Video: The Three Pain Points Holding Back High Capacity Leaders

hey Channel insiders welcome back to channel Insider partner POV your source for untapped opportunities and unfiltered opinions in the it Channel all to help you make Better Business decisions I'm your host Katie boso this episode is going to be a crash course in identifying why we may feel stuck in our career Journeys and how we can all become high capacity leaders my guest today is Aaron Brown Chief transformation officer of true increase and founder of burgeon software Aaron started his Executive coaching business true increase in 2005 and later pivoted to work in the it Channel but he still saw a need for coaching so this time with the help of his business partner Chris Williams he decided to become that Agent of Change once again welcome Aon hi Katie first of all I'm so grateful to be here and thanks for having me can you start out a little bit by talking about your IT background and ultimately how you got here today although I've served uh in the technology space particularly in the midm market for over a decade not only do I know a lot of your previous guests and I've worked with many of them um for many of your audience or much of your audience it'll be the first time they've heard of me I launched my first business in 95 I was 18 years old and I was serving High net worth individuals in Orange County California and after about 10 years of that I was was able to Parlay that relational Equity into serving those same clients in their multi-million dollar businesses and so I spent about a decade serving 50 multi-million dollar companies in change management and leadership development and then something odd happened is I felt like it was time to make a change and I was asked by one of my actually two of my clients who both own tech companies if I would take on an executive role and I took one of them up on it uh some of the your audience might know the comtel group they've been around for over 30 years or might know them by their newer name when we rebranded them as Tech trust the last uh four or five years I was there from 2000 as a consultant from 2011 as a VP and president from 2013 to 2022 and frankly I got frustrated I got frustrated with uh not living my life purpose every day my greatest passion was helping leaders helping leaders get what they wanted whether it was personal objectives or business objectives and so as a sales leader frankly I have to confess I was a hack because I didn't really care about whether I got the contract or not I care about adding values to Value to leaders so in 2022 at the end of 22 in uh January 23 when I moved on I uh launched or relaunched true increase and I also launched viron software uh software companies a sister company to True increase and so what ultimately led to that transformation I have to confess was my marriage was on the verge of destruction after 20 years of marriage and four kids uh we had been through marriage counseling almost weekly for 20 years and uh couldn't move the needle and then uh in this weird Twist of events the next five people I asked in my town who had a network of like 10,000 people and I've lived in for 45 years I knew everybody the next five people all said the same name when I was sharing with them you know I need help like we're on the verge here and we went in and met him for one session and our marriage was transformed in 30 minutes his background was neuroscience and my background was a physiologist so I had this um love of human behavior and development and yet I didn't appreciate neuroscience at that point after 30 minutes when he changed our lives dramatically I mean it was it's night and day four years later my wife and I have an amazing marriage our children are doing wonderful two months after we met with him I said hey I'm going to go back to coaching eventually I don't know when I said but I'm going to take what learned from you I can't help but teach it and he's like right on I said yeah but I'm going to take it and we're going to take it to the world and we're going to democratize it we're going to leverage some technology and software to do that as well because I believe everybody deserves the right to have access to lifechanging tools and not have to be able to pay through the nose for it so that's what the software allows people to do is any individual can go spend 10 bucks a month and have the tools at their fingertips a year and a half later he's my business partner January 2023 uh we rebooted true increase in virgin software for the first time after a few calls I had a dozen clients now working with billion-dollar companies the first one being the Orlando Magic NBA team and their EVP of Technology Jeff loots and so I was so grateful uh because I was back to doing what I love but now empowered with another level of of tools and resources I had the business side and the technology background uh but my business partner had the Neuroscience which was a missing component I felt let's talk about what exactly it is that you actually do and what true increase is is meant to do could you kind of explain that through a success story for me to give our audience an idea of what exactly it is that you specialize in now and what you love to do every day basically there's four ways that we help organizations right now and the first is uh thriving leaders and so uh many leaders would just not describe themselves even if they're highly successful as thriving and so we help leaders get to that thriving place and whether it's because their marriage is falling apart or whether it's because their department is falling apart or the business is just not making the leap that they feel they have the potential to make we hope the leaders Thrive second is cohesive culture most organizations struggle culturally and then the third would be strategic Clarity I find most organizations even multi-billion dollar companies struggle with strategic Clarity and then fourth and finally performance optimization once we're crystal clear on where we're going like how do we get there in the most optimized way all of our methodologies for all the different Services we provide fold under one umbrella methodology we call it our Ace methodology and it stands Ace stands for Align or alignment clarify or Clarity and execute or execution so alignment Clarity and execution and what we find is most uh leaders teams and organizations are struggling with one of those phases at one of those levels so on our on our diagram at the lowest level you see high capacity leaders that's our job is to help high capacity leaders tap into their full potential and what we find is most individuals and teams and organizations don't need to add more things to the mix they need to be able to tap into the resources the full resources they already have and so I have a typical situation is I have a CEO of a this happens to be one of our smaller