00:00:00 Thanks for joining me on episode 691 of the inspired stewardship. Yeah. Hi, I'm Ella Hawkins, author of cracking the leadership code. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent and your treasures to live out your calling. Having the ability to lead well is key.
00:00:26 And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this, the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott Mader, we oftentimes don't think about what are we doing to create these emotional experiences that wow them. And what we want to do is create the blight. Wow. That people go, Oh my gosh, this is the best place in the world to work.
00:00:56 I can't imagine working somewhere else. So an example would be first day on the job, what are you doing so that people come away at the end of that experience. So that's a peak moment that whole day as a people. Welcome. And thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be,
00:01:18 then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling in the inspired stewardship podcast. Cool. Learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world Today's interview with Alan. He shares with you what a peak moment is and why you should care. A lot. Also talks with you about making a dent in the universe.
00:01:49 And a lunch also shares the legacy who wants to leave in the world. And lots more. One reason I like to bring you great interviews. Like the one you're going to hear today is because of the power in learning from others. Another great way to learn from others is through reading books. But if you're like most people today, you find it hard to find the time to sit down and read.
00:02:12 And that's why today's podcast is brought to you by audible, go to inspired stewardship.com/audible to sign up and you can get a 30 day free trial. There's over 180,000 titles to choose from. And instead of reading, you can listen to your way to learn from some of the greatest minds out there. That's inspired stewardship.com/audible to get your free trial and listen to great books.
00:02:41 The same way you're listening to this podcast. Ellen Hudkins is a consultant trainer, coach and speaker around the complex topic of leadership. His recent book cracking the leadership code three secrets to building strong leaders was released earlier this year, over his 20 plus year career LN has led over 2000 groups in 25 countries, including groups at Walmart, Pfizer city group, GE state farm IBM GM and Microsoft Alon has designed and facilitated seminars on many leadership topics,
00:03:16 including team building, conflict management, communication, peak performance, innovation, engagement, and change. Alon also serves on the faculty of Duke corporate education and is published in many of the most prominent business and leadership sources, including fast company Forbes, inc, and more welcome to the show. And, and those are both forms of feedback once just internal and one's external.
00:03:45 So they're both valuable. Um, from that same point of view, one of the things that, and again, listeners will laugh as they hear this. Cause I preach all the time. The idea of if you are not reflecting on your learning and, and you know, constantly do that plan, execute, reflect, revise, plan, execute, reflect,
00:04:05 provide. If you just simply lived your life that way. If, if we all did all the time, it'd be amazing what we could do. Now, that being said, you don't always, you can't always do that. You're not always perfect at it. We screw it up too. Um, all of us do, I don't care how,
00:04:20 how good you are. You, you mess it up, but the more often you can do that, the better it, it gets whatever it is. You know, it literally could be anything in, in that, in that Blake, whether that's communicating with your spouse, whether that's leading your company, whether that's, you know, recording a record,
00:04:38 I don't care at all. And also Scott, I'm really excited to be here with you today. So one of the topics that you share in the book is this concept of peak moments. Would you unpack a little bit about what is a peak moment and how can these make a company a better place to work and impact, you know, our company,
00:05:00 our employees, our customers. Sure. Yeah. So the idea of peak moments comes from the idea of the experience economy. So we live in an experience economy. So all of us as customers know about the customer experience and employees have the employee experience. And we talked earlier about removing friction, you know, and I talk about the customer experience and we ask,
00:05:23 when I do work around this, I ask people, okay, give me an example of a company that's made it a really good customer experience. And the company that always comes up of course, is Amazon because everyone knows what one click means and it becomes the benchmark for everything else. Right? And so we think about the experience and experience. Isn't just,
00:05:40 you know, you don't just buy a product and you don't just buy a service and experience is actually over the course of time. It's all the touch points that you have with a company, whether it's finding out about them on their website, like how easy is their website to navigate finding the product? Let's say it's product in this case, instead of a service find the Product that you want,
00:05:58 that, you know, your ability to order, it can be ordered with one click or two or 20, whatever it might be and then delivery and then the quality of it, and then how they follow up and personalizing it. So realizing that in the life cycle of an experience, not all moments are weighted as equally as other ones. So I actually remember learning about this.
00:06:18 I got my start thinking about customer experience because back when I was in college, I used to wait tables in the summer. And a funny thing about waiting tables, you know, it managing it is you have to manage the Diner's experience and not all moments are created equally. So for example, when a diners come to sit at the table, the expectation is there'll be greeted by a server within 60 to 90 seconds,
00:06:44 right? So that's a 69. You have a window of opportunity. And that if you come in that time, you suddenly, you meet their expectations about hi, welcome to our restaurant, yada, yada, yada, right? Do all that stuff. Now, if people know that that's where they want promptness yet notice, imagine you just finished eating the last bite of your entree and you've just finished.
