Jeff Grimshaw Show Notes Page
Jeff Grimshaw, author of Five Frequencies, was treating his life like a dress rehearsal for the real thing. He finally realized this and it became the catalyst for him to put things into perspective, make some tough decisions, and do something different.
Jeff was born and raised in rural Southern Utah. He is the oldest of five (two brothers, two sisters). Jeff’s father, the first generation off the farm, was a third-grade teacher and money was tight. The family didn’t travel often, but some summers his parents took the kids shopping for school clothes in the nearest big city, Las Vegas, 90 miles to the southwest.
The culture of Las Vegas and the culture of Jeff’s mostly Mormon hometown couldn’t be more different—and those differences fascinated him. He wondered why people in different communities know what they know, feel what they feel, and do what they do.
He went North to college to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where he earned degrees in Organizational Communication and Political Science. After graduation, he got recruited to a consulting firm in Philadelphia, where he developed statistical models for predicting customer behavior. When he had the chance to focus instead on organizational and employee research, he jumped at the opportunity. At some point, he realized his passion was less about running stats, and more about figuring out what leaders need to do to move the needle on engagement, culture, and other metrics related to organizational performance and health.
Jeff has lead-authored two data-driven books that demystify challenging leadership topics in practical ways: 1). Leadership without Excuses: How to Create Accountability and High Performance…Instead of Just Talking about It, published by McGraw-Hill in 2010); and 2). Five Frequencies: Leadership Signals that Turn Culture into Competitive Advantage.
Jeff is a principal at MGStrategy, where they help leaders measure and manage culture as a source of competitive advantage. The team is currently helping senior leaders on six continents. Jeff is married and, after more than 25 years in Philadelphia, now lives in rural Mount Gretna. His daughter is entering her freshman year at Penn College of Technology.
Quotes and Mentions
Listen to @jeff_grimshaw to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow – Click to Tweet
“Leaders are constantly transmitting signals across five frequencies and these are what creates culture.” – Click to Tweet
“If you’ve got a great culture, it’s because you’ve got strong and steady signals across five frequencies.” – Click to Tweet
“Lots of organizations have had the delusion that they’re going to change their culture with formal communication.” – Click to Tweet
“In a culture that gives you a source of competitive advantage, what do you need your people to consistently know, feel, and do?” – Click to Tweet
“How do you close that gap between the culture you have and the culture you need?” – Click to Tweet
“What do you tolerate or not tolerate?” – Click to Tweet
“So many leaders weak spot is that they tolerate stuff they shouldn’t tolerate.” – Click to Tweet
“High-performers start looking for the exits when they see that they’re given more work to do to make up for their leaders failure to hold poor performers accountable.” – Click to Tweet
“Are you showing up in a way where your team feels like you are part of their tribe.” – Click to Tweet
“Human beings are wired to constantly monitor for inequity.” – Click to Tweet
“Everybody has different emotional algorithms in which they process rewards.” – Click to Tweet
“You have to spend time with people to understand some of the contours of their emotional algorithms.” – Click to Tweet
“While everyone is different, everybody wants to be appreciated.” – Click to Tweet
“You do have to manage for perceived inequity all of the time.” – Click to Tweet
“Even when it’s in their job description, when they’re doing good stuff, demonstrate appreciation.” – Click to Tweet
“You have to have an organization where mistakes become intellectual capital.” – Click to Tweet
“You have to have an organization where we constantly reserve the right to get smarter.” – Click to Tweet
“If you want to change something in an organization, you’ve got to change the conversation.” – Click to Tweet
Hump to Get Over
Jeff Grimshaw, author of Five Frequencies, was treating his life like a dress rehearsal for the real thing. He finally realized this and it became the catalyst for him to put things into perspective, make some tough decisions, and do something different.
Advice for others
You can be in creating mode or reacting mode, but you’re going to have to pick where you put your best energy.
Holding him back from being an even better leader
Self-limiting beliefs.
Best Leadership Advice
Awareness precedes choice and choice precedes change.
Secret to Success
Always be smart, never be an a-hole, and try to do cool things so you can be outcomes-focused.
Best tools in business or life
What do you want people to know, feel, and do?
