Are you a high-performing leader, frustrated that you're not being recognized or promoted to senior leadership, despite doing everything right?
Welcome back to Speak Up, the podcast for high performing introverts, including you, social introverts, where we reveal the charisma and communication secrets of A-listers so that you get the recognition and the opportunities you have earned.
I am your host, Elora Camacho, your magical executive presence coach, godmother, and strategist.
And by the end of today's conversation with Jimmy Burrows, you will know the three invisible communication blockers that even high performers face and how to eliminate them.
The simplify to amplify method that's been shown to boost team performance by 40.
You're going to love it, plus game-changing scripts and leadership frameworks to build trust, clarity and strategic influence, even if you're introverted.
So everybody, today we have a special guest.
Again, it's unbelievable the kind of talent we get to talk to here.
We're speaking with Jimmy Burrows, who is English.
He has a military background, so all of you... who are veterans.
I know a lot of you are.
Shout out to you.
He's turned his military experience into a methodology to help people in corporate communicate better.
Be better leaders.
He's very metrics driven, performance driven.
This is all going to be about how to improve team performance or performance in some way, through communication.
So welcome to the show, Jimmy.
Thank you so much.
It's genuinely an honour to be here.
So I'm really, really proud to be in such an auspicious show as yourself.
Thank you.
Yes, we have extremely high IQ, highly attractive listeners right now.
OK, so Jimmy has this methodology is called Simplify to Amplify, which is a brilliant name.
So congrats on that.
Thank you.
And he teaches that, and his...
Research shows that it will boost team performance by 40 percent.
That's almost by half.
So it's pretty impressive.
So what specific communication techniques or approaches can those of us who are a little bit introverted, a little bit awkward, use?
We perform great except when our brain freezes.
So help us out, Jimmy.
There's so many places we could go, but I want to try and keep this kind of really practical, because that's kind of what's useful right.
The first thing I think we need to be aware of is the majority of the people that are listening here and the majority of people I've had the pleasure and the luxury of working with over the last 10 plus years as a consultant have been very intelligent, very capable people who are frustrated by the system.
This is not they're not capable.
This is not that they don't know how.
It's kind of like they're in a rowing boat with all their teammates and everybody's rowing as hard as they can in different directions, with the anchor chain still attached to the boat.
And so what we see in organizations is this.
Often it's the barriers to communication or the communication friction that is the real challenge versus I don't know how to communicate.
When I sit in a room of leaders and we talk about what would a good leader communication style look like, or how should we communicate if we want to be an effective leader people know all the answers.
They know what they should do.
It should be repetitive.
It should be clear.
It should be concise.
It should be informative.
It should be value driven.
Blah, blah, blah.
Keep the whiteboard list going.
So then the more important question is, so why aren't you doing that?
And it generally comes down to one of three things.
Number one, I see, is I feel stupid or like an imposter, or like I'm going to get found out, or my opinion is not good enough.
So that holds us back from talking to people.
The reality with this let's call it imposter syndrome as an umbrella term is it's the syndrome of highly capable, highly smart people.
The communication opportunity here is to look at the evidence of your back catalogue of achievements.
I've got to head off.
GM director manager, whatever your job title is, by being good at my job, by being a smart, capable person.
And by having some talents and techniques that I've used, which have served me well.
That therefore, my opinion is valid because I have a seat at this table.
Therefore, I need to work out a way of speaking up.
And we'll come on to the how in a minute.
The second barrier that gets in the way is a lack of psychological safety in the environment.
So if i speak up i might get shot.
You know i might get my knees chopped off from underneath me, or you know it's like raising your head above the parapet you get shot.
So people don't speak up.
So, as again, as a leader, in order to create that communication clarity.
What we teach is how to create trust and psychological safety with those people around you.
And how do you do that?
The third piece that tends to get in the way is yes, I've spoken up, but nothing's happened.
So I'm not going to bother.
So I become disengaged.
And this is one of the biggest challenges.
I think that People who work for senior leaders often find they're in that middle management layer managing managers, managing a function, managing a team.
And they're getting all this noise for if we could just change this.
And they feel disempowered because even if I do something, it's not going to make a difference.
Or even if the difference I make, it's not going to really lead to anything.
So I just won't say anything.
And then we get into this apathy sense where people don't do anything.
So then we go back to your question, which is, so how do I actually communicate effectively?
We teach five core leadership differentiators.
The first one of those is clarity.
Why am I trying to say it?
Who am I trying to say it to?
And what outcome am I looking for?
Then you almost like plot it out.
Right.
What am I trying to say?
