Start With A Win - How to build GREAT LEADERSHIP.

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

How can you build GREAT LEADERSHIP?  and...Can holistic leadership help your leadership?Build great leaders in your organization, it is a full time job!  How can you build a company around leadership?  We answer that here!In this episode, Adam discusses holistic leadership and personal development with Dr. Jeanne Porter King exploring the concept of leading from the inside out, emphasizing the importance of self-awareness, purpose, and values in leadership.  They highlight the significance of aligning personal values with organizational values and creating a thriving, values-driven culture.They delve into the idea that unhealthy leaders can harm organizations, emphasizing the need for leaders to prioritize their mental, emotional, and physical well-being. Find out how leaders balance between reflection and action, ensuring they don't burn out and negatively impact their teams.Dr. Jeanne Porter King is a multi-talented author, business leader, inspirational teacher, ministry leader, and board-certified coach. With over 30 years of experience, she's dedicated her career to helping women discover their purpose and identity. As the Founder and President of TransPorter Group Inc, she specializes in leadership development and diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy. Dr. Jeanne has worked globally, training, and coaching leaders in 20 different countries. She holds degrees from The Ohio State University, McCormick Theological Seminary, and Ohio University. Dr. Jeanne's transparent and genuine concern for others shines through in her mission to help individuals reach their highest aspirations. She also serves as an executive pastor at Christ Community Church in South Holland, IL, focusing on women's ministry, leadership development, and new ministers' training.03:13 We all can pinpoint our leadership…05:30 What is holistic leadership?07:03 This is the spirit of the organization!09:38 What must be lived out?11:15 Unhealthy leaders, hurt…!12:56 Is leadership, leadership no matter where we are – work, home, communities?15:53 Permission to go to the well!18:42 Burn out, what happens?21:28 Start by going to the well!www.drjeanneporterking.comhttps://www.instagram.com/drjeanneporterking/ Connect with Adamhttp://www.startwithawin.comhttps://www.facebook.com/AdamContosCEO https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamcontos/ https://www.instagram.com/adamcontosceo/ https://www.youtube.com/@LeadershipFactoryhttp://twitter.com/AdamContosCEO Listen, rate, and subscribe!Apple PodcastsSpotifyGoogle Podcasts

How do we build holistic leadership of ourselves and others? We find out today on Start With A Win. Welcome to Start With A Win, where we talk franchising, leadership, and business growth. Let's go. And coming to you from Area 15 Ventures and Start With A Win headquarters, it's Adam Kontos with Start With A Win. We have an amazing author and guest today on the show. I want to welcome Dr. Jean Porter King. She's an author of multiple books. In fact, one of them was just released this week. She's a business leader, board certified coach, inspiring audiences worldwide with her engaging style and faith-based insights. As the founder of Transporter Group, Inc., Dr. Jean specializes in leadership development and diversity strategies,

impacting leaders in over 20 countries. Her passion lies in helping individuals connect with their purpose and authentic identity. Welcome, Dr. Jean. Thank you, Adam, for having me on. This is such a pleasure. This is awesome because this is book launch week for you with your new book, Leading Well, which is just a fantastic book. And before that, you had an amazing book put out that is actually kind of the manual of a lot of companies. It's called Influence Starts With I. How did you get into writing? And I mean,

give us a little bit of the flyover of each of your books. Sure. You know, I have been an organizational development consultant for years. And that work led into really focusing in on leadership development and ultimately women's leadership development, bringing in kind of my doctoral work, et cetera. And so once you do enough of this, after almost 15 years of working with women in leadership, I wanted to write about it and share principles and tips that we've learned down through the years. So that's how it's come about. Both of them came about in that way. That's awesome. I'm a huge fan of developing women leadership. When I was running Remax, we had a women's leadership development group. We also had, I mean, I think it was like 40 or 50% of our board was women. Like half of my C-suite was, were women. I mean, just, I'll tell you what guys,

if you, if you look around and there's not enough women in the room, you're not finding your potential. So you know, developing women leadership and, and empowering women leadership is a huge part of our business culture that we need to pursue. Um, you know, naturally it happens because the reality is, um, women run a lot of the households also traditionally in society, but the reality is they're better at running businesses and a lot of it. So, um, can you tell us a little bit about your story? And, um, I mean, it, you've, you've done a lot in this empowerment. Why did you get into it? And what drove you to become such a strong leader and help others become that way? You know, I appreciate that question because I think we all, those of us who lead, can