Recommended Reading
Contacting Jeff Grimshaw
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffgrimshaw/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeff_grimshaw
Website: https://fivefrequencies.com/
Resources and Show Mentions
Bob Anderson on the Fast Leader Show
Show Transcript:
241: Jeff Grimshaw: What are your leadership signals?
Intro: Welcome to the Fast Leader podcast where we uncover the leadership life hacks that help you to experience, breakout performance faster and rocket to success and now here’s your host customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.
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Okay, Fast Leader legion, today I’m excited because we have somebody on the show today who’s going to make sure you are actually sending the right signals. Jeff Grimshaw was actually born and raised in rural southern Utah. He is the oldest of five, he has two brothers and two sisters. Jeff’s father, the first generation of the farm, was a third grade teacher and money was tight. The family didn’t travel often but some summers his parents took the kids shopping for school clothes in the nearest big city Las Vegas, which was 90 miles to the southwest. The culture of Las Vegas and the culture of Jeff’s mostly Mormon hometown couldn’t be more different and those differences fascinated him. He wondered why people in different communities know what they know, feel what they feel, and do what they do. He went north to college, to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where he earned degrees in organizational communication in Political Science. After graduation he got recruited to a consulting firm in Philadelphia, where he developed statistical models for predicting customer behavior. When he had the chance to focus instead on organizational employee research he jumped at the opportunity. At some point he realized his passion was less about running stats and more about figuring out what leaders need to do to move the needle on engagement culture and other metrics related to organizational performance and health.
Jeff has lead authored two data-driven books that demystified challenging leadership topics in practical ways. Accountability which is Leadership Without Excuses: How to Create Accountability in High Performance (Instead of Just Talking About it) published by McGraw-Hill in 2010 and two, culture, Five Frequencies: Leadership signals That Turn Culture Into Competitive Advantage, published by logos in 2019.
Jeff is a principal at MG strategy, where they help leaders measure and manage culture as a source of competitive advantage. The team is currently helping senior leaders on six continents Jeff is married and after more than 25 years in Philadelphia now lives in Rolle, Mount Gretna. His daughter is entering her freshman year at Penn College of Technology. Jeff Grimshaw are you ready to help us get over the hump?
Jeff Grimshaw: Yeah let’s do it. Thanks, Jim, I love the introduction. I felt like I was listening to my eulogy but it was pretty good. I hope my actual eulogy someday is that flattering.
Jim Rembach: Well Jeff I hope and pray that you’re a heck of way, a long way away from that.
Jeff Grimshaw: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, me too.
Jim Rembach: But I’ve given my Legion a little bit about you, but can you tell us what your current passion is, so that we can get to know you even better.
Jeff Grimshaw: Yeah. So I am a bit of a geek. I was talking to a friend yesterday, actually the guy I wrote Leadership without excuses with ten years ago. He was saying that all his friends were saying “Why aren’t you golfing more” and he said “I don’t really like golf, what I really like doing is the brain candy of helping clients solve tough challenges” and I said “I feel exactly the same way.” I feel like it beats having a real job. Brain candy of somebody being in a tough spot and applying some brain power to it and seeing if we can come up with practical solutions driven by data. So I’d like to tell you something cooler than that but if I’m being honest and I like to be honest, that’s really what I’m truly passionate about.
Jim Rembach: Well I think for me I share some of those similar passions as far as being able to take evidence, and using that evidence in association with other points of evidence and maybe some theoretical factors and research and insights that have been captured in other places and putting all this complexity together to try to find a way forward. I mean it’s problem-solving at its best, right, using data but then when you throw the human element and it’s like you’re making an impact in people’s lives, I mean for me that’s like hey that’s getting to the point of bliss.
Jeff Grimshaw: Yeah absolutely a case in point. Last Friday, I spent the day with the senior team in the finance department, the CFO and his team for the city of Detroit. Their stated goal is not only to be a great finance operation, their goal is to build the capability and the infrastructure so that Detroit survives the next recession. So, talk about having a compelling challenge that you’re working on that has an impact on tons of people and of course when the longest expansion in US history. So at some point we’re going to have another recession and so to have the opportunity to work on really gritty important stuff like that is I just think it’s a real blessing the.
Jim Rembach: That beats getting frustrated out on the golf course.
