how we start building our profile. A good profile demonstrates this reporting.

What else do we know about him coming into this interview? What does that open up our conversation to? Listen in and note your observations.

• Observation 1:

• Observation 2:

• Observation 3:

A Strong Focus

Now here’s where I want us to see that what starts as a question or fact can lead to new discoveries or end with more facts. Talking with Carson raises lots of new questions and new facts we can go on to explore in our research toward building this profile. What questions or facts caught your ear?

• Question / Fact 1:

• Question / Fact 2:

• Question / Fact 3:

But curiosity and running down rabbit holes might not be enough to build a good profile. We need to have done enough work to at least be able to answer the questions:

• Does it have your basic narrative elements: a specific focus, a central question, stakes, a conflict, a central character? Is something happening?

• Why is this story important? — What will we learn? How will it challenge what we thought we knew? Make us better? More impactful?

• And why now?

• How can we best pursue this story in the time we’ve got? We’re working with busy leaders with good intentions and little time.

• Can I sum this up in one sentence? Pitch it in less than a paragraph?

So here’s the top question that caught my attention listening to Carson:

• What’s the impact of a leader’s message (a strength) on wins and losses?

And it’s here that I want us to learn how he takes his existing job and every day, reshapes it around his strengths. Even in the face of so much interference from the game around us. My hypothesis is that this is how he wins — making an impact both on and off the field. To do this he’d need to have mastered this discipline of playing to his strengths — his message. Bringing order and focus to a series of incremental moves. Put it into practice every day. And gradually, pitch by pitch, tilt the playing field so that the best of his job becomes the most of his job.

How strong was your message today?

So I ask him to help us identify the impact of his message through a simple 3-phase process over 10 days. It won’t require him to step back and away from his work. Instead, he’ll be paying attention more closely. Sorting out exactly what he does and how those things he does make him feel.

Step 1: Sort

This process begins with the challenge of capturing which specific activities over the course of the day played to his strengths and which ones played to his weaknesses. This phase is critical. If he doesn’t do it, we don’t have the raw data we need to craft strengths statements that are powerful, vivid, true.

But he does. Check out Table 1. He clarifies the specific activities he’s captured and arrived at statements that are both precise enough to preserve their original emotional punch and general enough we know he‘s applying them every day.

Finally, he confirms the dominance of these strengths by running each statement through the 1-10 test. Yes, we trust him to assess accurately how good he is at something and judge his own thoughts, emotions and actions in this one key area. Because he knows himself, his role, and his organization best. The rating naturally causes him to question the strength of each statement. And it lets him discover whether these are indeed activities that should dominate his time and attention at work. In less the 60 seconds.

We’re looking for a score of 7.5 or higher. Any activity scoring at this level or higher not only fires in him the right kind of powerful thoughts, feelings and behaviors, it tells us he’s focused on learning and applying it to such an extent that others have recognized his successes with it. Creating urgency and extreme positive reactions. Making him very effective, creative and resilient in his role. It’s a true strength. A source of competitive advantage for him. And serves as the focus of the day, weeks and months ahead.

So, remember, first we need to sort through his activities, and look for the patterns to pinpoint precisely which ones invigorate him and which ones deplete him. Then we can see if and what the impact on wins is. That’s what this process accomplishes intuitively.

So what patterns do you see in his data? Follow your eyes here. In criminal psych, we say “2’s a pattern. You wait till 3 and everybody’s dead.” Where’s this pattern lead you to next?

• Observation / Lead 1:

• Observation / Lead 2:

• Observation / Lead 3:

Step 2: Push

Second, while others are pulling him in every direction, he’d need to stay sufficiently in control of his hours at work so that, over time, he’d load up on the invigorating kind and push back hard if the scales gradually tip the other way.

Step 3: Explain

Third, he’d have to learn how to explain what he’s doing persuasively enough to get his team to want to help him.

Step 4: Stay Clearheaded

And fourth, whenever he gets a new hire or a new role or a new organizational directive, he’d have to stay clearheaded enough to keep his day intentionally tilted toward the invigorating activities and away from the neutral, depleting, boring, and draining ones.

Simply put, he’d have to ditch the typical “pull” approach to work and replace it with the “push” discipline. Standing up for and pushing the people at work, along with their many expectations, toward his strengths instead of his weaknesses. Where he knows he’ll be most productive. And make the greatest impact on his organization.

It’s this push that helps us see, know and understand his most dominant strengths and measure their impact.

Communication & Responsibility

Carson’s repeating thoughts, feelings and actions show us he’s especially talented in the Communication theme — he finds it easy to put them into words. We’ve heard he’s a great conversationalist and seen he’s a great presenter of them. And he’s also shown he’s really talented in the Responsibility theme. We see him take psychological ownership of what he said he’d do. And that he’s committed to stable values like honesty and loyalty.

Communication is an influencing theme we see within the leadership domains. A leader like Carson who’s dominant in this domain knows how to take charge, speak up, and make sure their team is heard using this talent. And Responsibility is an executing theme. He shows he just knows how to make things happen.

Finally

Now it’s time to deliver the profile: Go verify your findings with him. What would he add or take away? Take in more of his perspective. Ask him what he needs and wants next. Follow where he leads you!

Note: Another way to accelerate the process of identifying and confirming specific talents is to have him take a strengths assessment like CliftonStrengths.

Self-Evaluate & Debrief

It’s our turn to assess our own performance here today. And we’re going to borrow Carson’s strength test to do that.

My Performance Profile

• On a scale of 1-10, how strong did you feel your message was today? 10 = strongest, consistent near-perfect performance, fully-actualized.

• Why?: What we did - the specific activity or task - that made you feel that way.

• Now that you know this, what are you going to do to make sure you’re using this strength a little more every single day this week?

Closing Thought

“Connect with people. Understand how a person got to the point they’re at. And deliver your message to them in a way they can hear it.” — Carson Vitale

Thanks

Thank you for the awesome session today!

And special thanks to Carson who provided his leadership strengths for this!!

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This session of How We Won: The Complete Guide to the Championship Season is adapted from your reading Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance and will grow over time as I’m adding more resources and tools. You can call or text me at 509-542-7784 if your questions haven’t been answered here yet, and sign up here to get updates when I add something new.