begin to pinpoint the genesis of that leadership to very early on. I tell people that first and foremost, I'm the oldest of three, born to a very strong father and a very gentle, quiet, you know, compassionate mother. But because I was the oldest, my father cultivated in me critical thinking. He would test me. He coached me, whether it was spelling bee. He saw such great potential. So number one, it was something that was part of how I was raised, but I also was part of a faith tradition that believed in cultivating young leaders. And so I was thrown into leadership roles at a very young age. And by the time I did kind of find my, you know, wanting to know what I was going to major in college. And when I got into the workplace, it was kind of a natural to gravitate to places of influence, of helping

others. Believe it or not, I'll tell your audience, my first two degrees are in industrial and systems engineering, but it was the leadership side, the human side that grabbed me. And I went to do then organizational social science for the doctorate. And that's where it just brought it all together that I wanted to not only lead, study leadership, and then help coach and develop others for leadership. Awesome. You know, it's funny in listening to what you're saying here. I always say the problem with leadership is people. But when you think about it, I mean, that's what we're doing is we're influencing people to achieve more accomplished tasks, things like that. You know, we're not managing a process or a task. We're leading people to, you know,

inspire them to accomplish these things. So the problem with people starts within a lot of times. And, you know, within our hearts and our heads, we get in our own heads, we get in our own hearts. We feel hurt, we feel confused, we feel overwhelmed. And we also feel like a lot of times, and sometimes it's true, sometimes it's not, we. And we also feel like a lot of times, and sometimes it's true. Sometimes it's not, we feel like we don't have a chance. So, so we have to take a

step back and look at this holistic approach to leadership, which is really the key focus of your book and what you're putting out here. Why did you, we center on that? Why did you, why did you find that? And how did you find that? And explain to us holistic self-leadership. Yeah, see, I believe and have believed for years that we lead from the inside out. So the very thing you're talking about, the problem with people's inside, but it's also the good of people. So we lead from the inside out and the more clear and self-aware we are around our thoughts, our processes, our purpose, our values, we lead from that place. And so as I did this work, integrating kind of my corporate technical arena with my spiritual, began to realize holistic leadership was really about helping people unleash that power that was within. And sometimes our structures force us to kind of leave from the outside in and keep up with,

you know, the demands and the processes. And we end up wearing ourselves down, hurting ourselves. And we're really getting to a place of being unhealthy and unhealthy leaders hurt and create unhealthy places. So holistic leadership is about being in touch with body, soul, and spirit and being able to lead from that healthy, holistic place to create more healthy organizations and places. You said a couple of things I want to double click on here. Okay. The first one is values. I mean, it's incredibly important. It's fascinating when you look at an organization and when the organization does not have leaders who are just broadly and outwardly speaking their values, the organization wanders in its direction. It really doesn't have a spirit to it. And frankly, in this day and age, you've got the organization. And why are the values of the organization important? Because you want to be in a place where your values align with the values

of the organization. And just as the organization, you wanted to have a thriving, flourishing spirit, you want to be able to bring that same flourishing spirit so that it's symbiotic, that we're helping each other. And so what I found is to help this book, you know, Leading Well talks about that very core of our values, our spirit, our spiritual anchoring, being the center and core of our wellness approach, if you will, to leader, leading well, both effectively, but leading from a holistic place. And yes, we want that to align with the places where we are, and that's where we can thrive and where we all can flourish. Is there some sort of, you know, and I know there's not a hard and fast rule on this. I would always,

like when we would do a company-wide meeting, we would do a all hands meeting company-wide once a month with everybody in the organization, me as the CEO, all the way down, everyone was included and we started and ended the meeting with our values and clearly stating our values. Everybody in the organization, I mean, 900 employees knew the values of the organization. And then our 150,000 affiliates around the world, a lot of them would have the values printed out on the poster that we would send everybody in and on the wall. So they were crystal clear. Now, there are a lot of organizations that are missing that clarity of values. What, you know, obviously, the CEO speaking the values and everybody, you know, being recognized for them, because we would

give awards for our values every month. But what recommendations do you have to help companies reflect on their values and ensure that those are clear to the employee base. Yeah, I just did a team building session for a CEO and his direct reports, and it was values-based. Number one, we want to make sure that the values are lived out, that they're espoused, they're put on placards, and we can even say them at the beginning

and ending of meetings, but they're lived out in the habits and behaviors of the organization. So we take time to develop, to bring on, when we onboard people, we inculcate them recognize them, perform them, do them, but also make sure that they're aligning with their own personal values. So, yeah, it takes more. It's great to have them at the, you know, I love it that you as a CEO opened and closed meetings with that And not enough leaders do that, but that's really going to be the crux of having that inclusive culture, that culture that people can thrive in. And that really was the genesis of the work that I was doing that from my perspective as a Black woman, really getting in touch with my cultural and spiritual values and seeing how they aligned with the organizations that I was a part of. I love it.

