How leading with love builds higher-performing teams

Just that statement of what that sales meeting was to you right there. That’s leading with love. Yeah. It’s not harping on them to say, you need to sell more homes to feel more significant. It’s, let me tell you a story about the difference between success and significance, and let me tell you when I don’t feel significant, and let me show you that I am as vulnerable as anybody else is, and I have challenges too. But I work through them.

Yes. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where I bring a decade of experience working in some of the most influential companies in tech to help you navigate the ins and outs of being a people manager from conflicts to feedback, to delegating and more. We will leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it and everything in between. Doesn’t matter if you’re a new manager looking for some tips or a seasoned manager looking up their game.

Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. Let’s go. Let’s go, let’s go. I know you’re here because you want to be a better manager, but I also know it’s often easier than done. That’s why I put together a scorecard of 20 things that you can do this month and every month to show up better for your team as a manager, from positive feedback to recognition, to honoring those working norms that we know we gotta do, but sometimes forget.

This scorecard serves as a checklist and accountability buddy to remind you of all those things you gotta do to be a great manager. Download your copy today at liagarvin.com/scorecard. Welcome back to the show today. I am so excited to have Chris Hartley with me. Chris is the VP of sales at K Hovnanian Homes and is a children book author. So we are gonna talk about that book quite a bit today. And to share a little bit about Chris, he has nearly two decades of new home sales experience in various roles across the industry.

In addition to his current role as VP of Sales at K Hovnanian Homes in Dallas Fort Worth, Chris is a certified trainer for the Texas Real Estate Commission, frequent contributor to industry leading publications, a guest on numerous industry podcasts, and this podcast today, and a highly sought out public speaker. Chris has worked with both public and private home builders across the us. Chris has won numerous awards on a local, regional, and national level, including the inaugural Gold Award at the Nationals for one to watch through the National Association of Home Builders.

Chris’s latest adventure was completing a full Iron Man triathlon on behalf of the National Angels, a foster care organization Chris is passionate about, as well as his complete first children’s book series in 2022. Chris and I met a few months ago at the Intrapreneur Summit, put on by the wonderful Abbie Mirata, who was also a guest on this podcast, and I was immediately drawn to how freaking awesome he was as a public speaker and storyteller, but also on his message of the importance for leaders leading from a place of love, and especially right now where there’s so much stress and angst and uncertainty going on in the workplace, this could not be more important, and that is what I’m so excited to talk with Chris about today.

Welcome Chris to the show. Thank you. I appreciate you having me. I’m so excited to be on the show. So let’s dive right in leading with Love. You know, you talk about this a lot, which I’m guessing people interpret this in a lot of different ways. It could mean different things to different people. What is leading with love mean to you and and how can leaders model this? Well, you know what’s so interesting about that question, and I had a situation here recently where it made me acknowledge the fact that not everybody loves to be led.

With love and it’s interesting because you would think that you would rather be led with love than led with fear or anger or intimidation or all of the other types of leadership that there are, that all of us have some sort of a story about how a leader treated us. That actually taught us more than, than sometimes the good messages teach us, right? But I’ve recognized that depending upon how you’ve been raised, how you came up in the industry, no matter what industry it may be, whatever manager culture you’ve been involved in, it can very much dictate how you choose to receive management acknowledgement or training, or how you are gonna recognize the fact of what does and does not work for you.

So what I’ve realized is that leading with love does not always work for all people. Mm-hmm. Now, what I will tell you on the flip side is, Is if leading with love doesn’t work for you, you’re probably not gonna work for my team. Uh, and that’s okay. Right? I mean, as managers we have the ability and the responsibility to put the best people on our team. And if the way that we lead works for 98% of the people on our team, uh, then the 2% probably just need to go find excellence someplace else because it’s just not gonna work here because I’ve recognized that.

Although I’ve looked at my style of management many a times and said, does it? Does it work? I feel that it does. It’s proven over 20 years that it does, and I’m not gonna change who I ultimately am because it’s very, very difficult to change who you are inherently, I believe. So it kind of is one of those things, if you want on my team, you’re gonna be led with love and you’re gonna be all things love, so to speak.

So let’s just hope it works for you. Yeah, and I think for the most part, there’s a lot of evidence that leading with love and empathy and compassion and. And, and, and these things that used to be seen as soft skills but now are really clearly understood as power, skills, and leadership skills, that that’s actually how to drive the highest motivation on teams. And I think when you study things like psychological safety and motivation and, and engagement, this feeling that I am seen, I, I matter, my manager, my leader cares about me.