00:07:05 And you put that and you put your fork and knife down. And someone in SWAT came by and picked up your plate. You're like, Whoa, Whoa, slow down. So notice how those aren't. In fact, people will be happy to linger for a certain amount of time after the heat. So that first 60, 90 seconds is a different,
00:07:22 it's a different experience, right? It's a different moment in time. So I bring up that example because as we think about employees in the workplace, we oftentimes don't think about what are we doing to create these emotional experiences that wow them, because what we want to do is create the light and wow that people go, Oh my gosh, this is the best place in the world to work.
00:07:42 I can't imagine working somewhere else. So an example would be first day on the job. No. How, what are you doing so that people come away at the end of that experience? So that's a peak moment. That whole day is a peak moment because people are porous. Everyone, you know, it's like opening day, everyone wants to believe they pick the winner.
00:08:01 I was like, wait, what are you doing to support that? And every little thing you do either adds or subtracts to their perception of what you are. So, so what are you doing to greet them? Did you make them feel welcome? Did you give them an orientation that made sense? Or did you run them past 90 people who they'll never know to deal with?
00:08:21 Or did they have, I mean, I mean, in my book, I tell this story about this guy who ended up quitting the company after three days, but like literally, like he had it, the first thing he had to do, first of all, the person who hired him didn't show up. And then he had to spend two hours on line security to get a badge,
00:08:36 you know, and then he had to go upstairs and wait for someone from it to get them a laptop. And that didn't work and it was everything. Again, you have to think of the thing. And you're like, my gosh, this was the worst mistake. And he literally lasted two days before he quit. And that actually is not that uncommon.
00:08:49 So I bring this up because if we can start to, first of all, that just takes this metacognition understanding of, you know, getting out of your own. This is empathy, right? It's stepping into the shoes of your employees, what are they going through? And if you were them, what would make you go wow. And starting to build some more of those wow.
00:09:07 Experiences into that whole process. So that's what peak experiences are all about. So One of the things that I ask everybody is to share some of their top resources or principles, ideas that allow us as, as leaders, as people to really impact the world and make a dent on the universe is, is how I've always loved to phrase it. So what are some of those ideas or resources that you would share with folks if they really want to impact the world?
00:09:40 Cool. You know, I love the idea of denting a dent in the universe because I don't know when I first heard that I used to think, Oh, that's big, but the cool thing is like, we all get to make our own dents and you know, it's hard. And so the thing is make your own den. And I think in order for you to make your own dent,
00:09:56 you need to be clear on who you are and why you do what you do. So the first place that I would counsel anyone, if you want to make a dent in the universe is do some work around clarifying what are your own values? What's your own vision, what's your own mission for what you're trying to do, because without that, you might spend a lot of time,
00:10:17 energy denting away. It's something that actually turns out to be that wasn't your dent in the first place, you know, seriously. I mean, it's amazing how many people like coach now who might be mid-career even late career professionals to go, you know what? I kind of got into this because my dad was in this field and I thought I wanted to,
00:10:34 and they're now 60 years old and they're going, wow, I wish I had done something different. So yeah. Or to success on what it was on the wrong wall. Yeah, exactly. So it's getting really clear. And that also, when you have the clarity around your mission, your vision, your values, then it makes decision making a lot easier because suddenly you're going,
00:10:55 yeah, I could do this, but that would get them. I'll give you some examples from my own life. So one of the things that was important to me when, when I had kids with my wife was, you know, because of the work I do, I had a choice because the work that I do is if I do more of it,
00:11:09 I make more money. Like the more days I'm out working with clients, the more money I make. Well, there's always more clients. There's always more money, but there's not always more time. So when we had kids, I made, we made some real conscious choices. I'm going to choose time over money. So when both kids were born,
00:11:23 it took three months off because I'm self employed, unpaid. So it was like, that was, that was the choice. I mean, budgeted for it, but I would never trade that back in a heartbeat. You know, another thing that we have for our family is adventure and new experiences and growth and learning. So we made a choice and two years ago we moved abroad.
00:11:43 We lived in Europe and now there was finally before we got on there. Um, we moved back last week. We were living in the Netherlands for two years. Like that is an experience that is ultimately priceless me, you know? And so it's just finding out what are the things that are going to motivate you. So I had start with your dent.
