Returning Guest, Shawna Schuh — Beyond Command and Control: Why the Best Leaders Stop Parenting Their Teams

In 3, 2, 1.

Welcome back to Becoming Preferred, the podcast where we equip entrepreneurs and business professionals with the mindsets and strategies to level up their game and become the best version of themselves.

Back in season one, we were joined by executive leadership coach Shana Shu for a conversation that left a lasting mark on our audience.

She reminded us that teams are tired of being told and sold and that the quality of our answers depend entirely on the mastery of our questions.

Fast forward to today.

Leadership, team dynamics and workplace expectations have evolved dramatically.

But Shana's core message that investing in human connection, emotional intelligence, and master level questioning is the ultimate competitive advantage.

And it's more critical now than ever before.

Today, Shana returns to help us navigate the modern leadership landscape, build resilient hybrid cultures, and step out of our own way so that we can choose the legendary.

Please join me for my conversation with Shana Shu.

Well, hey, Shana, welcome to the program.

We're delighted to have you back again.

I'm whipped into a frenzy.

Michael, I adore you.

It's just so much fun to be here four years later.

I know it so well.

We're still going and you were one of our early guests and were gracious to come in and help us on the show.

So excited to have you back.

You're doing some exciting things.

So we're.

I'm excited about talking about those and very timely things we're seeing.

You know, companies, leadership, the theories of leadership are evolving and changing.

Let's go back.

So homes, Oregon.

So before we get started, I believe you're at your home or your little ranch there in Oregon.

Yes, I call it a ranchette.

It's a ranchette.

20 Acres.

Sounds about perfect.

Well, except for the blackberries that are encroaching upon everything I have, but yes.

Well, we'll get some pies going or something.

Good there.

That'd be good.

Now you just come back.

We were just chatting prior to the recording.

You just got back from a nice horse ride.

Let's talk about that because I think it's a good segue into our conversation today and how we're going to work on it.

So wouldn't you tell our audience what you just were up to?

Well, and it's not a little horse ride.

So an interesting story is in the 1800s, the Nez Perce Indians were promised all this land.

Well, most Indians were promised that they could keep some of their land.

And the Nez Perce were not a tribe with only one leader.

They had.

It was a democracy.

It was very Interesting.

And so some of them gave away their land.

They were.

They gave it through trees.

And then our king, Chief Joseph, the ones that we're following were non treaty Indians.

But they decided that they were going to government and settlers and being frightened and fear is something we're going to talk about quite a bit.

We're all frightened of things in the world.

And they decided to put the Indians in a reservation.

And Chief Joseph and two other leaders decided that they weren't going to do it.

They were going to go up to Canada and get out of the situation until they could negotiate.

So they went for 1300 miles and the military pursued them.

So now let's just go there.

This Indian Tribe had only 200 like Braves.

The rest were old people, women and children.

And they eluded the cavalry for 1300 miles because of their horses.

The horses could ford the rivers and the horses could climb the mountains.

Had no fear.

So anyway, in 1965, Appaloosaurus Club decided to reenact this 1300 mile odyssey.

And so we do 100 miles every year for 13 years.

Wow, that's 20, 25 miles a day.

So you got some sore behinds too, I'm assuming by day two or three.

I don't know if there's such a thing as a comfortable saddle, but for five days.

Well, good.

Good to know.

Well, it's interesting and because I think it kind of sets up our what we're going to talk about.

Because working with animals, there's people who are scared of animals.

There are people fearful of animals.

Animals have their own mindset.

So do organizations, so do different cultures.

So last time you were here over four years ago, in late 2022, you highlighted that teams are tired of being told and sold, which I thought is a great line.

So fast forward to today with remote hybrid dynamics, economic shifts, new workplace expectations, because it has evolved.

How has what teams need from their leaders evolved?

And why is the old command and control style kind of dead forever?

Well, you have this brand new book coming out, which I love.

Remaining relevant.

Yes.

Yeah.

Staying relevant.

Yeah.

Coming out in a couple of weeks.

Staying relevant.

Congratulations.

And when you really look at it as a leader, we've got to be able to evolve.

That's my gig, is to help leaders evolve into these people who are dealing with the fear that people are having around their lives, the fact that they want to stay home to work, where most leaders and businesses are asking them to come back to work, because they're proving that that interchange, that interaction, that creativity that happens when you're actually at the actual facility, it goes away, right.

You can't just say, hey, what do you think of this idea?

And so they're wanting people to come back and people don't want to come back.

And then I'm finding that in my leadership work a lot of people are.

And I don't know if it's because parenting has become so different now with the advent of the phone and the fact that like I don't know how you were raised, but in my world my mother and father said be there at 4 o' clock or you're not getting a ride.

Now kids go, I'm ready.

And then the parent runs to get them.

Right.