This is going to get you through all of this uncertainty and all the change and all of the ups and downs and, and leave you feeling resilient if you do have to make a change. I’d like to know what you mean by leading with love again, I think like, What does that sound? Because I think if people think it means you’re soft or don’t have high expectations, or it means you’re gonna go easy on people, that’s not what you mean.

And, and that’s why I love what you talk about here, because I. This is actually how you get the most results out of people and how you get the highest performing teams. Yeah. There’s never, I mean, my management style is not to run around hugging and kissing on people. That’s not, that’s definitely not what leading with love means. And you know, you work for a publicly traded company and definitely not what it means, cuz you’re gonna get, get all sorts of trouble with that.

Uh, but leading with love is just where you put your heart first and you put their heart first. Yeah. Right. And so one of my sales managers, her name is Meredith Chapman, and she has this coined this phrase called the heartbeat check. And I think, and I don’t think I know for a fact that where she is going with that, because she’s adapted, the mentality of leading with love too, is that she can understand and see things within her team before they will ever acknowledge.

The things that are bothering them. She has this amazing Spidey sense of knowing if something was going on at work. That means ultimately something is going on someplace else that’s affecting their performance, and she wants them to understand that she’s there, for them to accept it for what it is, help work them through it, and then help get them elevated back to where they need to be at work because the same amount of leave home at home.

Let’s be real. That is, that is not possible. We all carry a ton of emotions on us every single day, and the stuff that’s bothering us at home bothers us at work because it’s hard to turn it off and vice versa. If we’re having a situation at work that’s bothering us, it’s very difficult to not take it home and put it onto our significant other, our spouse or whatever it may be. So leading with love to me is having the relationship with my team that I can be extremely.

Vulnerable and open on how I feel and how they feel. So let me give you an example. I just ran a sales rally for my team and uh, for, and I’m in home building. So we do sales rallies or sales meetings once a month. We get the entire team together. We do about 800 homes a year, which is considered to be a good size home builder. And we get together and we just talk about. Really what’s going on in our, in our world and our lives.

I always try to make my meetings because I follow the leading with love philosophy. I try to make them very engaging, very inspirational, motivational, and so one of the things that I had talked about was success and significance, right? Success is for the individual. Significance is for others. Now in sales, Especially in home building. The market has been white hot for like three years. Ever since Covid began. People were buying homes left and right, and then the interest rate shut up over 7% and the market really tightened up.

Well. What happened is sales stopped happening and the sales team was no longer having success on an individual basis, but what was really hurting them is that they were not feeling significant. In other parts of their life because they no longer were helping families get into a home they were no longer providing for their own families, whatever it may be. They, they really struggled with this whole feeling. Well, I myself started thinking about this and I said, okay, one of the things that I struggle personally is I constantly have the need to feel significant.

And I think that’s really where the leading with love philosophy came from for me, is that if I could help other people succeed and feel significant, then I could feel significant and that. Made me feel a tremendous amount of significance. Well, we all have these barriers that come across us that make us feel less than right? They give us insecurities. And so we had a really phenomenal sales meeting this last month, and I have a jar, and on the jar it says, let it go.

And what it is is that each individual card, Has let it go written on it, and then you get to write on the inside. We didn’t put names on it, we dropped it in the jar and we forgot about it. Now, I had received this as a gift and I actually happened to receive it as a gift from, from Meredith, my sales manager, uh, back in December, 2020, so some time ago. And it was when I was in a pretty dark, dark spot personally, and I was feeling pretty insignificant in a lot of aspects of my life.

And so she gave me this gift and I didn’t quite understand it at the time. And she said, you know, put your, put your frustrations, put your anger, put your. Beliefs of not being good enough on these cards, put it in the jar and then let it go. Now, when I was prepping myself for this sales meeting, because things will trigger me to think of either a speaking topic or, or a blog or whatever it may be that I wanna just express and share.

And so I presented to the team and I put up this jar and I said, uh, I wanna read to you where I felt insignificant. And I opened up that jar and I I, true story. That was the first time I opened that jar and put those things. It’s the first time I’ve ever actually read them. And I showed my vulnerability to my team on a personal and professional level of things that I was struggling with somebody that leads them on a daily basis.