00:12:00 I would definitely start figuring out what's the dent that you want to make. And then once you figure that out, figuring out who might be denting in the same neighborhood, because I think another thing we tend to think is that, Oh, I have to figure this out on my own. Please don't figure it on your own. Somebody else. Yes,
00:12:15 you are unique and wonderful and lovable. And someone else is probably doing something enough similar that their success has left clues. So try to figure out who they are and what they're doing and learn from them and ask for help. I know it's amazing. Um, one of my mentors, the Dan pink, you might know Dan pink, he's got, he's working on a new book about regret and one of the biggest,
00:12:37 and he's doing this whole world regret project where people can go online. I think it's called world regret.com. Anyway, you can look it up and you can actually plug in your answers. Cause he's, he's, he's getting research for his new book, but I was just reading through, he's got regrets from people all over the world. And one of the biggest regrets I've seen numerous times as I've seen individual contributors,
00:12:56 they said one of my big regrets is I didn't ask for help sooner. And I think a lot of us it's the ego. It gets in the way. So I'd say those are a couple of, if you do those two things, you'll be, you'll be in good shape to start denting in the right place with the right people. Yeah. I don't know if you've ever seen it,
00:13:12 but there's a book called the, uh, top five regrets of the dying. It was written by a hospice nurse. And she talks about the thing that, you know, asking all of these people who are basically, you know, on their death bed literally, um, and asking them what their regrets were. And of course, none of them are things about I regretted.
00:13:32 I didn't go to work more often or I didn't make more money. It's all about relationships and people and connection. Um, you know, that that's, that's the things that we miss. So similar, similar idea. I'll have to look for that with, uh, with, uh, Dan pink. I do, I do love his stuff. So,
00:13:49 so Elaine, if you could travel into the far future, now we're going to ask the easy questions we've been given the hard ones all, all, all week. Uh, if you could travel into the far future and look back on your life, what impact do you hope that you've had on the world? Well, I'll go back to the question we just talked about,
00:14:08 which is, you know, so again, getting clear on your values and your mission and your vision. So I have a very clear mission. I've had it since 1994 and it hasn't changed a lot. So my mission is to create a vibrant and alive world like kindling, the fire brilliance and people. And so if I look back in my life,
00:14:22 my, I would be happy if I have kindled the world where there are more vibrant, alive, people who have access to the resources to make their own lives, their own family's lives and their own communities lives a better place to live and work in play. I like that. I like that mission. So what's coming next for you. As you continue down this path,
00:14:44 you know, you've got the book out now, uh, what, what's kind of your, your next step on this, this journey towards doing, towards making a more Vibrant community. Yeah. So right now, so yeah, the book came out earlier this year, um, and what I'm doing right now is I'm working with a company we're actually,
00:15:01 we are, we've taken the book content and we've put it into a 30 day online challenge that involves formation and positive psychology. And it will be running our, our first cohort of the 30 day leadership challenge in October. So we're working on that right now. It's just kind of exciting. Um, and, uh, yeah, there'll be more details coming out about that in the next few weeks.
00:15:24 And I'm also, uh, working to create, uh, we've taken the content from the book and turning it into an online product at this point live, it won't be like taped, but a live immersion leadership experience to take these principles and give people some specific coaching to do so that's the next step is basically taking the principles of all of this and bringing it more to life for people because leadership I'll tell you,
00:15:49 it's a lot easier to read about or write about than it is to live and do absolutely agreed. You can follow a lens on LinkedIn. He's Elaine Huskins. It's spelled a L a I N H U N K I N S. Or you can find him at his website with the same spelling, that.com you can find out more about the book@crackingtheleadershipcode.com. Of course I'll have links to all of that over in the show notes as well.
00:16:25 Is there anything else you'd like to share with the listener? Oh, I, first of all, I want to thank you Scott, for the great conversation today. And I would say that, I mean, the key to moving forward with any of this stuff is just a little bit of action every day. It's not about trying to do it all.
00:16:44 It's not about sending a new year's resolution. I'm going to do assault. It's just, we talked about really about the power of removing the friction and creating some habits. So creating habits that focus on development, learning, and growth and doing those things consistently over time, you know, oftentimes leaders, we talk about words like inspiring charismatic. I would take consistency over any of those other words any day of the week.
00:17:09 So be consistent and take action. And you will start moving in directions. You might not get there in a month or even in six months, but it's amazing. You do that over the course of a year, two years, five years. It's amazing how much things will change for you. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast, as a subscriber and listener,
00:17:45 we challenge you to not just sit back and passively, but Act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you enjoyed this episode, please, please do us a favor. Go over to inspired stewardship.com/itunes rate. All one word iTunes rate. It'll take you through how to leave a rating and review and how to make sure you're subscribed to the podcast so that you can get every episode as it comes out in your feed until next time,
00:18:24 invest your time, your talent and your treasures, develop your influence and impact the world.