Who am I trying to say it to?
What am I trying to do?
And what's the purpose of this?
What's the reason behind all of me doing this?
If I'm not clear on it before I go and talk to people, how can I be clear when I'm in the moment?
And this is where I think introverts actually have a huge strength because they like to sit and think then you're going to significantly increase the likelihood that you feel comfortable in the moment saying what you're saying.
You feel psychologically safe.
What if we're concerned that...
We have this idea, this proposal that could work.
Jimmy, I think it's good, but I'm not sure.
So how do I know?
Like a lot of people doubt on whether to push forward with a proposal and idea.
Because they want to have that confidence and they don't have it.
That for sure.
This is what we need to do.
So how do we manage that conundrum?
This is such a great question.
It often comes up.
If I don't know the answer or the solution and I don't know it's going to work, do I do nothing or do I do something?
I'm trying to recall the person's name as a Turkish religious figure, who basically said the path becomes clear when we start walking it.
The idea here is you know, imagine you're stuck in the Grand Canyon and all you can see around you is these giant walls going up in front of you in every direction.
And I don't know if you've been in the Grand Canyon, but sometimes you can get to points where you can't see where the path goes.
The only way you can see where the path goes is to start walking in a direction.
And you're going to work out one of three things.
Yes, this is the path.
No, this isn't the path.
Or yes, this is kind of the path that I need to tweak a little bit to get to where I want to go.
And the same thing applies when you're in this uncertainty phase of communicating, bringing up an idea, saying something, proposing something.
Is that, in the modern environment that we exist and operate in, which is we call VUCA volatile uncertain, complex and ambiguous?
Ie there's no right or wrong answers?
It's just, let's try some stuff.
Yeah.
You have to do something.
What we teach our students is to say what's the smallest step you could take that would help the path become clearer.
And for your proposal or your speaking up or your idea.
Instead of saying I think we should do X, we could do what's one tenth of X and C, and then that gives us a little bit of momentum.
That's the kind of the first piece.
Yeah, I love it.
The second piece that people don't tend to speak up is I'm scared of what if I'm wrong?
Yeah.
What if I've made a mistake or I'm going to look stupid as a result of this?
And it could be career limiting for me.
Yeah.
The communication technique we teach here is assumption sharing.
So, when we go into our meeting with our boss, or with our team, or with the board or whoever we're briefing on our idea, We preface that decision point with and these are the assumptions that I've made in order to make this smallest step, this decision that I made, this proposal I've got.
So I'm assuming that the market isn't shifting.
I'm assuming that the funding is the same.
I'm assuming that we can commit full members of staff to this.
What you're doing when you make these assumptions public is two things.
First of all, you're showing people you thought about them and that you're making essentially an informed decision, but you don't have the definite answer.
The second piece is you're inviting them to agree or disagree with those assumptions.
And so you're collectively positioning your idea, your proposal, your hypothesis, with a bunch of people who might be more experienced or have a different perspective of you.
And they're going to say one of three things.
They're going to say, yes, that's the direction to go in.
No, that's not the direction to go in.
Or yes, and we could change it a little bit by doing this.
Again, you've taken one small step along the path and we're working our way out of the Grand Canyon of doubt.
I think, by getting the assumptions out, I'm thinking of additional advantages than those that you listed.
First of all, it shows that you have thought about it.
You're not just pulling this out of a hat.
But also, you know, we always know that there's this one person in the room that likes to shoot down everything right.
And by giving them something maybe that person but you're giving them like a target of to shoot down the assumptions and deal with that.
And then if you can work out something there, then they're going to be automatically more receptive to accepting, to giving you the green light or supporting.
Would you agree?
Yeah, what you've just described beautifully is the difference between constructive and destructive conflicts.
And destructive conflict is where I don't like what you've come up with and I'm going to try and get you and shoot you down.
We want to avoid that because it's not effective for building high performance.
Constructive conflict is where we're shooting down the idea to get to a better solution.
So you're exactly right.
By sharing your assumptions, you're saying hey look, this is the list of things that eventually are up for grabs, based on me trying to get to this solution or this idea or this hypothesis.
Let's talk about those.
And if you disagree with those assumptions, That doesn't mean my solution is wrong.
It just means that we've got a better way of getting there.
Or there might be something different I haven't considered.
Or you can add a perspective and viewpoint.
And to see it as a constructive contribution to your argument versus somebody trying to attack you.
Because again, that reduces your psychological safety if you're feeling attacked.
Whereas if you're like, actually, do you know what?
I really appreciate that because I hadn't thought of that.