The dynamic has changed where the kids have a lot more power and so then the parent is trying to be relevant to them or serve them.

And I think that's a tough part.

I mean being and I think it's a topic for today and something we should touch on is being a parent.

We sometimes think that, okay, we're the leaders of our families and how do we parent?

And the role of a parent's evolved like it's evolved like when I grew up, you got spanked.

When I grew up in an era where it was okay to spank your kids, you could get a, you know, whack if you back talked.

It was just normal, nobody complained about it.

Now, you know, we would have been taken away.

Right.

Or our children would be.

And a lot of times parents take the that parenting style into the workforce and they use it for their leaders as well.

What are you seeing there?

Can you unpack that for us?

Yes.

One of the things that I think is really apparent is when you are a parent, you're needed.

You're needed very, very much at the beginning, but you love that you can fix the problems.

Think about how that feels, how ego generation that is where I don't know how to do this well, I'll help you, right?

Where do I find this?

Well, let me help you.

So we're constantly serving our children.

It feels good because they're needed.

And in leadership sometimes it feels good when people come to us to solve the problems.

We have an open door policy.

We allow this.

Got a minutes which completely ruins our days because it feels so good to be needed.

And in reality, the best leaders are the ones who do not.

They have self managed teams.

So your job as a leader is not to be in the weeds and fix their problems.

Your job as a leader is to step up here and figure out the strategy and where you're headed.

So I find that that's where they're getting in trouble, is that they love that people can ask them questions, that they're there to solve their team's problems.

And I believe.

And the leaders that are the most successful do not solve their team's problems because they're not as smart as their team anyway.

Yeah, I think I'm guilty of that one.

And I'm having to learn that one for myself.

I know when the kids wish they.

When they were younger, they rarely asked me for my advice.

But as they're older, sometimes they will ask, hey, what do you think of this?

That or whatever.

Rarely.

Rarely where, you know, unless they're writing you a check.

Don't give advice has kind of been my motto, particularly with your own kids.

But it's a hard one to do because we want to help, we want to be.

We want to people, please, we want to do it.

Now, what's interesting, four years ago when we were having a conversation, people were very exhausted from uncertainty.

Today, I find, anyway, they seem hungry for meaning, autonomy, to your point, and psychological safety.

So modern teams, they don't want this manager or parent sitting above them, what you're saying.

They want a coach standing beside them.

So if we try and tell and sell in today's environment, those high performers, I think they disengage and walk out the door.

So today it's more about facilitating growth, not demanding compliance.

How do we evolve as leaders?

How do we get there if we have a gap between that old style and where we should be today?

Well, a lot of it comes with what do you really want from your team?

And I think so many leaders get into a situation where they're put in the leadership because they're very good at what they do and that they haven't really asked themselves.

Then they have these problems pop up, right?

Somebody wants a lot of attention.

And that's the other thing that's happening.

You've got children that are on your team, right?

They're acting like children.

But recently, what big don't.

One of my clients was like, this person sent an email that said, this is not working.

Exclamation point, exclamation point.

And really slammed and sent it to several of the leaders.

This is a temper tantrum in an adult form.

Yeah, we are allowing these things.

This is the other thing leaders do.

They tell, they sell, and they allow.

And then suddenly we've got children that either have to be appeased or we have to do it their way or they're unhappy.

They're going to walk.

This is a problem.

I think we see it the other way too, don't we?

We say it like, look at some of our political leaders without, you know, naming names, but they're obvious.

If you pay attention to them, they, they revert back to childhood tantrums when things don't go from a leadership point of view.

And so that tells me this is in our programming.

Somewhere along the line, this has got to be in our programming.

And I know you've worked career wise on the programming.

What goes into our programming as adults, as children, because we're conditioning all of the time.

What have been the flaws in that programming?

How do we adjust that program?

Well, it's allowing.

And this is where our biggest problem is.

The easiest thing, of course, is when you have an animal and so many people have dogs now and we're finding out they all let them in their beds.

And I was talking to a gentleman recently, he goes, well, of course you let your dog sleep with you.

I go, no, I don't.

I live on a farm.

Okay, yeah, those dogs are dirty.

I like a kitty bed.

But when, when the dog is clean right after it gets out of the shower and we go, oh, come on in.

And the dog snuggles in and well, then when the dog is absolutely filthy manure from head to toe, that dog doesn't understand why it can't come in.

And so I believe that we do that with our teams.

We allow the bat behavior once we allow them to have a temper tantrum through email or.

I mean, one of my leaders recently said that, you know, she insisted upon something and the person rolled their eyes at them and said, well, if you what something about, I mean, really disrespectful.

And she came to me like, how do I handle that?

Like, like, you know what I mean?

You're not going to ever put them down.

Oh, but you've got to make sure that behavior like that, if it's allowed, guess what happens, continues.