And the outpour of emotion that was there with the team was I. Beyond words and everybody started writing down things that they were personally struggling with at the time. And then before we left the sales meeting, everybody put their Let it Go cards back in the jar and we put them away. And we recognize that that is at that moment where we started working on ourselves. And really where that came from is, is, uh, another one of my sales managers is training for a half marathon.

We all run these marathons and half marathons together. And I had asked the question, you know, are you a runner? And for the longest time he would say, absolutely not. I’m not a runner. I’m not a runner. And then I asked him, are you a runner? And he said, I am. And I said, well, I am are two of the most powerful words you can, right? So you are a mom, you are a wife, you are an author, you are a badass, right?

You’re all these things. Or you can say, I am a failure. I am insignificant. I am less than worthy. What follows I am is an extremely powerful statement. And the easiest thing we can all do in life is give up. So what I’m trying to do is let’s put the, let’s put the give up on the, on the, let it go. Yeah. Cards. Let’s put it in the jar and let’s move on. That, just that statement of what that sales meeting was to you right there.

That’s leading with love. Yeah. It’s not harping on them to say, you need to sell more homes to feel more significant. It’s, let me tell you a story about the difference between success and significance, and let me tell you when I don’t feel significant and let me show you that I am as vulnerable. As anybody else is, and I have challenges too, but I work through them. Yes. And as we can work through them together, a hell of a lot easier than we can individually and our sales have just shot through the roof.

Now, I’m not saying because of that sales meeting, our sales shot through the roof, but you know what? It made them feel a lot more comfortable with the fact that things are not always perfect and that it’s okay to work through your progress. Yes. That’s what Leading with Love is. Oh my God. Everything about that. I mean, I think first of all, this is a masterclass on how to operationalize and implement psychological safety. Literally, when I talk about psychological safety and trainings and workshops, at first it can feel abstract, but the more you talk about actually, here is how I did that.

So I love this example. Any manager listening, use it in your in your meetings, but also model it yourself. Share. Here’s where I felt stuck. Here’s a piece of feedback that was really hard for me to hear that I’m working through. Because the more you model that, the more, it’s not just talk, but it’s actions. And so in this, in the other piece of that as you talk about is building relationships through teams. How are you supposed to have hard conversations, give feedback when the person thinks, well, this person doesn’t care about me.

They don’t know what my goals are. They don’t know what I want. What I love about this is it puts, like you say, it puts into practice how to really walk the talk. And build that relationship, have that trust, volunteer first to be vulnerable, to share you. Also, by doing that, you really set the threshold. And when people are talking about psychological safety and having conversations around, well, how do I know what to share? Is this gonna, you know, the manager has to set the tone.

And when you set that floor, like, Ooh, we’re gonna go real deep. Then people show up. If you’re a manager and you say, something that was really hard for me was when we didn’t hit our sales numbers. Like that’s, that tells your team, oh, we’re not going really deep here. It’s not safe for me to, to, to go deep, to feel these things. Instead, when you shared, Hey, this is something that really, really got to me, I was really down.

Now people are comfortable showing up and as you said, what we keep seeing in all the research around psychological safety, around around engagement is. That the results are better because people are going to make mistakes. They’re gonna feel the feels either way. If you create that space in the form for that, then they know, okay, I can, I can talk through, I can shed this, and then I can move forward. So I love that because you it, it absolutely reinforces that high psychological safety results in high performance.

After that conversation you led in this sales meeting, people weren’t like, phew, okay. Like now we can just go like do no work, because everyone’s like, no one cares. I feel more motivated because I feel seen, and that’s the power of that. And all my workshops around building relationships, you know, around feedback around psychological safety. This is what I talk about. Because if you haven’t done this and modeled it first as the manager, no one else is gonna show up because we don’t know.

We don’t know what we can say. What’s okay to say. Yeah. And it’s, um, I mean, you’ve worked at some really high powered organizations, right? And so you’ve, you’ve ran some really high powered teams. When I first got on this team three years ago, I, I took a division that was negative 4 million, right. And, and Dallas is a great place to build homes. There’s no excuse to ever be negative 4 million, right. So where we were positive 40 plus million last year, and we’re gonna do extremely well this year.