Jeff Grimshaw: From my perspective, because I suck at golf, given a choice between those two things I know what I’d rather be doing.
Jim Rembach: Most definitely. Okay, so “Five Frequencies” the recent book that you have released that we’re talking about, talks about leadership signals that turn culture into competitive advantage. But I think for you and focusing in on what you call the frequencies and part of what you and I had talked about prior to actually hitting the record button, has to do with being able to connect all parts of the organization. I think for me that’s why frequencies, when you start talking about that kind of had some resonance, however, let’s pull everybody else into your thinking and talk to us a little bit about frequencies and why that contextual focus.
Jeff Grimshaw: Yeah. So the idea is that—where does culture comes from? Our research shows that whether they intend to or not leaders are constantly transmitting signals across what we call the five frequencies and that these signals are what creates culture. If you’ve got a great culture it’s because you’ve got strong and steady signals across these five frequencies. If your culture stinks and creates reputational risk and is hurting business performance it is because what leaders have done typically unintentionally across those five frequencies those signals that they are sending again whether they intend to or not.
Jim Rembach: Well of course that leaves us into you talking about what those five frequencies are, right?
Jeff Grimshaw: Yeah. So five frequencies. First, you are sending signals and shaping culture, whether you intend to or not, is through your decisions and actions. Second is through what your reward and recognize. The third is through what you tolerate or don’t tolerate. Fourth is how you show up informally. And what we mean by that is in unscripted situations where for example you are with your team and you’re not doing a town-hall, you’re not working from a PowerPoint deck, it’s not a presentation, so how you show up informally in conversation. Then the fifth, frequency is formal communication. Lots of organizations have had the delusion that they’re going to change their culture with just signals on highly polished signals on the fifth frequency form of communication. So they might make killer videos, they might have really nice posters but when you have signals on the fifth frequencies that are divorced from the signals on the other four frequencies, either people ignore it or worse make fun of those things because they’re well aware of the gap between frequencies one through four and what you’re transmitting on frequency five.
Jim Rembach: So when you start thinking about these frequencies, I would also have to start thinking about from an analytical perspective key drivers, right? You start at the independent variables and the dependent variables and a lot of times we confuse causation and correlation all these data issues that we come up with. And so when you start talking about these five frequencies, what do you find is one of the dependents that often drives a lot of these other variables?
Jeff Grimshaw: That’s a great question, and this is actually what we do day in and day out is just to take half step back. I’m still in the statistical game. We help organizations measurably define their desires they culture and we do by saying, the culture that gives you a source of competitive advantage, what do you need your people to consistently know and feel and do and we help them figure out the top 15-20 answers to that question we get a baseline measurement, so now we know what they actually know, feel and do and we can see. Okay, now how do we close that gap between the culture you have and the culture you need? The signals that we send across those five frequencies they all have an impact but there are two that have I think a disproportionate impact in most organizations.
What do you tolerate or not tolerate? Frequency three. There are so many leaders who actually do a good job on the other frequencies but their weak spot, their Achilles heel is they tolerate stuff they shouldn’t tolerate. They don’t like having unpleasant conversations or they go—I can’t hold this person accountable because he or she knows how to do some stuff and it would be too hard, or I’d like to performance manage them but HR is going to give me a hard time or some other excuse they come up with and it has really significant downstream consequences. We see in the research that high performers at some point start looking for the exits when they see that they’re actually just given a thing or they’re given more work to do to make up for their leaders’ failure to hold poor performers accountable. In other words, the reward for winning the pie eating contest for high performance is you just get more pie and eventually they go–that’s not a culture I want to be part of.
The second thing that has a disproportionate influence on the outcome variables typically is how leaders show up on the fourth frequency. How they show up informally, and this really gets to are you showing up in a way where your team feels like you are part of their tribe, not that your best friend, not that you’re necessarily family, or that you, so that because you’ve got to be able to hold them accountable, but do they feel like you are part of the same tribe because you’re part of the same tribe, that means that as an employee you feel comfortable learning from mistakes instead of hiding them, that you feel like you can constantly improve things that you can speak up, that you can find ways to innovate and that you’re not just going to get shot down by a leader who doesn’t really want to listen to you. So they’re all important but those are two big ones that are not obvious to everybody that just have a big impact downstream on culture and on business performance.