And other people pick up on it.

So there's where the challenge is.

I believe that we have to stop allowing and we have to start asking.

Well, there needs.

I think there's a metaphor in there with your trail ride that we're talking.

And one of the reasons why we opened it, because I've been on trail rides before.

How many horses were on this particular one for the 100 miles?

Well, this was a very tough ride.

On the first day there were a hundred riders that went out just under a hundred riders.

And that was a Tough day.

We did 20 miles up and down.

Very tough.

The second day was 27 miles, and we had 68 riders.

See, thus the soar behinds.

Well, what I'm wondering.

What I'm wondering is with animals, they all have individual personalities.

And so I want to be ahead of this one if it's on.

You know, I've been on trail rides where number seven wants to get in front of five, and if they do, they nip at each other.

And then you got all these personalities.

And horses definitely have their own personalities.

How is that managing a trail ride with that many people on that team, so to speak, that trail ride team?

Where.

Where are those similarities?

How do you manage those in the trail ride?

Yeah, brilliant question.

So two things happen.

Like if you were to say that, number one in leadership, which is what we're talking about, whether you're an entrepreneur, you have your own business, you lead a group of people, which is kind of my forte is when people lead.

But the first leadership job is for ourselves, right?

So you better be prepared, you better know your gig, you better have the skills.

And as a leader, you got to ask yourself, one of the reasons that people go and get coached is because they're smart enough to understand they need help.

So that's the first step.

The second one is, even though you're working with a group of horses and they can bite and kick and all that, I have to have a relationship with my individual horse.

So I have to do the work to spend the time to understand that, number one, he trusts that if I'm asking him to go up that hill, that he'll do it.

I mean, horses, which most people don't realize have trouble with the way they see depth.

And if they bulk at something or startle a horse that will let you shoot off of its back or go over a ravine, trusts you.

And when they bulk, that's the first indication that they don't trust you.

So think about that with your teams, right?

When they're trudging or they're doing something, they don't trust that you're going to be able to handle it, possibly.

So that trust thing is a big one.

So, number one, making sure that you have that individual, and then you have to be able to trust yourself and your horse that if that horse does whatever it's going the other horse, number seven, this off or whatever, that you can actually handle it or get yourself into a situation so that you're not in harm.

Did that answer?

Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense.

Well, you've got all these different personalities, and it's taking those personalities and then.

And making them all, you know, whether it's in single file, one at a time, and one will tend to follow what the one ahead of it does.

So if the one ahead of it achieves the objective, usually the one behind it I've seen will achieve the objective.

Like if it, if it's tentative and it sees someone else do it, it's.

Sometimes they'll do it even if it's not capable.

So I think it's a good metaphor because they're quick thinking, they're smart.

And again, it's what you're asking.

Well, speaking of asking, in our season one, you shared a brilliant takeaway.

The quality of your answers is in direct proportion to how masterful your questions are.

So today, everyone is asking AI for answers.

How can leaders use masterful questioning and probing to unlock deep human insights that no algorithm or search engine can even replicate?

Great question.

Also, and one thing I want to go back with the horse thing that you were talking about, when one will follow another.

I find that if you're all going on this trail, we know the end goal.

And there's where even people with not happy personalities or ones angry or fearful, if we all know where we're headed together, you've got a lot less conflict.

And I think that's the leader's job.

So even with AI, when we bring it in and we're using a lot of AI and I use AI, it's a wonderful tool, but it certainly is not going to replace all of the skills I must have to be able to deal with a human or an animal.

I mean, we're talking about species, we're talking about live creatures, whether it be a human or a horse or a dog or any of that.

And so that's the challenge, that's also the risk, is that they have a mind of their own.

It's not a golf club, you know, it's not something that you can manipulate.

This is something a species that actually has a mind of their own.

And so one of the first ways to kind of pull it in is to ask or figure out what they want as it is in relationship to your goals.

Does that make sense, Mike?

Yeah, it does.

Yeah, it does.

Well, we're.

It's communication too, right?

So a lot of leaders are failing to communicate the goal.

A lot of people don't know the why behind where we're going.

And if we're communicating with the horse, they communicate differently.

Like, I was just at a rodeo recently and I was talking to a, a gentleman who does the cutting horses and it's all with his knees and he says it's all done with his knees.

So he's communicating with the horse with his knees.

And so it's communicating, it's connecting.

And I think if you're going to go on a, a trail ride or we use that same example is connecting with your, your horse, your animal.

Because if you've got a good connection, it trusts you, then you pretty much can take that horse anywhere it wants to go.

And so I think it's a brilliant metaphor.

It might be a book in there for you, Shauna, somewhere, but just on, you know, equine leadership and how that can work.

But I think it makes sense Are.

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And now back to my conversation with Shanna Hsu.