But I was brought here to change a culture. Yeah. And to put the right people in place. Well, for me it was the easiest job in the world cuz it’s just who I am. Yeah. So one of the first sales meetings that we had is, you know, our DFW Dallas Fort Worth is so big, you have two different sides of the city. Right. Well, the team for the most part, didn’t know each other. And I wanted to make sure that everybody got to know each other because it was important to me that we were, became, we became a family.

Uh, so much so that I have a saying, one team, one voice, one heart. Right. So, uh, before it was. About 50 different voices and 50 different hearts and 50 different voice messages, and it needed to be just one. And so I had made this really giant board, and I had done this at a previous company I was at, and it worked extremely well. So I knew it was gonna work well here. And on the board.

I said dreams, goals, and motivations. Now, I had sent a message to the team. My sales meetings are always on a Monday. I sent a message to the team that weekend. I said, I want you to bring three photos. Now, they can either be personal photos, they can be magazine photos, they can be whatever you want, as long as it’s a visual. Of what your dreams are, what your motivations are, and what your goals are. And then what we did is I stood up in front of the team and I gave my dreams, goals and motivations, and I played a really great, uh, video clip before they kind of got people in the right frame of mind to, to dig into this.

And I stood up there in front of a team that I didn’t really know that well, and I said, this is who I am and this, this, these are my dreams. These are my goals and these are my motivations. And then my sales managers came up and they followed, and then the rest of the team came up and followed, and it was about a three hour sales meeting. So it’s something you gotta spend a significant amount of time with.

But what’s amazing is the people that opened up and the message that I gave at the end was now we have an entire board of Dreams, goals, and motivations that are individual to you. Now they’re individual to us now. It’s, it’s a mass dream goal and motivation for all of us. And so what’s cool about that is you got to see people put up there and say, I wanna live in a home, or I just got divorced.

I would love to provide a, a home for my child. And what was cool is that this board was always permanently part of our, our team. And anytime something was achieved off that board, people would tell the whole team about it. And they were like, Hell yes. Yeah. You are a badass. Congratulations for buying your first house, and you started to see things come off that board that were achieved. Yeah. And it was so encouraging to see that people rallied around each other and, and really showed love for the rest of the team.

Because if you provide, as you said, that you provide that safe space, your team. Is incredible. I mean, very rarely do I ever lose somebody off of my team that I didn’t want to lose. Yeah. Right. Now sometimes it happens, but very, very rarely is it a situation where I’m losing people that, that I wanna stay on the team. Yeah. It’s usually very much the opposite and it’s because they found an environment and a culture that is not like anything else they’ve ever been to.

Or if somebody does happen to leave that I would rather them not. I always hear back. Man, I didn’t know how awesome it was. Yeah. Before, and you should see how awful this place is. And I’m like, Hmm. Kinda knew it now. Kinda knew it super quick. I love that exercise, especially for folks, if you’re thinking that has to be in person. I love that for a virtual team, for a remote team. Mm-hmm. For distributed, because that’s where I think we don’t always celebrate.

Each other’s wins and sort of, we kind of get siloed. We do our own thing at our computer, we close a laptop, we go back on our day and what an awesome exercise to do. With a virtual team and pop up that slide and say like, Hey, what are our wins? And because I think that’s where we don’t have that, those side conversations, the hallway conversations, the coffees, the lunches, where we stop forgetting that everyone has those individual goals and dreams and motivations.

But to weave that into, you know, how your team comes together across locations and distances, I, I think that could have so much power for folks and both in a team building sense, but also building morale, building connection, and building empathy. And one of the things that really resonated as I was, I heard you talk about leading with love at, at the Entrepreneur Summit and was thinking about. Where do folks really need this? And I think feedback is one of those places.

I, I always talk about feedback in, in the podcast, in my trainings, cuz it’s one of the places I think that goes sideways so quickly on teams. And, and because we’re starting the place of, I think I already know how this is gonna go. I’m uncomfortable. I, I’m worried that the person’s gonna be defensive. No one ever gave me feedback. Well, so I don’t have any skills in it. Whatever it is. And when you start to think about applying this lens of leading with love, Feedback could be transformed completely because when you lead from that place, well now you’re talking about wanting to help someone rise to their full potential.

You’re talking about what you see in them. You’re talking about how you are gonna be there to show up for them, to help them bridge that gap. How else do you feel like you’ve, you’ve applied this to some tough situations, either giving feedback, letting a team member go something else where this was the superpower to deploy. Yeah. Well, and you actually talked about this in your book, so I, I’m glad that you teed this up in a question.

