Turning the Tables

On the Leadership Lab podcast, I’m usually the one asking the questions.

This week I decided to turn the tables.

On the latest Leadership Lab podcast, I brought on leadership coach and bestselling author, Eddie Turner, to interview me about my new book, The Five-Week Leadership Challenge. Now, I loved this interview for a lot of reasons. It gave audiences an opportunity to hear me speak directly about my new book and it allowed me to bring Eddie back onto the podcast for the first time since our last episode together in August of 2020.

But more than anything, this podcast worked as a learning experience. Too often we get stuck in our roles. Whether you’re a project manager, a sales representative, or the CEO of fortune 500 company, we can all afford to turn the tables every once in a while.

As much as we do not want to give up control, it is important to try viewing things from another person’s perspective. Acting as a guest instead of a host with Eddie this week showed me just how hard this can be! As a host, I come with questions prepared and am able to play off the other person’s experiences, but this time I was the center of attention. It was hard, but in the end, I gained valuable experience that I needed to improve my podcasting skills.

It also helped me put into words some of the rationale for decisions I made when constructing The Five-Week Leadership Challenge, such as the length and the use of stories. In my doctoral dissertation, I found that the most important element of any education content for long term retention is one thing: relevance. To that end, I strove to make the course and the book as relevant as possible to leaders.

This week’s tool is dynamic: it’s an online 5-minute quiz. It’s designed to help you turn the tables by asking you to think of yourself how others perceive you, rather than through your own perception.

Below, I invite you take an individual assessment that will evaluate the leadership areas where you are strong, and some areas where you could use improvement. What I am asking you to do is answer these questions from the perspective of how you think others view you. So, if the question is “I strike a good balance between maintaining relationships and accomplishing the task at hand”, ask yourself how your coworkers would answer the same question in relation to you.

When you’re done, I’ll send you your personalized results, along with a custom action plan to improve. Maybe you don’t uncover anything new. But if you do, I’ll have a relevant solution waiting for you!

 

Photo by Konstantinos Hasandras on Unsplash