I missed that.
Let's build that into my solution.
You immediately elevate your status in the room and you help people to see you as a collaborative thinker, but also somebody who's willing to mold and share their ideas in pursuit of the strategic solution which is what we really want for people.
Exactly.
So, Jimmy, I've got a more precise question scenario.
I'm all about communication and executive presence, but you have the.
Your territory is the leadership.
So we've got overlap here.
What do you recommend to show people that you're ready for that next step as far as leadership or communication or anything like, what else can someone do?
Yeah, this is probably one of the hardest questions that rattles around inside managers and managers' heads.
Yes.
My boss is telling me to be more strategic and step up.
I don't really know what that means and I'm not really sure what a leader does, versus what I did when I was managing a team of individual contributors.
So how do I have executive presence and how do I communicate in a different way?
We teach sort of two ideas here.
Number one, and this was given to me actually by a colleague.
Basically, what he does is he writes a list of all the things he's working on before he goes into his meeting with his boss.
And he says let me just give you 60 seconds down the list and you tell me the three you want to hear about.
And immediately.
What he's doing is aligning on.
What does my boss think is important out of all the things I'm working on?
That helps me be more strategic, because I'm aligning to strategic intent versus me coming in and going.
Hey, I want to tell you about how I ordered some more stationery and I've done all the photocopying and I've organized the morning tea.
The boss is immediately going to tell you what is important to me and what I want to hear about right now.
Equally, he'll say what are the three things that are really important to you right now that you want me to be aware of.
So he's stepping into their domain and saying, hey, look, I really want to get what your focus is.
So I can then go back and realign my priorities based around what you're focusing on.
So we've got this bilateral agreement going on around expectations and delivery.
That'll be the first piece I think about.
How do you step up into one of those roles?
The second piece is get really clear on your role versus your boss's role versus your team's role.
And what I mean by that is often, when you get to that manager of managing layer, you don't really have much clarity on what's your day job.
No, you don't.
What tends to happen is we do what we think is best.
And that usually is one of two or three things.
It's the things that made us famous in the first place.
I was a great salesperson, so I'll keep going to the big sales meetings.
I was the best developer, so I'll keep developing.
It was the things we like doing or make us feel comfortable.
So often that means we're stepping on our team's toes.
Maybe we're now the GM of technology or the VP of technology.
And we're still doing stuff with the service delivery manager did because we like to solve problems.
We enjoy helping people out and all those things.
And by doing all those things we get in the way of our team doing their job and growing and developing.
And then the third piece is not paying attention enough to what your boss's job is to be able to step into some of the things they want to delegate.
Again, we're looking up and we're looking down at the same time.
We're looking horizontally through the organization but we might be seeing that our bosses generally four to seven times as loaded up as we are, because they have four to seven reports an hour later.
So they've got four to seven times as much complexity.
They have no clarity.
They're struggling to get by each day.
They're trying to work out where next. and you're coming to them and saying, what should I be doing?
And how do I be executive?
And how do I get my executive presence and be strategic?
And they're like, I don't even have time to think.
Though you saying what are you doing right now that I could potentially take on, so I get the opportunity to step up into your shoes, even if maybe the bottom 5 percent of your low-value tasks, Give them to me.
I'll get my head around them.
I can give my bottom 5% to somebody else.
And all of a sudden, everybody's stepping up through the chain to be more strategic.
Okay, guys.
So Jimmy has just given us three new approaches. to the one-on-ones.
But I want to go back to the second one, which is you want to show that you can handle the next level.
Your boss is overwhelmed and has even very little idea of what you could possibly take on.
But if you asking for like, what did you call it?
The low value work offering to take that.
But also before that conversation, like trying to get your head around what all is your boss responsible for and what is your boss being graded on.
What are his or her KPIs or OKRs?
And that would give you insight.
But by you listener, taking the reins of the one-on-one.
I think that is a very powerful source of insight and insight getting intel that you can use to increase your visibility and to learn the right things and allocate your time and energy where it's going to pay off right.
100%.
And you struck on a really key point that I want to clarify as well, which is that when we say low value, we don't mean necessarily low value to the organization.
It's low value for your boss, only your boss to do it.
And this is where you look at your urgent important matrix.
It's the low importance that they do it.
And this is what people often misunderstand.
It's not important that it doesn't get done.
Of course it's important your boss is involved in it.
But are they the only person that could do it?
And if they're not, then that's something that you could potentially take over.
But the low value stuff is low value for your boss being involved, high value for you to learn.
Absolutely.
That's really good.