Let's talk about upgrading Win Wednesdays for modern remote hybrid teams, which we've talked about four years ago.

You introduced our audience to Win Wednesdays, asking teams what they got done and what they were most proud of.

When teams are now distributed across time zones and Slack channels.

How do we adapt this habit so it doesn't feel like it's just another meeting or forced positivity.

What a great question.

Forced positivity is a really interesting way to put it because when we're saying that is it positive?

I actually don't know if a win even has to be positive.

And I think that's the beauty of it is to be able to say what challenge did you overcome?

But it isn't even a challenge.

I want to know what you think a win is.

And that's where it turns from.

A win might be that I made it through this really difficult situation or the win might be I was the first that came in or I made the most money.

It out turns and that's how you kind of know what your team's about.

And when they can't come up with a win, you learn about your team as well.

So I still do it.

I do my 5:15 accountability call Monday through Friday and we only do wins on Wednesday.

But in my coaching, whenever I talk to my coaching client, the first question after I find out how they're feeling and we do a little guided meditation is give me a win.

And it's interesting where they will, number one, not be prepared to give me a win.

And that kind of tells me what kind of leader there are also.

Or they give me a win that's personal and I'm really looking for.

Yay.

That's great.

And what worked at work because many, many leaders are focused on what is needing to be improved.

No, it's good.

Well, it's like Wade, it's easy to look at what we've done on a personal level, but how are we doing it for our team?

And it's a real transition.

Because you made the point earlier.

A lot of people who are excellent, particularly with sales market organizations, customer facing organization, if you're really, really good in that organization, I mean, you're just amazing, they elevate you, they promote you into management and a leadership role so that they can pay you more money.

And the problem is you might not, you might be terrible at that.

You might be very good at that front line.

Why not just pay you more money and keep you on the front line?

Why not pay you more just to do that role if leadership's not for you or you don't want to be accountable or responsible?

And I see people lose the love for what they do because they want to earn more income, but they're not put in a role where they're babysitting or that's how they interpret it at least instead of they don't have the leadership skills to elevate their, their teams.

Do you see that as well?

Yes.

And half the time, and it's not just to give them more money.

I think a business that is elevating a leader that's doing really, really well.

I think their end goal is they want them to teach everybody else what.

They're doing duplicate me.

Yeah, exactly.

Get your success.

Yeah.

You're making this much money.

Well, what if we had a team that did the same thing you're doing?

But most leaders aren't necessarily natural teachers, nor should they be, because people have different ways to do it.

So they can teach or they can ask the kind of questions that help them become self managed.

And I think that's really where we need to go is leadership.

Yeah, that's right.

Self managed instead of I lead you.

Yeah, we're just seeing that generational dysfunction getting passed down from generation within organizations.

And it's.

Yeah, it makes sense to me.

And we do it with parenting too.

It's like we, we don't want to do what our parents do and we want it.

We want to take the good, leave out the bad of wherever we judge it or interpret it.

Then we find ourselves doing it.

A little later in life, you might say something, oh man, I sound like my dad or I sound like my mom.

Right.

But pick the good things and move on.

And the style is always evolving.

It's always a met which boils down to communication and boils down to intent.

So let's talk about intent versus impact, particularly in today's world.

You mentioned in our last interview that it's not the word, it's the intent behind the word.

But today, so many of our leadership happens over short emails, slack and text, where tone gets lost easily.

How can leaders ensure their positive intent isn't misconstrued as pressure or criticism?

Well, I don't know if you can assure anything.

That's a good point.

Because the minute somebody reads an email, they're going to take it the way they're thinking.

I want to go back before I answer that, though.

You were talking about the next generation and forced positivity.

And on this trail ride, I was with a group of young women and older women, but there were five women in a trailer.

And I decided this year that I would camp.

So just throw my camping gear on the back of the trailer.

I didn't take a driver or anything.

And it was the hardest thing I've ever done, I gotta tell you.

But these women were all in their late twenties and they instigated.

I had nothing to do with it.

At the end of the day, they would say, what was a rose, what was a thorn and what's a bud?

And this was their new way to come up.

I love that.

Yeah.

What was the.

What was the rose was your best part of today?

What was the thorn which hurt and what Are you looking forward to what's the bud?

That's excellent.

That's a great way.

We used to do highs and lows.

So when we raised our family, my wife, Sunday nights she would make cookies for everyone.

We raised seven and we'd make two batches of cookies and we had a gallon of milk and you got to pull out a cookie and whoever went first, we rotated, you know, we reverse engineered it on the second batch.

So you always got to pick your cookies.

And it was.

What was your high for the week?

What was your low for the week?

But I really love that rose.

What your.

What was the thorn rose, Thorn and bud.

Yeah.

Makes more sense.

Was not me.

And it was not the win Wednesday.

It was a new generation coming.

