Episode Transcript.

What’s up? What’s up? What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys, welcome back to five minute rants. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And welcome back to the show predicated on the journey of life and business. Hey guys real quick, if you know somebody whose life would be better by listening to the show, would you partner with me in changing lives and share it with them? I appreciate it.

Well, today, I really want to talk about how you actually lead people. And especially within a business or, I mean, to be honest, this is this is everyday life, okay? It’s not just within a company. It’s cool. You got kids, you’re raising kids, you’re interacting with your little league softball team, because you’re coaching them, how do you actually help in lead people help them move forward.

One, you really treat them for who they can become and who they will become versus who they are today. But then the main point I want to talk about today is really being empathetic towards them, there’s oftentimes a large lack of empathy in leadership. It’s especially within the corporate world, there’s a huge lack of empathy. It’s about numbers. It’s about money. It’s about this. And there’s a whole slew of reasons for that. I’m not going to get into all the unintended consequences and the intended consequences. But What I want to talk about is this, if you want to become a great leader, you actually have to care about people. Right?

No good leader, no good leader dislikes. People, no good leader hates people. Okay, you have to care about people. Here’s why. Because the people that you’re leading, have partnered with you to help create, cultivate, and deliver the vision that you have said we’re going to accomplish. Are you the means of production as a leader? No, not always. And so if you think about that, they’ve partnered with you, they’ve trusted their future to you, and you’ve trusted their future to them. And at that point, why would you not be like a team.

So a good example of empathy would be this, you have somebody on your team who keeps underperforming, they miss benchmarks, they do this, and instead of just being like, cool, right, you’re missing and messing up, and you’re keep screwing up. So if you don’t get your act together, you know, we need all this stuff met, we’re gonna let you go, a place of empathy would be like, Hey, what’s going on? This isn’t like you. And then you actually have a real conversation with a real person. Right? Not a team member, a real person, not a employee, a real person. See, the higher up you go in leadership, the more you are now required to serve people. Your whole job as a leader is based off of serving, it’s having a servant’s heart, it’s servant leadership. And it is really based off of those things.

And if you’re not going to have empathy, to care about what’s going on in somebody else’s life, and treat them like a person, you’re not going to have any loyalty, you’re just gonna have distress, cool, you treat me like a number and treat you like a number, it really goes to that law of sowing and reaping. Whenever you sell, you’re going to reap if you treat people like numbers. And if you treat people like performance statistics, you’re going to have that thrown right back at you. Cool, awesome. Where’s my raise, I performed this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they don’t care about your budget, they don’t care about your vision, they don’t care about how you’re personally doing that day, right? They don’t care about any of that crap, because you don’t.

And it’s interesting, because whatever you care about, really begins to change the people around you, too. So it is it is so important. I think as a leadership, as it’s so important, when you are in leadership, to actually care about the people you’re leading, not just the goal, it is very easy to just stop, like, we’ve got to accomplish this, we got to accomplish this, but you’ll never actually accomplish it without the team members. There’s an old African proverb that says if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far go with others. But if you’re gonna go with others, you actually have to care about the others on your team, the others who are on the journey with you, they may not hold the same title. And I’m air quoting, because titles are bull crap. In my opinion, I can talk about that later on why, but you actually have to care about them, because they have chosen to be your partners along this journey. They’ve chosen to have your back and you have their back.

And crap does not roll downhill crap rolls uphill to leadership. And so if stuff sucks below, and there’s bad performance, or there’s bad culture, there’s toxicity, it’s your fault as a leader, you’re the one who’s allowed that and cultivated that whether you did intentionally or unintentionally doesn’t matter. And so now the thing is, are you going to actually help and serve and do what’s required to really help people, the best part of life is serving others, investing in others and making them better than yourself, making them greater than you that is the best part of life. It’s better than money. It’s better than anything else, because you actually had real change and impact in somebody’s life. Other than cool, here’s your paycheck.

Anyways guys, I’m out of time. I hope that was good, to me this is a topic I really like talking about. I catch you later peace