Um, you know, feedback doesn’t have to be negative, right? It, it can be negative. But if you’re, if you’re leading with love and you are true to yourself and true to your team, and you are constantly. Engraving yourself into your team and making yourself part of their day-to-day and truly understanding what’s going on in their world, both personal and professional. Then any feedback that you give when it comes time for a review, it’s just like almost a normal conversation.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I actually, let me, let me give you, I have a story actually from today, and it’s, uh, I, I did lose somebody on my team today that. As a human and as a person, probably one of my favorite people ever. Like she is an incredible person. Um, she’s loving and she’s caring and she means well. And, you know, for, uh, uh, when I first got here, she was on fire and things were great and something just.

Ultimately shifted and changed. And I, I’m still gonna hold onto her as a friend because, you know, as she was telling me goodbye today, she was like, I still love you. I still appreciate you and, and I hope we can continue on this, this friendship. But I said, absolutely we will. Now, not everybody that leaves my team wants to be my friend. I totally get that right. But if you connect with somebody and you, the leading with love actually works, then they do, right?

You can actually let somebody go. And in my previous place, I let six people go on my last day. All six of them hugged me. Thank me for the opportunity, and I still keep in touch with them today because I helped them find another position or I’ve encouraged them in another position. Right. That’s what leading with love is. It doesn’t mean that you let them go and they’re out of your life. Mm-hmm. If you truly care about them, it means you let them go and you help them find something that’s they’re a better fit for.

Yeah. Or a location that they’re a better fit for, and that just makes you feel better as a person. Now, granted, that has not happened with every employee I’ve ever had, but the ones that I, I. I feel like understand the philosophy of it. It, it does work, but this particular individual left today and, and she’s going to leave for what she feels is a better opportunity for her. Um, and, and that’s okay because we had a really great conversation and it didn’t end where she was criticizing me and I was criticizing her.

It ended with complete respect. Yeah. Now if you do have to deliver bad news and you air are coming down, and then, because trust me, I’ve had to do that too. I’ve sat my entire team in a room and said, look. If you guys don’t start performing, then there are people in this organization that are not going to have a job. And because I come from home building and I’ve been doing this for 20 years, I’ve seen my fair share of ups and downs, and I’ve seen entire divisions wiped out by recessions.

And I’ve seen people lose their jobs that had to go tell their significant other that they don’t have a job. And it’s a very difficult thing. And I made a vow to myself and to my team. At that point, I refused to ever manage and lead a team. That if we ever have to let somebody go in the future, that we cannot look them in the face and say, we gave it everything we freaking had. Yeah.

And if we have to let people go and we can say that we gave it everything we freaking had, then I’m okay with that. I can sleep at night. But I’m gonna tell you a story. So the market obviously shifted this last year and dfw, it didn’t shift for us until September. And when it shifted, it shifted hard. Like we were doing 50, 60 sales a month to. 14, 15, 16, like it was, it was bad.

And I sat the team down. Now the team and, and when you, when you manage a new home sales team, they don’t get paid until the home closes, but they have two, $300,000 in backlog in commissions that are coming to them. So if things are bad right now, sales wise, it doesn’t really feel that bad cuz they’re still closing houses, they’re still getting paid. They’re gonna feel that pain six months, nine months from now. But right now, that pain’s not there.

Well, from a large publicly traded home builder, we’re a top 15 national home builder when sales are 50%, 40% of what they were, you can’t continue to hold onto the overhead that you have, and I saw my team really slacking off on some things that just really pissed me off. And because I lead with heart, I couldn’t hide the fact that I was pissed. Like it was evident. And the team was like, you’re managing different. You’re a different person.

You were fake before. And it took me standing up there and saying, look, this is why you feel. This way against me, and I have not changed who I am. I have not changed my leadership, but let me explain why I’m so angry and why I’m pissed, and it’s because I expect more from you because I have helped elevate this team to a higher place than what we are today. And I said, what are we gonna do if sales continue the way that we are?

And we have to look our construction teams in the face and say, I’m sorry, we have to let you go, because I didn’t really work that hard. Yeah. This last couple of months, and I said, I’ll be damned if that’s gonna happen. And if that’s the, the mentality and that’s the performance you’re gonna give me, then I’m gonna find new people that wanna work here because we have a great culture and people wanna be here. And I’m gonna tell you this, and this is a, a great sense of pride for me as an organization.