Nice to see that.

Absolutely.

I just thought that was a great.

I wanted to add that in depending on if somebody's using it or they could use it.

Well, that's what I. I've seen this.

And even in our own world, in our own style, I'm a baby boomer.

And so I grew up with command and control leadership.

Right.

We still have a lot of that.

If we look in at some of our government, we have sell people where it's just, I'm going to bark the orders.

You just follow my orders, and that's it.

And that's such an old school style and most people resent it, you know, unless you were raised in it and you're.

You're kind of comfortable in that environment.

But in today's world, and thank goodness young people, there's an evolution where they're going, hey, don't want to do it this way.

They have better values.

I think they have better.

They just have different values.

They have different.

They have different ideals.

For me, it was, you know, paper out soon as you could.

You're old enough to get one, then you worked and you're just always worked and it's hard to take time off.

Today they're going, they don't even take on the new job unless they got every other Friday off or they're negotiating their terms or they've got different set of values.

And I'm not saying one's better or we're so driven to productivity that we lose the humanity.

I think of what we do.

And I want to look at how does AI impact that?

What can we do as leaders to make sure that we're balancing that human to human element in our leadership?

Because it's, you know, today's marketplace is that condensing.

We're busy.

We're overwhelmed and people are getting overwhelmed because we're expected to do more with these tools and there's no more separation work.

Home, it's all the same.

It's a big blur.

It used to be we came home at the end of the day, dinner, evening, you know, watch whatever it was.

You're watching your show today, you're working, you're replying to emails at 8 o' clock at night, but you might be at your kid's soccer game at 4.

You know, there's how, how, where do today's leader.

What where do they need to be?

If we were going to identify some attributes, all right, just like you were going to go pick the best trail horse, what would that, what should we be looking for?

Well, I think the question has a couple of nuances.

If you're looking for a leader or you're going to look for different qualities and one of them is how much engagement do they engage in.

So you can bark orders, you can demand things.

That's one way of, of being a leader.

Or you can actually inquire and you can actually ask more questions.

But that leader doesn't even get to the questions until there's a real strong, clear direction of where you're headed and what is the value.

Because I just want to make my money and go home is one part of it.

Or you might say that we're as a team going to be the very best that we can be.

I think a leader doesn't.

Sometimes I think they are either given the team and they're trying to make do with it, or they really haven't determined what kind of a culture are they building within that team.

Are they building one of trust?

Are they building one of respect?

Because the minute somebody is disrespectful, that has to be handled.

Or are they building one of where the people are needy to them?

They have to.

You.

I, I can't do anything unless I ask the leader.

What, what are you creating?

Yeah, you have to look and say what team, what culture inside my own do I really want to create here?

And if it's a self managed, confident, authoritative.

I mean I can't believe how much we pay people and then want to do their job for them.

Right.

We, we put together the agenda, we put the.

No, you put it together and tell me what you're working towards.

Yeah, because you're making a lot of money and I'm leading but I'm not managing you anymore.

It's more important, you know, in, back in the day and I'M going back a couple of decades.

Well, we still see it today.

There's that pyramid.

It's the command and control leader sits on top.

The organizations on here.

I honestly believe it should be inverted and so that the leaders at the bottom of that organization supporting and lifting the organization.

In other words, if you're working for me, Shauna, what do you need?

What resources do you need?

What things can I do and bring into play to help you do what you do better and take care of,.

Argue with you or disagree if I can't?

Politely.

Yeah.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

If I've hired you at a good wage and you're as brilliant as I think young people are brilliant today, then I'm not going to support you or give you resources.

I'm going to ask you if you know where to find them.

We're living in a world where better question, better question, oh, I'm not there to support you.

And when I say my door is open.

Let me do for you.

Uh, that's a mother, that's a father.

Look it, I paid you a great sum of money.

Or maybe I'm not even paying you that great sum of money.

I'm paying you, however, to do your job.

Yeah, you have a job.

So there's expectations.

Yeah.

And so let's talk about the expectations I have from you.

Well, nobody told me where to get it.

Well, then the question is you don't know where to go.

I mean, in a world where you can Google anything, right?

Anything, you don't know where to help yourself.

Then I've hired poorly.

Yeah, that makes sense.

That makes sense.

My brain goes that way because I believe that if we do too much for others and a leader is the one that they are enabling them, strategy, they're going to look for where we're headed.

They're going to look for an example of respect and decorum and how to treat people with fairness, which means I'm a fair leader.

All of you have to figure it.

Out while you're enabling him.

It sounds like.

And it's almost the same with parenting.

Like, what have you considered?

What are your options?

Don't just give them everything and take care of it.

What would be good question to ask in the hiring process and say from an HR point of view, or if we're a leader and we're interviewing somebody in second, third interview to find that they have that ability to go and find solutions when they don't.

