This week on The WarriorU Podcast, Trent and Bram are joined by Executive Coach of 15 years, Greg Layton, to discuss his experience creating profitable and progressive businesses through transforming their leadership. By the end of the episode, you will be equipped with a range of leadership, resilience and performance frameworks designed to optimise your management mindset and behaviors, and have the tools and inspiration to take charge of your own career and professional development.
A Glimpse of the Guest
Name: Greg Layton
What he does: As Founder of the executive coaching organisation, Chief Maker, Greg helps senior executives to champion transformation and growth to achieve peak performance and business transformation. Greg is also the Founder of The Council of Chiefs – a private forum for CEOs to share their wisdom, strategies and resources – and Co-founder of The Universal Man, a profit-for-purpose community of men who want to be more, do more, and create a better world. Along with his long list of professional achievements, Greg is also the author of bestselling book, Chief Maker, host of the top-ranking podcast ‘The Inner Chief’, and has even ran the 250km Ultra Marathons across the Gobi and Atacama Deserts.
Greg online:
The Chief Maker | Greg on LinkedIn | Greg on Instagram
Food for Thought:
[36:30] “What I’m sick of is everyone putting entrepreneurs on a pedestal, like every person that goes out on their own makes a gazillion – it’s not how it works. It’s really challenging out there and it’s very lonely. Almost everyone underestimates how hard it is to start and run your own business….but they also underestimate how much more they could be doing where they are.”
Top Tips from this episode
Greg’s definition of leadership/a ‘true chief’: [22:41] “Leaders bold lead change, inspire their people and leave a legacy.”
Greg’s five pillars of positive leadership:
- Mission: You understand where you and your team are going, how you are going to get there, and who is doing what.
- People: You have the right people in the right roles with the right development plan, and you are actively involved in coaching them.
- Culture: “The window to the team’s soul.” You have in place the standards of behaviour, rituals and traditions, language and narrative of the business.
- Tools: Your team have the right scoreboards, metrics, software, hardware and mechanisms for feedback to do their job each day.
- Execution: You have in place the operating rhythm, risk management, review process and business acumen needed to enable people to make the right decisions over time.
Building resilience: As a coach who has worked with a wide range of businesses in various phases of development – from toxic to game changers – Greg says resilience is key to corporate life. To help develop a leader’s grit, Greg has developed the ‘Resilience Playbook’ – a process of self-reflection that allows individuals to adapt to change and stress:
- Identify the daily triggers that set you on a negative path.
- Work out the root cause of why you feel this way.
- Develop a mantra that helps put you in a positive mindset and a clear action that sets you down a more positive path.
The high performance lifestyle framework: Prepare > perform > recover > review. A high performance lifestyle allows you to create a business environment that not only optimises your busines growth potential, but also protects the mental health of yourself and your team. While most companies understand the preparation and performance aspects, says Greg, may overlook the recovery and review phases, to their own detriment. “If you don’t recover, you burnout and can’t make good decisions. If you don’t review, you’re still in your growth.”
Episode Highlights
Developing ‘intrapreneurship’: At [36:24], Greg discusses his passion for ‘intrapreneurship’ – or the difference you can make inside an established business. In direct opposition to the modern-day obsession with entrepreneurship, Greg says most people don’t suit the pressures and challenges of making their own way externally. Instead, he suggests “…thinking about your career as a professional services team of one and your boss is your number one customer.” Take ownership of your career path through mastery and self- and professional-development, and you’ll “…earn the right to do other things and take other opportunities” – from pay rises to promotions.
How to learn a skill quickly: At [9:00], Greg talks about his time learning martial arts with Shaolin Kung Fu Monks in the remote mountains of China. Here, he perfected the art of learning new skills. Rather than copying the martial arts moves from his Masters, he embodied them to learn the skill twice as fast. “You almost micro-muscle move exactly as they would move. You’re picking up within your own muscles and DNA exactly what they’re doing. So, when you kick, you not only perform the kick, but you kick it like they kicked it – in their own style.”
Top quotes
[33:30] “A lot of the time, the things we get most annoyed at, are the things we are most passionate about.”
[39:50] “Career ownership precedes career victory.”
[40:57] “Your ideal role should be a combination of what you’re good at, what you sort of love doing, and that has a customer that’s going to pay for it.”