Leadership in the workplace is paramount for organizational success. A strong leader fosters a positive work culture, motivates teams, and navigates challenges with resilience. Effective leadership inspires collaboration, innovation, and employee engagement, creating a foundation for growth. How can we continuously enhance leadership skills to propel our teams and organizations forward?

In today's episode, I had an insightful talk with Steven Turner, the Founder of Business Flow Solutions. Our discussion centered around nuances of leadership development and effective employee training strategies. We explored key aspects such as cultivating a positive work culture, fostering employee development, and addressing motivation, engagement, and retention challenges in the workplace. Tune in and unlock leadership insights!
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Listen to the podcast here:

Effective Leadership in The Modern Workplace with Steven Turner
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We’ve all had different experiences in different organizations and I think almost anyone listening that has worked for different organizations, worked for different managers within the same organization has experienced a difference between a manager and a leader, and I believe this is something I may have briefly talked about on some other previous episodes, being a manager is a person who can check off the Q2 list of tasks, make sure everything’s kind of going according to schedule, whereas a leader is someone that actually inspires their employees to be the best, inspires their employees to grow, and I think most of us would prefer to work under leaders. To elaborate on this topic, I would like to introduce my guest, Steven Turner. He is the founder of Business Flow Solutions [sic].
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Steven, welcome to the program.

 

Good to be here. Thank you very much.

 

So, you talk quite a bit about how to develop as a leader. What in your view truly makes someone a leader?

 

Well, the biggest thing about leadership, first of all, is just accept the fact that it’s not all about you, it’s about your team, and, as a result of being team oriented, you’re in a much better position to actually show interest in individual employees and develop them as individuals as opposed to just employees. That’s a massive conversation. I’ll give you the importance based on what happened to me. I think this is as good a way of any to explain it. But when I got started, I was a supervisor at UPS when I was a sophomore in college and UPS had part-time supervisors. So, when I got started, I got started early, I was 20 years old, and the people that were reporting to me were most likely older than I was. So, in your 30s, 40s, and 50s, nobody really cares too much. But in your 20s, a 22-year-old doesn’t like a 20-year-old guiding their life at the office. So I had to make a decision on day one of how was I going to make this work, so I simply decided to do this,

I would treat others the way I’d like to be treated. It worked on day one and it’s worked for 45 years since that date.Click To Tweet

So, in the process of leading people, if we always remember and always put ourselves in a position where we can put ourselves in their shoes so that we can see and understand what we’re saying, how would we like to receive what we think we’re trying to say, and I found it to be a massively beneficial approach because it allows the individual to be an individual, opposed to just doing something because I said so.

 

Yeah. So this was apparent to you when you were 20. When you were starting out, you kind of just looked around and said, “I need to do this, I need to treat others how I would want to be treated.” Why do you think this idea is so much harder to realize and enact for so many other people in leadership positions?

 

Historically, it goes all the way back to the Industrial Revolution.