So I would imagine, hey, if you found a challenge and A thing.

And you can't go to your leaders.

How would you solve the problem?

Do you have any questions that come to mind that would be good questions to ask?

Well, of course, stories.

When was the last time that you actually led a project and how did you succeed?

A story.

Tell us about.

Or if you got yourself into a jam.

Have you ever had a flat tire?

What.

What were the actions that you took?

Now some people are going to fix it themselves.

Some people are going to call aaa.

Yeah, I'm saying that for me.

Yeah, but you know how to solve the problem yourself, so you know how to take care of it.

One of the biggest moments I thought we had or poignant moments from our 2022 chat was we're talking about hurt humans with compassion and boundaries.

How do we lead those types of people?

And you said that the ones that are the most hurtful humans are probably the ones hurting the most.

How can leaders lead difficult, reactive team members with empathy without letting toxicity damage the team?

It must isolate.

If you look at it and say that that person is hurting or upset or driven by their own personal agenda.

So, number one, you either have to isolate to be able to figure out what that is, but you also have to let the whole team know that is unacceptable without.

And empathy is an interesting word I can feel for you, and I'm still going to demand a certain standard.

So the question is, did this behavior adhere to how we will be in this teen culture?

That'll be a no all the way along.

You allow them to actually come to the conclusion that this is not appropriate.

You're not going to call them out unless they are losing it in front of everyone.

And then usually you'll just ask them, do you need a moment?

Do you need to walk out of here right now?

Or you don't even.

Then you tell and say, we're going to give you a moment.

Yeah.

Well, that's a good one.

Yeah.

Somebody's crying in your office and they're wanted.

They want to spew and tell you what's going on in their life.

Usually I'll ask the leader to just step back and say, I can see that you need a moment.

I'll give it to you.

And they walk out the door.

Now that makes them.

They wanted to unvent, they wanted to unleash, they wanted to be angry or whatever it is.

I can see that you need a moment.

That's an interesting way to deal with it.

It's an EQ issue.

And, you know, we talked prior to going live on the Show, I believe that EQ is the new mba.

You know, in my new book, I kind of detail it.

I think the emotional thing is AI can't be empathetic.

It can fake empathy, it can write something that makes you cry, but it's never had its heart broken.

Right.

So its process isn't there.

How, how do we develop the eq?

How important from a leadership point of view is EQ in today's world?

And how can a leader continually evolve that and develop it?

Real brilliant question.

And I think emotional is so important.

Here's the biggest thing.

You have to ask yourself a question.

And I think all leadership starts from you're first.

And the question you have to ask is, do I care enough or do I love enough?

Because if you love that team enough or you love that person enough, and love is a word that you don't see in business, but it truly is love.

Yeah.

Because if I love you enough, and you can love almost anything out of anybody if you love them enough.

Right where he was like, that's unacceptable.

Well, it was acceptable because it just happened.

So you have to love them enough to either figure out what's going on or loving them enough.

Love them enough.

Like your children.

If you love them enough.

My animals, if I love them enough, I will allow them to fail.

I will allow them to learn it on their own.

I'm cheating them if I do it for them.

Yeah.

And even with horses like you're asking, asking, asking until the horse goes, oh, I think I'll move forward.

They think it was their idea.

Yeah, but you gave them no other option.

And that's how you lead well, that you, you box them in with the questions and with the care and with your intent.

And then ultimately they go, I get it.

And you go, well, that's because you're wonderful.

No, I think it's a nice way to approach it.

And it's not what we see.

It's not what I was raised with, it's not what I see out in the marketplace.

But I think it's a great approach.

Let's talk about overcoming internal roadblocks and get up and go.

You've coached executive leaders for years on getting out of their own way and picking up their get up and go.

What is the number one self sabotaging pattern that you see top executives or leaders falling into right now?

And how do they break that?

I love the question.

We're living in a world, I think fear is the number one.

Thanks.

Stopping them.

And I think the fear is people will Go away from you.

In other words, I've got this team and I don't want to lose them.

I've got this team or I don't want to lose my highest performer who is the most ill behaved.

There's fear that we're going to fail with our teams, fear that they're going to leave, fear that the high performer will go somewhere else.

That's what I see in my own leadership life.

If you're asking somebody if they're taking the actions to stop the behavior, they'll go, well, I didn't want to upset them because they could leave.

So I think that's, I think fear is the biggest.

And we're frightened.

We're frightened that AI could take our jobs.

We have to become relevant.

We have to be able to say that I add values.

Yeah, but a leader's value is not that they are doing the work for their teams.

The leader's value is that their teams are so self managed that they're solving solutions before they even come up or they're making solutions or they're coming up with new creative ideas.

If they know the goal, get them the goal first.

Well, you're starting to see, I know there's decision paralysis is disguised as analysis.