Jim Rembach: So for me as you were explaining those, I started thinking about the one of the biggest drivers I think we all have as human beings and that’s the whole fear component. The fear of the confrontation, the fear of losing something and so therefore I just avoid it which in and of itself compounds the problem it doesn’t fix the problem. So for me as part of my morning’s as I will get myself ready and watch a little bit of the news to kind of acclimate myself and then I look at the particulars stories that they’re covering at a national level and one of the stories that I was watching today was talking about partly of this issue, meaning that the reward or what is given to those that are the high performers is just yet more work and so after a while they just like you said they just kind of look around and say well wait a minute I’m working my tail Off, I am carrying this torch for everyone and I have nobody to pass the baton to so guess what sayonara baby.
Jeff Grimshaw: Yeah. There are organizations who are just to be clear, everybody works their tail off and if you look around and you see everybody else working their tail off you go “This is pretty cool.” I mean we’re all passionate about the work, but one of the things that I think we know from neuroscience and evolutionary biology is that human beings are really wired to constantly monitor for inequity and for fairness. And so when we look around and we go—I’m working my tail off and other people are skating and getting the same rewards I am, maybe I’m just really like the job so I’m wired to work hard, so I’ll do that for a while, I am not doing that forever.
Jim Rembach: I think you hit on something that’s extremely important there, the whole equity and fairness thing because we also know that we want to be treated as an individual. I think this is where kind of these frequencies come back into play and talking about what I’m modeling, what I’m communicating, is that we do have a diverse organization, we do have a diverse workforce and therefore there is going to be different expectations and different things that people are going to be interacted with are provided or things like that and it’s going to cause are those perceived inequities what they really are is customizations. But if we don’t communicate and therefore position it as such as part of our overall strategy and vision, people are going to draw their own conclusions.
Jeff Grimshaw: Right. Everybody is different, and that makes it hard to be a leader because everybody has different emotional algorithms by which they process rewards, what is most rewarding for me could be different than what’s most rewarding for you or for the next person. That’s why leaders get paid the big bucks is because part of your job is to figure out how to motivate performance and that means that you have to spend time with people to understand some of the contours of their emotional algorithms, so that if they’re doing great stuff you how to deliver that for them.
For example is this somebody who is who is going to feel more and rewarded if you are spending time with them, if you are giving them great attention, or is the greater reward for them staying the heck out of their way, but you’re not going to know. There’s no one-size-fits-all you’re going to have to figure that out. One of the things that we do know is that while everybody’s different, everybody wants to be appreciated, and so I think that’s one of the most important things that people forget. You do have to manage for perceived inequity all the time but if you’re doing a lousy job of just showing people basic appreciation for doing good stuff then they’re going to be more attune to and potentially triggered by perceived inequity than they are if you’re just doing a great job of showing people on a day to day basis that when they’re doing good stuff, even if it’s in their job description. If they’re doing good stuff you’re demonstrating appreciation and saying thanks.
Jim Rembach: Well as you’re going through all this, I start thinking about how I may be programmed or wired as a leader, what I’ve been conditioned to, what I’ve been exposed to, and then therefore that translates into my behavior, that translates into what I do when I’m not on stage. And so when you start thinking about being able to go through a transformation process, we’re talking about things that are extremely difficult for organizations. So for example put it in context of frequencies is that I’ve been broadcasting this way in this frequency for a very, very, very long time, how do I change what I’m actually broadcasting?
Jeff Grimshaw: Yeah. This happens a lot like I’ve been in two conversations in just the last week where leaders who are middle-aged white guys like me, were in a room and they were complaining about how the Millennials that work for them need all this attention and need all this reinforcement. They need validation, they need new experiences, they need novelty and I didn’t need that when I was growing up in the organization, and they might be right and it might be frustrating but you sort of have to confront reality. I mean, if people don’t always like it when I quote Machiavelli but there was a thing that Machiavelli said in The Prince, he said “He who neglects what should be done for what is done sooner affects his ruin than his preservation.” What he meant by that is, if you sit around talking about, “well people should just feel motivated by this,” “well people should just do that or the other thing” and Machiavelli words “Your sooner affecting your ruin than your preservation” because what we should focus on is what people are actually doing not what they should be doing based on the way that you grew up in the world.
