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Excerpt
A lot of people and businesses have been shaken up by this pandemic. I want to know how you’ve been leading your team through this. Can you share a little bit about that?
Leaders should show up and be accessible and available. They should not hide or run. They should make it clear that if there’s anything that they’re team needs, he is there.
According to Adam, this is what your people, your customers, your stockholders, and your whole organization needs. They want to know that you will be there for them.
Adam has been in a lot of interviews since the Coronavirus crisis hit. And that led him to conclude that at the moment, everyone wants to know how to lead during a moment of crisis.
In almost all of them, Adam would emphasize three points.
First, he thinks that leaders should be trustworthy. They should be honest, truthful, and transparent. Leaders need credibility. When leaders say something, everyone in the organization believes them. Everyone in the team should know that when the leader says something, it is truthful.
Second, leaders need to be communicative. They need to be out in front. In the current situation of the world, it’s very easy to hide under the covers. To duck and run.
As they say, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. Now is the time for the tough to get going.
Lastly, leaders need to be flexible. They need to be nimble like every entrepreneur. One of the first things you learn as an entrepreneur is the importance of managing change.
When people have jobs, things can be kind of steady and stable. You’re doing almost the same things every day.
As an entrepreneur, you’re constantly managing change. As a leader, especially one in a moment of crisis, you have to be highly prepared to adapt and pivot on a moment’s notice because the environment that you were in yesterday can be completely different today and tomorrow.
The only way that people can adapt is by having a mindset that is open to change.
How has your mentorship, personal growth, and coaching helped your leadership style?
Adam has his own podcast named Thirty Minute Mentors where he talks one on one with some of America’s most insightful people about leadership.
He has always believed in the power of mentorship. He has been a huge beneficiary of great mentorship because he has had many great mentors in his life.
Adam also mentions a concept that he calls “Mini-mentors”. It’s something that he has written and spoken about.
Mini mentors aren’t like the traditional mentors that you go out to lunch with once a month or someone that has a lasting and powerful impact that you think about regularly.
They’re people who you might talk to once a year or every other year, but they’re someone that can add enormous value to you in that one interaction. This is what Adam tries to do in his show, the Thirty Minute Mentors. He brings the best possible network of mentors to listeners because that was invaluable to him and his success as a leader.
Everyone learns differently. Everyone develops differently. Some people learn by picking up 300-page books and breezing through them. That was never the best way for Adam, but there were some books that he loved reading such as those by David Halberstam and Malcolm Gladwell.
The best way for Adam to learn has always been to pick up the phone or meet someone for lunch and just pick their brain. That’s the style of learning that he is trying to bring to his audience.
His podcast is usually set to last at most thirty minutes. However, one of his challenges is that there, he interviews literally the most successful people that he can think of.