I mean, if there's clarity, there's no question, right? Exactly. We know what's going on. Something else I want to double click on that you mentioned in that a little bit earlier was unhealthy leaders hurt. Yeah. Break that down for us. Remember the old saying, hurt people hurt people? Well, I'm a firm believer that hurt leaders hurt organizations, hurt teams, hurt industries, hurt nations.

They hurt us all. them to get to this place of self-awareness, get to this place of seeing their organizations as something that's entrusted to them for the greater good, to serve society, and also helping them to treat their employees, fellow leaders, et cetera, with that human dignity and respect so that we all could flourish. Because unhealthy leaders tend to bully, over-talk, do unethical things. And those are not the things that we want to have reproduced in our organizations. So yes, unhealthy leaders hurt us all. Oh, totally agree. And it's important that we always remind ourselves because

we always have to be checking our health as leaders in order to make sure that we're leading well. Yes. To coin the term there. A little play on words there at Double Entendre, but yeah. There you go. Yes. Hey, what do you think about, Dr. Jean, you know, in your research and things like that, you've noticed that, and obviously leading well is a lot about this holistic approach. But it seems to me like a lot of bad leadership starts at home. with ourselves, our faith, our commitments, our honesty, our spouse, our, you know, whatever it might be. And then we start delivering those things to our place of work, you know, where we spend most of our time, if we're not asleep at home or with our family, our most of our time is spent at work doing, you know, some sort of employment. What do you think about, you know, and you talk about holistic, it seems to me like a lot of times it breaks

outside of work before the broken is brought inside of work. Give me your take on that. That is so good. And we know that from our own lives and as being leaders. So what I do with this book and even in the influence book, I start talking about two things to help people really get in touch with it because in some ways I've developed, cultivated, trained, coached leaders in corporate settings, nonprofits, schools, homes, churches, and we can say leadership is leadership is leadership so what i help people do is begin to see their lives through a lens of leadership and help them develop a leadership purpose and as they get clear on that it helps them translate how they lead and who they are as a leader across various segments of their lives so at home home, that purpose should be a guiding point,

an umbrella point at home, at work, in the neighborhood community, et cetera. So that's number one. Number two, as part of getting in touch with this purpose and why you lead the way you do, it also takes some doing some self-reflection and we begin to bring in the health components of mental health,

emotional health. I've created a nine factor framework for leaders, especially from my perspective as a Black woman and the group that I coach is that we begin to then legitimize the need for having good mental health, whether it's at home or at work. We give permission to leaders to say, I need some help. We need to ask for what we need. And we need to have that integration. Most wellness frameworks talk about

an integration of all of these parts of ourselves. So spiritual, mental, emotional, physical, relational, vocational, et cetera. So the more we get those integrated and aligned, then that gives us the framework, the permission, and even the strategies to assure that leadership purpose is being enacted in healthy ways. I love that. I mean, it's just what you just said is so inspiring and so true and gives you a lot of good self-reflection. I've heard you mention permission to go to the well. Yeah. Tell me about that. Oh, wow, Adam, that is the crux of, first of all, my transformation in this, that the well represents

this centered place in us. My faith tradition is Christian. And I stumbled across or studied for years the story of this woman at the well, that Jesus comes to this woman at the well and has this transformative conversation and unlocks theologically insight onto the Holy Spirit and major theologies of our faith. But he used a woman, first of all. And for those, you already gave the raw rod at the beginning, you are a believer, but so many leaders still aren't. So it's significant that it was a woman. He crossed boundaries to have this conversation with a

woman, but the place was at a well that was culturally significant to her tradition. And so that notion of the well, and then he talks about this well of living water, he's talking about this vibrancy that can be within us, the spirit that is within us that can flow out to other parts of our lives to literally maintain that vibrancy. So for me, the leading from the well is about, first of all, being anchored in that spiritual tradition,