So Jimmy, what assumptions or mistakes do you see high performers making that keep them from being promoted or keep them from reaching those performance goals?
So we have five leadership differentiators, which are essentially what high performers do differently.
Clarity, value, impact, trust and decisions.
Clarity is are you able to clearly see the situation that you are in and clearly tell other people what's happening?
And this is probably one of the biggest ones that gets in the way of people getting promoted is that they're not even sure of the priorities.
They're not sure of what the business is doing or trying to achieve.
They're not sure of how the business makes money.
And again, we go back to that VUCA environment.
It keeps changing all the time.
Yes.
And so you expecting to just get through this week or this month or this quarter and things will calm down?
That's never going to happen.
Getting clear in ambiguity is one of the core differentiators.
What often holds people back is that they don't know how to do that.
They just get lost in the melee of all the things that are going on.
And so they start working on low value stuff.
Because it's easy, because it made them famous, because they liked doing it, as we talked about before, but also because they don't know what else they should be doing, because they haven't got clarity from their boss on what are the important things.
So they're either inappropriately spending time on low-value tasks or they're equally valuing everything.
And you know what they say, if everything's a priority, nothing's a priority.
And this is probably, again, what holds people back is that they're working on tactical operational tasks, firefighting, putting out the fires, dealing with the emergencies, not thinking, why does this keep happening?
How do we stop this from happening in our people?
And what's happening at a cultural level, a strategic level, a geographical level that's causing all these things.
That's the iceberg I've got to go and solve for and leave my managers to be doing the fireside.
Because that's what managers paid for.
Leaders are paid to stop the fires happening.
So that's the second one is the low value stuff.
Impact the biggest decisions that you make as a good leader or the differentiator.
Good leader is they put their time and energy in the few things that are going to be making a difference.
I remember distinctly going through a workshop with an exec from Amazon.
And so we brought this guy in.
And he said, on a daily basis, I get anything between 1,500 and 2,000 emails a day.
Of those emails, about 200 of them are things that I could get involved in.
About 15 to 20 of them are emergencies.
And I can normally do two to three a day.
So you have to get really comfortable and really skilled, knowing where to put your time and energy for the biggest icebergs, because you can't solve everything.
20 emergencies a day.
A, you're going to burn yourself out, and B, if you're solving 20 a day, you're probably not doing a good job of looking at the system.
So it's about knowing where to put your impact and how to.
When you turn up, it's a high-value meeting for you with a high-value outcome, not a low-value meeting that you can actually delegate to somebody else or just not turn up to, because you're actually stepping on other people's toes by being in the meeting.
The fear of if I'm not in this meeting, I'll have to do six other meetings later on to sort it out.
Well then, you haven't built trust, which is our next one.
So the trust piece is you have to understand how trust works and build trust with those people around you.
And what tends to happen is people who are really good individual performers get promoted to manager.
They're really good individual managers who have a team of people who they can corral to do lots of things that they want to do.
Those still stop working when they get to leadership because they haven't learned how to build trust.
They just learned how to build motivation.
So, again, differentiator.
And then the final one is decisions.
And this is probably one of the most valuable lessons I learned in the military, actually.
When I commissioned from Sandhurst, which is the UK equivalent of West Point, you go to your regiment as a 22, 23-year-old second lieutenant and you're given a group of soldiers to command.
And honestly, you know nothing about what those soldiers do realistically.
You know, you've had a year's training to get to this point.
You've had four months of trades training.
So I was a logistician back in those days.
So four months of learning how trucks worked.
But then you turn up at your regiment and you're expected to command 30 to 40 soldiers who've all got more experience of being logisticians than you, who've all done this for longer than you.
And you're paired with some senior sergeants who've probably got 15 to 20 years of experience doing this stuff.
And I remember distinctly Staff Sergeant Derbyshire.
My first Staff Sergeant said to me Your job is to make the decisions.
My job is to give you the information.
And this was a key deciding point, a key change in my approach, because I always thought well, I've got to know, I've got to be the expert in everything.
I have to know how all the trucks work.
I have to know how all the processes work.
I have to be absorbing all the information.
No, you don't when you get to leadership.
And actually you shouldn't.
You should be relying on your experts to give you the information and talking it through with them and then making a decision on the back of it.
And so this is what we would do.
We would sit in and we had to move from point A to point B and I'd say, well, what do we think?
And the staff sergeant would talk, the sergeant would talk.
And they give me some ideas and some input.
And then some of the senior corporals maybe would say, well, what about this?
And we should try this.
And what about that?
And then I finally say, right, based on what I've heard, this is what I think we should do.