So a lot of leaders want certain things as well in the uncertain world.

They want, you know, they get in by overthinking things.

We, we all have those moments.

We can overdo it, but I like that.

So fear and like I say, the role of AI.

How can AI help us in today's world with leadership?

So you said it can help amplify our abilities maybe as leaders.

Where should, where can we use it in our leadership role?

Well, it's a great thing.

I think AI works in so many ways and so when you have them check an email or you have a check your reports or you ask.

One of my clients is amazing, brilliant man, my oldest coaching client and still ready to learn.

I just, I just, he impresses me all the time and he is so verbose.

He was a doctor so he'll put all of the footnotes of where to find all of his research and people are like not reading it, not reading it.

So he goes into AI and says condense this or pull a point.

Yay for AI.

That's how you use AI.

But if you're actually looking for that twinge that I get you like if you're talking about horses, a horse can feel your breath, right?

When was the last time that you actually were with one of your team members and you actually breathed with them.

They don't know you're doing anything.

But AI could never replicate that.

No.

And interestingly enough, you talked about remote.

And I do all my executive coaching remotely, always over the phone.

And I don't use zoom for a reason.

It's distracting when I'm on the phone.

I've asked my clients for an assignment I had for one of my coaching programs.

They said, ask your clients what value they get from you.

So I texted instead of email, because people answer texts quicker than emails.

And I said, what are three things you get value from?

I got a hundred percent response.

That was a lesson.

An email I probably would not have.

And they all said things like, you hear what I'm not saying.

You are intuitive to me, and it's because I'm listening to their breath.

I'm listening to what they're not saying.

I'm asking the kind of questions and I'm just going to wait until they actually go, you know, well, what I really want.

And next thing we know, you're.

Yeah, you're on the issues.

You can do that over the phone.

So it's not like they have to be in front of you.

But a good leader is going to ask questions and then instead of spending the time thinking of their next question, like, my clients will say, shauna, I want to write down these questions.

No, no, all the questions come from whatever they say and what you want.

So if you're saying, hey, is this a reputation you want to make with me?

Listen.

And if they go, well, what reputation do you want?

And if they go, I haven't thought about it.

And you're like, well, let's think about it.

You know, it's interesting.

Have you tested AI as far as from a leadership point of view on its opinion?

Like, people will ask it issues, personal issues, professional issues.

They can actually ask it to help maintain it.

But it's going to answer the way Shawna Shu would.

In other words, it's your own, Michael,.

And I probably won't.

And here's the thing, and I know you love systems, and I do, too.

We got checklists, you're pilot.

There's.

There's good things about that.

But I believe that the very, very what AI can never replicate and why I cannot scale is because the human to human, I think that's what you're calling it.

H to H. H to H. Yep.

The human to human is.

I don't know the question until I'm uncovering what's in there.

And that's the whole Piece of the AI could never replicate.

They could ever, never.

They could never.

And so you look at it and go, why I can't stale.

Because if somebody goes to a leadership, many of my clients go to leadership courses and they learn great things.

But if it's not relevant to them right now, if it's not something they like, the only time we talk about a tantrum or a disrespectful team member is when it's happening.

And then if it's juicy and it's vibrant and they're like, I'm going to use that right now.

And then they learn these skills.

But if I just taught it as a concept, you will forget it when you got a disrespectful person.

Well, I'm so glad you, I'm so glad you made the point because that's really the heart of where it is.

That's how we defeat AI, that's how we compete is our human, human skills.

Because AI won't be empathetic, it won't read that room, it won't read that Bible or listen to that breathing and go, this ought to be the next question.

And so it's really, you could use it to help create questions if you were going or if you're going to have a meeting or you want to create an agenda, you can use it to amplify those, that boring mundane stuff or admin type responsibilities.

But we're going to want more and more connection completely particularly in the age of AI.

So I think the human to human skills are really where we should be focused in eq.

You have it.

You have it.

I would look at AI and think it's like an Excel spreadsheet.

In the old days we had to do all of that ourselves.

And now we put it all in and we ask the right questions and it pops it out.

AI is going to become, help us become more efficient, give us the directions, help us with things that, what I would consider are everyday mundane things that just like gps before we had it, we actually read maps.

Well women, women did, men didn't.

That's, that's an age old issue.

You can read a map, right?

You look at it and say AI is going to be brilliant to help us with all of this.

But it still is not.

It can't love us.

No.

You know, it comes to mind I was with my daughters a number of years ago and I was in a vehicle in my wife's truck and it was an intersection and a car crossed over the intersection and plowed into us.

And so I'm in the middle of the intersection.

No one was going fast.

So it was a, you know, something could easily be handled.

It's scary just the same because I had young children with me.

And I remember once I got him off to school and got everything settled down, I called the insurance company and I called the, you know, to call that accident line, to call it and report it.