clients a $200 million a year organization and he comes to me and he says hey yeah I want to hire you because I need to do a strategic Retreat we just sold a a multi you know billion dollar asset and now they're now they're just a multi-million dollar company so now we can be laser beam focused and we're putting all those resources into this resource so I want to do a strategic retreat with two of my teams and really get clear and really get aligned and and I as I started to investigating the discovery conversation what we what we found was he wasn't ready for a strategic Retreat he wasn't ready for his team to align because if you start in the pyramid at the bottom he wasn't aligned with himself with what his role was he had internal conflict about the role that he was playing the way he was playing it where the organization was going and as the leader it's hard to align your team in fact it's next to impossible to align your team when you yourself are not aligned and so when a leader comes to me with an organizational disconnect or a a team or cultural disconnect we've got to drop back down to to level one and make sure that he's aligned and that works on an individual and a per instance basis for example if if if you want you know your husband you know we've talked about marriage a little bit you and I off camera and if you want your husband to be on the same page with you something but you have internal conflict about it and haven't resolved that it's hard to get him on the same page because you're not going to be at a good place to do that so with him what we did we started with one-on-one coaching and in one session he had major epiphany of where his conflict was keeping him from leading the team well if he's not leading the team well the team isn't leading the organization well so they're not executing well so it's first alignment then clarify then execute what I've seen is high-capacity leaders this that's all I work with they often have enough talent and enough skill that they just they they think about what needs to be done the result they want to accomplish and they just start doing it and the really good ones will stop and really do some thoughtful planning to get clarity so let's start at the second stage so good leaders start somewhere between execu like they think what they need to do they execute or they think what they need to do then they do some real planning for clarity then they move to execution and that will work until it doesn't and then what you have to do is when you start hitting the wall either personally interpersonally on the team or in the organization when you start hitting that wall we all hit the ceiling or the wall eventually you have to step back and go okay where's the breakdown so if you want to fix your team which most leaders come to me with Team issues then I say hey we got to start making sure you're at the right place we make sure they're aligned they're C they're clear on what they need to do and they're executing their plan then we move to the team when the team is uh aligned and you remove that conflict or that that misalignment they're clear they can execute execution is actually the easiest part most organizations will tell you they're oh we're good at this we're good at that we're good at but we struggle with execution I disagree in my experience it's usually not execution is actually the easy part it's getting crystal clear on what executing and getting aligned so that you can get crystal clear because it's hard to get clear if you're not aligned it's interesting what you say on the execution part being the easy part it's everything that leads up to it in my job so much of what I do has to do with pre-production before we even get the cameras rolling so it's really interesting to hear that kind of translate in in that realm oh you're so natural on camera like when we talked when we had our Discovery call I felt like I was already on the podcast I feel like you should be like a a weather forecaster or something you're just so natural in front of the camera that is easy for you you execute really easy and most high-capacity people do they execute it's natural that's why they're high-capacity people it's will only take you so far though so that's why really successful people when they get stuck they're like I don't know what to do because my talent my skill my experience is not getting me there and you have to go back to basics almost what I'm interested in is taking people who already are successful and helping them understand what their limiting factors are and how to flip that switch to hyper successful and to take that success and make sure it proliferates through every part of their life and their work so for example uh there's a slide that I shared with you about the three most common challenges that I deal with with high-capacity leaders and uh number one far and above the others is generally influence now um when I say influence there's three directions we influence there's up line which can be your boss so if you're at a VP and you report to the ca level or if you're a C Level you report to the you know the uh board um if you're uh it could be your customers I would consider those upline because ultimately you kind of answer to them then there's uh parents there's mentors that are upline there on on the laterally on the peer level there's spouses which you know there's a reason 60s something percent of of marriagein and divorce in America right now right so there appear that we're a relationship that most people are struggling with and that impacts your work greatly whether you recognize it or not then there's siblings there's colleagues peers other uh Executives on your team finally there's downline there's your direct reports there's your children a lot of successful uh uh leaders who children are and adult children are imploding and so you've got these these three directions you got upline downline you got laterally to your peers it doesn't matter if you're successful and influential eventually we hit our ceiling and how we move past our current capacity is much more neurological than it is skills-based so U most leadership development programs and books they're based on transferring information to you intellectually but that's not how we actually learn as human beings neurologically we know we learn through experience and so how do we actually gain that experience without having to spend years of udy overcoming something right that we're keep hitting our head against the wall so the second biggest challenge that we see is uh insufficient execution and that may be related to lack of influence or may be um just uh inability to execute on whatever the task is at hand right now or whatever the initiative is and so what I find is high-capacity leaders often have executed many very impressive things in their career in their life but right now they're hitting their head against the wall