Jim Rembach: Okay, So that leads me to believe that there’s oftentimes inability to see that most important frequency that we’re broadcasting, if we’re talking about having an organization that perseveres, overcomes, achieves, and excels, is that we have an innocent victim in all of this dysfunction and inability to pick up and broadcast in the right way is that’s a customer. So when you start looking at the customer impact in these five frequencies, do you find certain things that kind of standout? I mean, I know you hit and said that third frequency is the most important, but is that the one that oftentimes the customer feels the most as well?
Jeff Grimshaw: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think for that, it’s probably true. But as you were asking the question the first thing I thought of is really frequency for how leaders show up informally and here’s why I say that. Right now, I’m working with a big global pharmaceutical company, and they are working to become more customer centric, and what that really means is how do we get more medicines to more patients faster. And they realize that they’re incredibly successful organization, they have so much to be proud of right now but they also think, “We’re big, we can be bureaucratic, we could be a heck of a lot more agile” and one of the things that they have committed to is the idea that if you want to have a more agile organization, a more customer focused organization then you have to have an operation or organization that gives people a heck of a lot more trust. You have to have an organization where people can fail fast and learn from it instead of hiding mistakes. You have to have an organization where mistakes become intellectual capital. You have to have an organization where we constantly reserve the right to get smarter, hey we said we were going to do this but instead of doubling down on something that isn’t working very well, let’s reserve the right to get smarter and rapidly experiment with something else. And people are only willing to do that in an organization where they trust their leaders and they feel like their leaders trust them. The only way to make that happen is again, is if leaders are getting out there and operating as coaches as opposed to a strict command and control organization where it’s “Bring me that rock or bring me a rock” and then people freak out and go into committees trying to figure out the rock that they’re supposed to bring back to the boss.
Jim Rembach: So that, it’s that all-important trust component, and so when I start thinking about a journey, a pathway, transformation, and you talking about the agile component that’s just one of the approaches that will help with the whole transformation process, but when you start looking at the timeline and the expectation, because I think this is important, because when we start thinking about the frequency element, I’m having to modulate and having to adjust having to do all that and I oftentimes have baggage and miscommunication that had in the past I had to fix. What do people expect as far as an impact in effect when I start getting and broadcasting the right way and having things received the wrong way versus what really happens, so in other words giving kind of context is that many many many years ago my wife and I bought an older home and so we did a walk through, I knew it had to be rehabbed and so she looked around and She said “So how long will it take for you to remodel this stuff, three weeks?” and I spend two years later I finally finished. What is the expectation versus the reality?
Jeff Grimshaw: Yeah. We have seen cultures transformed and not just like Anna totally. We measure culture, we measure culture for organizations. So we have seen organizations absolutely transform in eighteen months. We have seen leadership experiments where we go from a baseline to a measurement four months later and they’ve real moved the needle because they an entire leadership team really took seriously broadcasting different signals across the five frequencies and we see statistically significant differences three or four months later but that’s not transformation that’s just moving the needle in the right direction. So really 18 months is the best-case scenario and I have to add, I’m sad to say we have had clients who were under a lot of pressure from an example from a board to make a bad culture good in 18 months we had results that showed that the culture was really night and day difference they prematurely declared victory and one year later they’re pretty much back where they started because they took their foot off the gas, so big cautionary tale, you just have to treat culture. Most leaders say absolutely culture is important and most leaders they don’t think its provocative when we say that culture is seen an asset or a liability, it can be a source of competitive advantage, but what do you do with everything else that is really important to business, you measure it and you manage it. So why wouldn’t you treat culture that way. Lots of organizations liked the idea but they don’t quite have the appetite, its hard work.
Jim Rembach: Well it is hard work, and with hard work we need things to continually help to give us a boost and reinforce us, and one of the things that we look at on the show to help us do that are quotes. So is there a quote or two that you like that you can share.
Jeff Grimshaw: Yeah, I was telling you about Greg Baron, my co-author on leadership with that excuses the book on accountability that we wrote ten years ago and he has two quotes that I love and one of them is “Your greatest source of power as a leader is the ability to change the way people feel” and honestly when I first heard him saying that I was like, dude that sounds like the lyric to a Johnny Mathis song, I mean that’s so soft and fuzzy. And I was unenlightened 20 years ago and then when I started getting into behavioral economics and when the big discovery was that most economic choices are actually based on emotional algorithms I was like, dude actually you were right all along, he was like, yeah no kidding.