And the first thing that the agent said to me was, Mr. Vickers, he said, I'm really sorry that you had the experience.

He goes, before we even get started in collecting all the information.

How are you doing?

And I almost started.

Well, I did.

I welled up in tears in my eye.

And it was just like, because I was worried about my family, my kids, all of those things.

AI will never do that.

Yeah, we can get AI quotes, but when I get into a problem or an issue or there's something, if I'm getting a procedure at a hospital, I want that nurse holding my hand.

I want that person talking to me.

I want that radiologist spending the time explaining those things.

So people worry about those things.

We need to learn what we need to learn, apply it to the parts of our job that it matters.

But I think we need to develop that human to human skill set.

You mentioned in the past that about 3% of people continuously educate themselves.

And this is something you and I are both in agreement on.

They don't read, they don't learn, and we're speaking generalization.

Matter of fact, I just read an article that was, came out in the Atlantic a few weeks ago.

Readings down to like 23% more people spend time online gambling than reading or they're scrolling or they're watching tv.

For listeners today who want to remain in that top 3% over the next three or four years, hopefully we'll get together sooner than that.

What daily or weekly discipline should they commit to starting today?

Well, I'm laughing because you're telling me the percentage of how people don't read books and you're putting out a book.

I know, it's true.

It's true.

Well, you know why we do it?

We do it for the work.

We do it for that percentage that does read or people who are concerned.

I know.

Yeah.

And 17% of people who buy business books finish those books.

So it's.

Yes.

And I'm a reader, I've been a ferocious reader, but now I listen to books more than I read them.

And so that would be one.

I, I think that there's, I've mentioned it a little Bit last time I study Benjamin Franklin, my morning group does the 13 virtues.

Yeah.

And Benjamin Franklin asked himself every morning, what good can I do today?

Yeah.

Okay, so if you actually said, how do we, how do we hit those 3%?

Or how do more people come up to it?

And doom scrolling and being on TikTok is not going to do it for you because that's individual.

So what could I do today for others or my team?

And then at the end of the day, he always asks himself, what good did I do today?

And I think that morning question and the afternoon question or evening question are that the bookends that hold your life into a place that says, I live today.

Yeah.

Or what was the rose, what was the thorn?

And what was the bud?

Yeah.

No, that's a good one.

Well, like I say, and learning today, like you said, you know, back I wrote my first few books, it was all printed.

You know, today we have to have them on audible, they're on ebook.

And there's no excuse not to learn anymore.

In my day growing up, we read books.

That's what you had today.

If you have problems with autism, you can listen to it, you can have it read to you, but there's so many ways to experience the information.

There's no excuse.

So it's that continuous learning process.

Shanashu.com is the website and anything exciting if helping leaders evolve through executive coaching.

Anything else exciting going on in your world?

I just am a happy girl and I think the more I recognize how happy I am, like I wake up and people go, really?

Yeah, yeah.

The minute you go look around.

And when we did this, when I did this ride, there was one day that was 27 and a half miles and I got in the saddle.

We had a lot of problems that day, but it was, it was an epic.

Like, there was fear, there was challenge, there was other horses to deal with.

We had to fight forward over water, we had to go up steep, we had to go down shear.

People got off their horses and walked.

That's how scary it was.

Right.

It was like an epic ride.

And so when you look at that and go, no technology.

We couldn't give service if we tried that.

You are living in this place.

If you each day can live where we're actually smelling and seeing and touching and experiencing all the gifts that we're given, then we're living all the way to the edges.

Well, you know, you make a good point.

I still believe that the best things in life are pretty much free.

You can get.

Listen to good music and get outside in nature.

And if you haven't been out in nature, I live in the, as you know, in the Rocky Mountains and love it.

I get to smell the air sometimes.

The forest fires too, and we get those.

It's embracing it and it's having gratitude for what we're doing.

We're all playing a game.

It's just how well can we play this game that we're playing?

And to your point, I'm glad to see that you're having fun and doing what you're doing.

Definitely a gift.

Lots of great insights.

Shauna, thanks so much for being our guest today.

Thank you.

And you're great.

You're a great host and you're a great questioner.

I tell you, you're a great guest.

And again, we'll have to do it again.

So we'll stay in touch.

Thanks, Shauna.

Thank you.

As you are listening to this episode, what is one idea that you've heard that's caught your attention and why does it matter so much to you?

And who is one person who you can share that with, either sharing this episode or just sharing that insight that occurred to you while you were listening?

Perhaps it is that effective leadership requires stepping back from fixing every problem and instead asking questions that foster self managed teams.

Or maybe it is that true human connection, emotional intelligence, and deep listening are critical leadership capabilities that AI cannot replicate.

Thank you for listening, for learning, and for investing in yourself so that you can become the best version of you.

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