We had a reduction in force at the beginning of March and it was, it was not a huge one, but it was a decent sized one. DFW was the only division in the entire country that did not have a single layoff. Oh, and I, I truly do believe that that has everything to do with the fact that my team recognized at that moment, cuz it was pretty dang early on in this downturn that we have a lot to do with the people that are gonna be here and that our efforts.

Show and people need to keep their job. Now that, and we have a phenomenal division president that is, he’s, he’s a wizard in a lot of things, and he’s seen a lot of great things, but he allows me to lead this way. Right? Yeah. He allowed me to have the conversation with them that basically said, pull your heads outta your asses, because if you don’t, people are losing their job, and how are you gonna look them in the face and say, yeah, I, you know, I didn’t do my follow up.

I didn’t reach out to the realtor. I didn’t make sure that those people closed on their home like I should have. I got laser. Yes. How do you look somebody in the face and you just can’t, yeah. So it’s, you know, the, it goes back and forth. You have to be able to deliver the hard news and, but you lead with love. It’s easy to do. Yeah. Well, this is so important because it, it reinforces again, and we’re talking about that.

This is not like, yeah, holding hands and singing songs in Kumbaya. This is about the love is you want the best for this team no matter what, and you have, you are holding them to the high standard that you know they can deliver on, and that knowing and that belief, this is what motivates people to rise to the occasion. This is what will get you through the downturn because people see, hey. I am accountable to something.

Mm-hmm. And the, the sense of ownership you instill in people. This is something again, I talk about a lot. Accountability really is about ownership. And what is ownership? Well, this is about setting expectations and you have set such clear expectations that, hey, this is the performance we know we can deliver on. That’s why all of us are here. I believe in you. I’m gonna show up for you. But you have to show up for each other.

And that is why this is so powerful. Even in a downturn, this will get you through it because everybody had that sense of accountability. No one was like, well, You know, well, this guy over here’s not doing it, and she’s not doing it because everybody’s collectively bought in because of all that groundwork you’ve laid. Yep. Yeah. One thing to add is I think a lot of times people worry, well, this kind of thing, it takes longer, it slows things down.

My guess is all of this work that you’ve done, it allows you to be, to move faster, to be more agile, to respond, to change faster, that this is actually a strategy in inefficiency. Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, gosh, it, it didn’t take me any time at all to fix the culture of the team. And what’s amazing is that people crave it. Yeah. Right? And, and when I first came in, they were like, who in the hell is this guy?

Like, what is he? Like, what are these stories? Because I tell every, I do all of my teachings in a story, right? Because people remember stories. They’re easy. Uh, they, they, you know, they remember them, they recall them. They can live off them. They have their own stories. And so I’m telling all these stories and every story has a purpose. And you know, you start to build the foundation and it’s amazing how quick they gravitate towards it.

And then it’s amazing when you are not being authentic to it. Yeah. Your team calls you out. Yeah. That’s the most amazing thing about it, is that I have, you know, I’ve, I mean just, you know, we talked about Meredith earlier, like she actually, she actually came down on me and she said, Hey, I. Like, I feel you are not being the best version of yourself. Like there are things that you are doing that are not authentic to you, that you need to see what’s going on in your life and you need to refocus.

And I talked to the team about that and I said, Hey, there’s some things that were brought to my attention that I need to apologize for. And by coming forward and saying, look, I’m not perfect. I’m far from it, but I own up to it. And I at least have a culture built around me where people are comfortable enough to tell me. If I’m not being the person that I’m preaching, I want that. I want them because I don’t wanna live a life where I’m not.

What I say that I am, that’s a very unauthentic way to live. And that’s a, that’s a horrible, we’ve all had unauthentic managers and it’s, it’s nobody any of us wanna follow. Yeah. No. And, and by doing that, you’re, you’re modeling a few things, both you don’t think you’re infallible, but you’re also making it clear that feedback’s a two-way street. People can come to you and instead of getting defense, I’m saying, who do you think you are?