and so how do they move past that current level of execution and then finally uh another one extremely common is uh poor life balance and so you got people maybe they're they're jamming in the influence category and they're jamming in the uh execution category they're just killing it and yet like me their marriage is impling or their kids are falling apart or they're struggling with anxiety or stress or they're not taking care of their personal health or um their personal their personal wealth for that matter they're a high- paid individual and they have been for a long time but they're not wealth building so these are areas that um what I found is is most leaders high capacity or not as humans we struggle with balance and so I'm not talking about work life balance in terms of like how many hours you work I'm talking about making sure that you're keeping all the balls in the air your physical health your relational Health your emotional and mental health your your work your financial um so what I find is most people are good in a couple of those they're okay in a couple and they're terrible in another couple and as as high-capacity people what do we do we focus on Roi we go after where we're getting results and so when we stop getting results somewhere we hit our head long enough on something we just kind of start to neglect it move on to focus on the area where we're getting fed and that eventually starts to catch up with us how can we identify in ourselves that something is wrong if we don't believe it so how can we know that we have a problem so that we can start addressing it well first of all our brain our subconscious mind is set up to not let us know so there's neurological Clues there's relational Clues there's organizational Clues so let's start with a few of the neurological Clues here's some of the obvious ones um you're feeling frustration and anxiety regularly or semi-regularly this client they were using a bite guard for I don't know a decade or two and I said hey before we're done uh you're going to stop using a bite guard at night and they were like eron I I grind through a bite guard every month literally annihilate this thick rubber Thing by grinding so hard at night that's a neurological clue that you have anxiety and stress fear shame something that's active in you subconsciously on a regular basis there's a great uh best-selling book called the body keeps the score so if you're a nerd science nerd like me it's like this thick you'll love it but it says the the body is dying to give up the truth so your body's your early warning system and your late warning system so what I mean by that is when you feel under threat Katie if someone were to verbally assault you or physically get in your spell space and you felt threatened you'd feel it in your body instantaneously it happens in a millisecond so you'd feel anxiety your chest tighten up or your shoulders You' clinch up your body there's it's what we call basoc constriction your body's going to respond chemically by cortisol and adrenaline so When You're Heart's racing like before you get in go do public speak most people it's one of the most common fears right your heart starts racing that's your neur your neurology telling you we're under threat so why can some speakers go talk in front of millions of people and be look totally or be totally calm and relaxed well because they've had they've relearned that experience neurologically so number one you listen to your body your body is going to tell you through um grinding your teeth at night through neck tension and pain uh through IBS or upset stomach or indigestion gestion anxiety physical responses uh weight gain uh loss of appetite or weight loss poor sleeplessness so there's all these neurological signs and symptoms next let's go to some relational ones conflict where do you have conflict so look at your relationships whether they're personal or professional where are you not being totally honest where do you not have peace or alignment in your relationships and I'm not saying every relationship is going to be rainbows and unicorns what I'm saying is is that traditionally if we are at a good place and we've resolved any stuckness in us neurologically then we're able to navigate even difficult relationships really well and we can have peace in the midst of of the lack of agreement right so when we don't and we have that consistent relational conflict usually there's some stuckness there and that's where we slip into our limic brain which subconsciously says you're under threat here you're not safe you're not going to get what your needs met and therefore we retract and we devolve intellectually organizational let's look at the last couple signs organizationally again potential signs you're not growing as an organization you're not solving longtime problems that have plagued you uh you have cultural um factions in the organization there's huge discrepancies between the way different organizations within your organization are functioning or or individual performers right when great organizations when they have top performers they go okay what are they doing let's duplicate that and help others to duplicate that so if you have these huge discrepancies that's a sign or a symptom potentially organization that you're not optimized and so if you as a leader are not solving that then you're usually stuck somewhere in the process that makes a lot of sense and it helps us to kind of see of where we are in that process to say maybe I need to reach out for help so by the time they get to you Aaron how does that usually begin when somebody is exploring Aaron I'm thinking I might need your help I may need a coach how do we get started could you kind of walk me through that process what I would say is um I'm not here to pitch you know true increase or Aaron Brown or buring software my business partner um I'm here to Advocate that the more successful you are the more coaching you need if you think you've tapped your potential and you're at your Your Capacity as a human being or as a leader or as an executive don't get a coach but if you think that you've got more in the tank or you're just not satisfied with the results I'd say hire a coach if you're comfortable with it I would love to take something that you'd like to work on but I'd like to just walk you through a simple process oh boy not so fast join me again Tuesday for part two thanks so much to Aaron for joining me today and thank you for watching or listening check out every episode of Channel inside partner POV on Channel insider.com or watch on YouTube at Channel inssider newws and Trends you can also listen to this episode and every episode as a podcast on your favorite podcast listening platform don't forget to like subscribe and follow so you never miss an episode once again I'm Katie boso and I'll see you next time

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