The second quote is from him that I quote him all the time is “Everything that happens in an organization happens in or because of a conversation.” So if you want to change something in an organization it means you’ve got to change the conversation, and a lot of the work that I’m doing with senior teams is really at a basic level. We can call it strategic planning, we can call it culture, we can call it anything you want but in a lot of cases it’s really about how do we change the conversation. The conversation that you as a leadership team are having and then how do you change the broader conversation in the organization knowing that really that’s the best the leverage point where everything happens.
Jim Rembach: Well that’s not a good marketing message.
Jeff Grimshaw: That’s a terrible marketing message.
Jim Rembach: Well needless to say I mean you talked about right there, a time where you got all the hump in regards to your mindset and what you were thinking and perceiving and those moments can be very valuable to us and others can learn from them. Can you think of a time where you actually had that in addition to that that you can share, that you you’ve got over the hump?
Jeff Grimshaw: Yeah well I’m going to go back to my buddy Greg Baron again because I spend a lot of time that my firm MG strategy is kind of an interesting firm I think because the four principles were all part of another firm at one point, I’m not going to say the name, but we were all part of another firm and we all kind of had a Jerry Maguire moment where we said we love what we do we just don’t like the culture were part of and so we took the goldfish or verbally and started our own firm. But I put that off for a long time and my buddy Greg Baron had said to me for a few years, dude you treat your life like it’s a dress rehearsal for the real thing, and honestly when I was in my 30s as like that is a good saying I’m going to write that down and say it to other people but I didn’t actually take it to heart, and then this is over ten years ago when all of a sudden it was like I’m turning 40 I was like, holy crap, he was right I have been treating my life like it’s a dress rehearsal for the real thing I actually need to make some tough decisions. So that’s a big existential moment and probably not like the day-to-day Wednesday hump that you’re thinking of, but still I think when you’re facing a hump even if it’s a small thing I go back to what Greg said, are you treating your life like it’s a dress rehearsal for the real thing? Sometimes that’s the catalyst to put things into perspective and do something different.
Jim Rembach: Well I think that’s exactly what we’re looking. When you start thinking about humps and for us, and I think all of us would say that some were significantly bigger than others. And ultimately when we start talking about as adults how we learn the most it’s in community of one another and by sharing our stories. All of those things can really help us to self-reflect in to say, uh am I in dress rehearsal?
Well when I think about what you’re doing, the work that you’re doing, you even talk about the city, you and I talked about a couple of industry verticals as well, when you start looking at where you’re headed, where you’re going, what is one of your goals?
Jeff Grimshaw: Great question. I think one of my goals is to expand. One of the things that we spend a lot of time, you and I talked about utility companies. My first consulting gig was with a utility company and 26 years later they’re still this a client, I was there yesterday. One of the things that we found last year was the model works universally. Honestly a year ago I didn’t know for sure whether five frequencies was really just something that made the most sense and English- speaking countries in North America but over the last year we now have leadership experiments going on six continents. I have been to Antarctica but we don’t have any leadership experiments going on there with the five frequencies. So I think a lot of it is just about because I’m all about brain candy one of my goals is to be able to just keep going after new kinds of organizations and experimenting with the model and seeing what works and recalibrating when it doesn’t which is of course what we’re always asking our clients to do.
Jim Rembach: And the fast leader legion wishes you the very best.
Jeff Grimshaw: Thank you.
Jim Rembach: Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor.
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Alright here we go Fast Leader legion it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay Jeff, the Hump Day Hoedown is the part of our show where you give us good insights fast. So I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us robust yet rapid responses that can help us move onward and upward faster. Jeff Grimshaw are you ready to hoedown?
Jeff Grimshaw: I’m going to say yes. I’m feeling a little trepidation but I hope I do a good job. Yes. I’m ready to go, let’s do this.
Jim Rembach: You’re going to be great. Okay, so what is holding you back from being an even better leader today?