that spiritual value, having that relationship, but then on a daily basis, being able to go to the well and spend that quiet time. Most of the leaders that I work with, and I know me, I'm extroverted. I can give you my Myers-Briggs type. You can probably guess it, right? I'm extroverted. We're high energy. We're go, go. And then in my tradition as a Black woman, we're trained to be the strong Black woman, lead like a superwoman. You can do it all. But the reality, all of that will drain you, especially those of us that are extroverted. Our kindred that are more introverted already know about spending that reflective inner time, right? And for them, we have to coach them to get into community.

But it's that balance of reflection and action. And for me, leading from the well is about spending that time for my spiritual practices and disciplines to get stronger within so that I can lead from a healthy place. As a coach, we talk about leading from the inside out and that's what leading well is about. There's a lot of gold in this here. I mean, I love the reflection, the balance of reflection and action. I think that is incredibly important because, you know, we, and you talk about the go, go, go of us, of even introverts who go, go, go, face the same outcomes of extroverts that go, go, go. Yes, yes, yes. And maybe even magnified a little bit because what do we end up doing? We hit the wall and we start getting burnt out.

And if we don't break that paradigm or interrupt that pattern of go, go, go with going to the well and finding that reflection and taking new action, we're going to burn out. And we're going to take, like the unhappy little fairies, we're going to spread our unhappiness all over the place. And there's nothing worse than that person who sprinkles misery around your company. Right. Exactly. They haven't been to the well.

Or the way I like to also say it is they, we have to take a break from our work so that our work doesn't break us. Ooh, I love that. That's quotable, right? It's in the book, like Prego, it's in there. Right on. I mean, that's, that's incredible. I want to ask you, where can our audience go to connect with you and purchase a copy of your book? Yes, I'd love for them. First of all, they can purchase the book from any of the booksellers. It's published by Baker Books, and their site has it, Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, all the major booksellers. I'd love for them to connect with me on my site, drjeanporterking.com, drjeanporterking.com. And I'm sure you'll have how my name is spelled. And on social media, you know, especially Instagram, I try to daily put out quote graphs

or pictures or videos. And starting on Wednesdays, I'm going to start having leading well Wednesdays and give a little talk about some concept of leading well. Awesome. You know, leading well is not a one-time thing. Everybody just can't go to a seminar or just listen to this podcast and go, all right, check. I am done. I'm leading well. It's a constant reminder. We always have to be waking up to lead, waking up to holistically be well and find good ways to do that. It's like Zig Ziglar always talked about. Leadership is like bathing. It's not something you do, you know, every now and then you got to do it every day. Yeah, exactly. So Dr. Jean, I have a question I ask every one of our amazing guests, and I'd love to get your answer on this. I'm sure it will continue to help us go to the well and reflect

wonderfully upon ourselves. How do you start your day with a win in order to lead well? Awesome. I was waiting for that question, Adam. I start with going to the well. And on an ideal day, I can carve out the time that I can have my prayer time. I do Bible devotions from the YouVersion app and put on some good worship music that just kind of steals my spirit and heart. And I start doing also some yoga stretches so that I have that integration of mind as I'm reading some kind of devotion, spirit and the prayer time, the worship time, and then the stretching time. That would be an ideal day. Depending on client activities and things of that nature, I also will get to the gym. And I live in Chicago. And so I can only do this part of it when the weather is good, but I'm a distance cyclist. So I, and I don't get to always go the distance anymore because it takes time,

but on a good day, I'll do a 30 minute ride and get seven to eight miles in for that activity. So I'll switch block between the gym and the cyclist, but I've got, and even then if I'm on the elliptical, I'll have my worship or high energy music on that keeps that rhythm going. So yes. Dr. Jean, you're an inspiration to us all. I mean, it's about all the time leadership, not sometimes leadership and that leading from within. Remember everybody, you have permission to go to the well. Use that permission regularly. Dr. Jean Porter King, author, business leader, board certified coach, and just a great person to talk to. Thank you so much for being on Start With A Win. Thank you, Adam, for having me.

Thanks for joining us on Start With A Win. Be sure to like and subscribe to this episode and share it with your friends. Also, be sure to check out Adam on YouTube at Adam Canto CEO, as well as on all the social media platforms. And don't forget, start with a win.