In a Meredith? You’re like, wow. I know that you believe in me more than how I’m showing up. Mm-hmm. This is how we rise to our full potential. And I think why it’s so important for managers to not avoid giving feedback, to not be afraid of it. Because if we don’t wanna give someone feedback because we haven’t figured out our own shit around it, like our own fears and for things, we are withholding opportunity for that person to be their full self.

So if we’re afraid about giving feedback, this is the time to lean into how to lead with love, get feedback on our own feedback, get some skills around that, and go back to that person and say, Hey, I know how hard you are working on this thing. And there was this misstep that got in your way from really delivering that at your best, let’s fix that. I’m gonna be here to support you. Mm-hmm. That’s not a hard conversation to have.

And modeling that first starts with, I’m open to feedback. We’re gonna talk about this. Like you said, having it be a regular conversation. This is so powerful to demystifying that and, and taking a lot of the anxiety away from feedback. Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’d love to switch gears and talk about your book. I mean, I think I got to get a preview of it when I, when I saw you speak and both the story behind it and, and you know, really.

You know, what you’re, what you’re aiming to do with the book. I, I’d love to share with the audience. Thank you for asking about the book. Uh, it’s something that has, has been a passion project of mine for a couple of years now that is finally coming to the end and it’s something that I’m so very proud of. It is called Life Lessons with Daddy. And it’s a book that’s inspired by the fact that I absolutely love to read to my two little girls.

And I was sitting there one day asking them, would you guys like to be in a book? And of course, every child would love to be in a book. So they said, yes, we would love to be in this book. And so it took me a while to come up with what the concept of the book was gonna be. Uh, and I met with some amazing friends of mine that have helped me come up with the idea behind it.

And in essence, what I do is I interview dads that I have a great amount of respect for, or they’re daughters that I have a great amount of respect for. And I audio record the conversation. I pre-end them a list of questions so they can prepare for it, and then we go through the interview questions and they’re so. Passionate. They’re so filled with emotions, typically they cry. I cry it. It’s just, it’s an amazing moment for both of us.

And then I take that lesson and I take that interview and I craft it into a story as if I’m teaching it to my two little girls and the dad that I interview and the children in the, in his life. His daughter, daughters, sons, whatever it may be, will be sub characters in the book itself. And then once the book is crafted, the dad then writes me a love letter to his daughter, and then I let the daughter know the project that their dad and I have been working on together.

It’s an extremely touching moment. And then the daughter writes me a love letter back, and those love letters are included in each book. So each book has three short stories from three different dads, and it has three love letters from the fathers, and it has love letters from the daughters. Well, what makes this book so special is the fact that each book sold will help benefit the National Angels, which is a foster care organization, ran by an incredible woman named Susan Ramirez, who’s a dear friend of mine.

And their mission is that every child deserves to have someone in their life. The knows the color of their eyes. And when you think about it and, and I know you’re a parent, it’s something that you couldn’t imagine not just being overwhelmed with joy and love and affection for your kid, but there are 400,000 children in foster care today that don’t get that same experience in. The goal here is to help the foster care community to help these children get adopted in defined love.

Like the children do inside of my book. And so it’s turned out to be an incredible mission that I hope just takes off because the more books we sell, the more we can help kids that need the love that our children have. And so I, I deeply thank you for asking about it. I can’t wait for it to come out. It’s gonna come out soon working on some exciting things to possibly make the book even bigger than I ever could have imagined.

And even if those things don’t come out, I’m still gonna self-publish it. It’s gonna get out there into the world and there’s gonna be more than one. So beyond the lookout for life lessons with daddy part one, and then hopefully part 100 someday. Love that. And where can folks find more about the book? Yes. So there is a website. Uh, by the time this comes out, maybe the website will be like, fully amazing. It’s, it’s like 90% amazing.

Right now it’s life lessons with daddy.com. Okay. And I’ll put that in the show. So you can go there. Perfect. And you can, you can sign up for pre-sales for, well, you can sign up for updates on the book and then once we get it all worked out with publisher when it actually gets launched, we will, we will send updates for sure. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. It was so wonderful to hear both about the book and about leading with love.

All of the examples that managers can apply to their teams immediately because it results in higher performing teams. It is not, it’s not soft stuff. It is the hard skills that we need to be deploying every single day on our teams. Absolutely. Well, I adore you and I’m, I’m proud to call you a friend. Thank you so much. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple Podcast where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.

I always love to hear from you, so please reach out at liagarvin.com or message me on LinkedIn. See you next time.