Jeff Grimshaw: Like for anybody else I think its self-limiting beliefs. I think it’s about really understanding what are the beliefs that are motivating, the choices that you make. Awareness precedes choice, choice precedes change, so it’s about being aware the beliefs that are driving behavior and then shifting beliefs where that’s appropriate.
Jim Rembach: What is the best leadership advice you have ever received?
Jeff Grimshaw: I’m going to go back to what I said before which is awareness precedes choice and choice precedes change. And that’s what Greg Baron said by the way, so now I’m up to four quotes for him, I’m going to call him after I’m done with this podcast and give him some love and tell him how much he’s profoundly influenced me because I’m running out of fingers to count my Greg Baron quotes on this podcast.
Jim Rembach: Well most definitely you need to tell Greg he needs to be one of our guests on the Fast leader’s show that’s for sure. So what do you feel is one of your secrets that helps you be successful in business or life?
Jeff Grimshaw: In our firm we have an informal mantra and that mantra is always be smart never be an a-hole and try to do cool things and you’ll always be in business and you’ll always be happy. I don’t know if that’s actually 100 percent true or guaranteed to work all the time but for us and our firm that’s been working really well for 11 years and we started in the recent Great Recession.
Jim Rembach: And what do you feel is one of your best tools that helps you be successful?
Jeff Grimshaw: We use a tool called what do you want people to know, feel, and do, that’s how we get leadership desired state culture. But it’s a useful tool for communication, a lot of times if you’re going into an important meeting if you stop before you go into that meeting you go okay what are my outcomes, don’t forget about my talking points, what about comes here, Who am I talking to, and if this is a successful meeting what I want them to know and to feel and to do as a result the way I show up and communicate, then you can be outcomes focus when you go into the conversation, lots of people swear by that tool.
Jim Rembach: And what do you feel is one of your favorite books of all time, and of course we’re going to put a link to five frequencies on your show notes page as well.
Jeff Grimshaw: All right well I talked a lot about Greg Barron but one of my other mentors in life is a guy named Bill Adams and a lot with Bob Anderson, he wrote a book in the last year called “Scaling Leadership” and it’s also just incredibly data based, I mean there’s a million data points. Literally, a million plus data points that went into that book that shows really what you need to do to be a successful leader in environment of volatility and uncertainty which most of us are facing, I mean that’s what fast leadership is about and even though the book is driven by data it’s super accessible. Came out last year and I was going to read it because Bill’s my mentor and so I said, okay, it might take me a year to read this book but I owe it to Bill to read his book and I read the whole darn thing in like a Saturday morning, it’s a good book.
Jim Rembach: I actually had Bob Anderson on the show as well and they put together some phenomenal work, that’s for sure. So we’ll put that on your show notes page as well and in fast legion you can actually find more information when you go to Jeff’s show notes page which will be at Fastleader.net/JeffGrimshaw.
Okay Jeff, this is my last Hump Day Hoedown question. Imagine you were given the
opportunity go back to the age 25 and you have the opportunity to take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you but you can’t take it all you can only choose one, so what’s skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?
Jeff Grimshaw: Yeah. I think it actually it goes to what Bob Anderson’s and Bill Adams research is about. That the one thing that’s changed my life is their whole theory around you can be either in creating mode or you can be in reactive mode, where you’ve got something to prove or you can be creating stuff that’s really important to you, outcomes that are important to you and your family but you probably have to pick where you’re going to put your best energy. If I had that paradigm in my head when I was 25 I would have avoided a lot of mistakes and been a lot happier and been a lot more successful but I’m darn glad that I have had that paradigm firmly rooted in my head for the last 10 years.
Jim Rembach: Jeff I’ve had a great time with you but can you tell or fast leader legion how they can connect with you.
Jeff Grimshaw: Yeah absolutely. We have a book website and it is called fivefrequencies.com and you can either put the numeral 5 or you can spell out the word five, fivefrequencies.com. And when you get there you can download for free the books’ introduction, so you can try before you buy, and lots of folks are using the book they’ve told us in their business book clubs or leadership book clubs and we also have a discussion guide that you can download obviously for free as well. So I hope folks will check it out.
Jim Rembach: Jeff Grimshaw, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom the Fast Leader legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump.
Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader show today for recaps, links from every show, special offers, and access the download and subscribe if you haven’t already head on over the Fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster.
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