Thoughts?
Yes, no, tweak, tweak, tweak.
Okay, final decision.
This is what we're going to do.
Now let's brief everybody.
It's about my job is to make the decision.
My job is not to know all the answers.
Again when you're moving from that manager to leader role.
What stops people going any further is they think they still need to be the expert to gain status, to keep themselves feeling safe.
Yes, they do think that.
What you need to realize is that even if you were the best programmer 20 years ago, you're probably not the best programmer now, so you can't be the expert.
Your job is to now lead the programmers or the programmers' managers.
Even if you're the best salesperson, your job is to now create a sales culture that drives big deals.
Your job is to lead and make decisions that enable that, by removing the icebergs, by getting really, really clear, by focusing on high impact stuff, by looking after the value that's out there and making decisions that lead to the outcomes that you want.
Wow, that was so good.
I'm sure everybody's thinking, How is this podcast free?
This is such valuable information.
Oh, my gosh.
So, well, you gave us three approaches to having a more productive one-on-one with your manager.
It could also be with your skip manager.
You made a distinction and we didn't go into it.
But there'll be a link to Jimmy's Simplify to Amplify program.
But I really think it would be interesting to explore the building trust versus motivation.
So that's something to think about.
You know, he's got these five distinguishers.
And I can't recall all of them, but the first one is clarity and ambiguity, and one of them is impact.
One of them is trust going back, trust is not the same as motivation.
I think that's a big takeaway.
And then making decisions without having all the information.
I think what you've given us overall is the vision that, in order to be a senior leader, you have to think about things differently.
You have to like imagine you're in a helicopter and you're just going up and you don't see the details as clearly, but you see the broader how the pieces work with each other.
And it really is an imperative that you understand how your company makes money.
What did I not ask you that it was so obvious to you?
Like, Laura, how could you not ask this question?
What was it?
For me the piece that isn't taught widely and isn't often taught in organizational development programs because, or for a variety of reasons, but normally because the internal people who develop the leadership development programs don't intimately understand leadership because they've never had to lead in a complicated PL environment, a high-stress environment.
Maybe they've led a couple of HR people to create a program, or maybe they're working with a consultant who's external, who's probably an ex-LD manager or something like that.
And so what they're being serviced with is management development, which is great stuff, and we need management development.
But when you're moving into leadership, it's like an operating system upgrade.
We use a framework called the the leadership backpack.
And it's based around a journey I once did in the mountains of Afghanistan, where we were climbing a mountain and we started off at base with backpacks and we put all the stuff we needed in and then we went to a point where they gave us some rations and some ammunition.
We put those into our backpacks and we got walking up the mountain.
And when we got to let's call it base camp just below the summit of this mountain, we took our backpacks off and we emptied them out, because all the things we carried to that point weren't necessary.
Only some of them were.
Then we repacked our backpacks and we put new things in like crampons and ropes and oxygen tanks and extra equipment that we would need.
But we left behind the things that we brought from the base because they weren't needed anymore.
And this is the analogy we use for when you move into these leadership roles is you've carried all your individual contributor skills.
You've developed maybe some management skills along the way, but now it's time to empty the backpack and make some space for some new skills.
This leadership operating system upgrade.
A lot of that we've talked about today and a lot of core principles we've talked about today.
The only thing that we didn't cover.
That, I think, is important to kind of get people's heads around.
It's not your fault that.
Leadership is a struggle.
It's because nobody really prepares you for leadership.
You just end up there and hope you can make a difference.
And so that's what people like you and I do, which is to help people make that difference.
That's so good.
Wow.
Well, thank you, Jimmy.
This has been extreme high value conversation.
And I know our listeners are massively taking notes unless you're driving.
Don't take notes if you're driving.
Okay, great episode.
I really liked Jimmy.
I thought he was so helpful.
I really liked the three invisible communication barriers, but the most value I think comes from the simplify to amplify method for increasing team results.
But just that saying that to yourself, simplify to amplify is extremely powerful.
And then those scripts and frameworks, all excellent.
He's all about performance.
And if you've been promoted to leadership and feel like you're carrying the old manager backpack outdated habits basically, you're doing too much solving the problems instead of leading through others and wondering why you're not seen as an executive.
This is your wake-up call and i have created an executive presence scorecard.
It's an assessment to help leaders like you identify what you need to let go of and what you need to work on.
If you're interested in upgrading your leadership operating system, Email me at hello at speakupwithlauracom.
Put the word score in the subject line and I will send you access to the executive presence scorecard.
Have a fabulous day and I will catch you on the next episode.
