Lead In 30 Podcast

Strengthen Your Ability to Create Silence

• Russ Hill

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Have you ever thought of creating silence as an ability? What if it were a skill that you could develop? In this episode we dig into how most leaders simply aren't good at listening and the impact that creating silence can have on a team and their performance.

In the ever-evolving landscape of modern workplaces, your ability to lead others cannot remain stagnant.  Ryan Holiday talks about how practicing silence can empower leaders to engage their teams. This episode emphasizes the importance of stepping back and creating space for others to contribute, ultimately enhancing team dynamics and individual growth.

Explore how the relentless quest for validation, both on social media and within the boardroom, can derail decision-making processes. Through innovative techniques like "listen, position, listen," leaders can create truly inclusive environments that prioritize alignment over mere agreement. This episode offers actionable insights into honing active listening skills, fostering an organizational culture that truly thrives on communication and inclusion. Tune in to transform how your team communicates and collaborate toward stronger, more effective leadership.

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About the podcast:
The Lead In 30 Podcast with Russ Hill is for leaders of teams who want to grow and accelerate their results. In each episode, Russ Hill shares what he's learned consulting executives. Subscribe to get two new episodes every week. To connect with Russ message him on LinkedIn!



Speaker 1:

You are so desperate for validation. No, for real, I know it, it's absolutely true, it's true of everybody. We are so desperate for validation and it's one of the major issues inside our organization, so let's talk about it. This is the lead in 30 podcast with Russ Hill. You cannot be serious, strengthen your ability to lead in less than 30 minutes.

Speaker 1:

When I first started traveling a ton, I got into the consulting business, right. So I'm hired by this consulting firm and I'm given, I'm made like the most junior person on our account teams, right, and I'm assigned to this organization and that company and you'd recognize the names of all of these companies big, gigantic organizations and automotive industries and healthcare industries, insurance industries, restaurant industries, defense contractors, all these big companies. And so, like I start traveling, I'm not allowed. I'm not allowed to speak in the meetings, like. So our team from our firm, a team from our firm, would go out to work. You know we'd be at an offsite or a strategic meeting or a um, a senior leadership team meeting, or maybe it was an all leadership meeting with with 2000 people in the room, and um, and so there'd be a team from our firm assigned to go to that meeting and we're working on that account and and I'm I'm the most junior person, not by age and not by, not by experience, leading teams, but by time, at our firm right. So I'm brand new. So there's like zero chance that they're going to let me up on the stage or in the front of the boardroom. I'm in the back taking notes, right, and I'm not 22 years old doing this, right. I'm like double Not quite, but um. So it was a really humbling experience and and as I get involved in this industry, I get going right.

Speaker 1:

So, meeting after meeting after meeting, and flight after flight after flight, and week after week after week, and now months and months and and I don't know how long it had been, but let's say probably three months in, six months in, I don't know and I'd been to all these companies in all these different places across the US and throughout the world and I started to really ponder and reflect on my experiences. I got at this point where I could breathe a little bit and I'm looking back and I'm like what, what have I learned? Like, this is my introduction to the corporate world and I've never been in the room with leaders of like Fortune 10 companies, like the 10 biggest companies in the world. You know, I've never been in that kind of a setting before, and so what am I learning? What am I seeing?

Speaker 1:

I've interacted now with thousands of leaders and all these different organizations, and my biggest takeaway was, you know what? I think so many of the problems, so many of the issues and challenges that these organizations, that these um leadership teams, these executive teams, are experiencing so many of them would go away, would be fixed, would be solved if those leaders were better, more skilled at listening. Like they're not listening to each other. They're all so passionate. They've got great experience, they've got great ideas. They've got great ideas. They've got strategic plans that they built out. They've got a um, uh, they're, they're driven, they want to accomplish things. They've got, they've got these ideas, and yet they aren't listening to each other. And so it got me thinking about the skill of listening, and in this episode, what I want to dig into for just a few minutes is the skill, is the art of silence. The art of silence and being deliberate about it. That's what I want to talk about in this episode.

Speaker 1:

Welcome into the lead in 30 podcast. My name is Russ Hill. I make my living coaching, consulting senior executive teams at some of the world's biggest companies. Lead in 30 is a podcast where, in less than 30 minutes in each episode, we give you a nugget, an idea, a story, a best practice, a model, a framework, something to consider to get you thinking about how you might more effectively lead others.

Speaker 1:

If you are as good, as effective, as skilled leading people in 2025, as you were in 2024, that ain't good Like. You've got to get better. And the workplace is changing. It's dynamic. So the needs and desires and, and all of that, the way that people work is changing. So if you're leading the same way, you're like wow, I've been a really good leader. I learned how to lead and I've been leading others since 1995. Well, I got news for you the workforce now ain't got the same needs and demands as they did in 95. In fact, they don't even have the same demands as they did in 2020. It's changing the world's in motion, 2020. It's changing the world's in motion. So in this podcast, we try to give you things to think about to help you build and strengthen and keep up your skill, and one of them that we're going to talk about in this episode of silence.

Speaker 1:

By the way, if you haven't subscribed to the podcast, click the add button, the follow, the subscribe, whatever it is, in whatever app you're using, and it would be so valuable if you find value in these episodes to be so meaningful to us. It's how we grow. If you text the link to the podcast to somebody else, there's a share button for an episode. When you find an episode, you're like man, that's really good. I know someone who needs to listen to that. Share it. That's how we grow. Okay, I would. I would appreciate that.

Speaker 1:

So much lead in 30.com, by the way, is the website, the address, the URL for our 30 day leadership development cohort? We don't. We, we've gone back and forth. You all, when we first developed the lead in 30, we offered it to the public. Like you alone could go just by yourself, we, we did that for a year and then we were we. It was just organizations that were buying it for 300 managers here, 50 managers there, 2000 managers there, and then, about a year ago, we decided to go back and and offer it to the public again for about a month. It just it doesn't it. It takes too much of our effort and and and you can just understand from a business standpoint, a business viewpoint like for us. It's just so much more effective, efficient for us to offer it to organizations that are buying licenses to lead in 30 and groups of 10 or 20 or 100 or several hundred, rather than just one. Does that make sense? So yeah, in order to go through lead in 30, the course you have to do it with an organization. It could be it could be like 10 or 15 leaders inside your company. It's not outrageously expensive at all. Um, we just need more than one of you to go through it. Okay, lead on 30.com. Okay, so let's talk about silence.

Speaker 1:

So, ryan holiday, you guys know who Ryan holiday is right. Oh, my gosh, if you haven't discovered Ryan Holiday yet, you need to, and you need to just get onto Google and Amazon and search and buy a few of his books. The Ego is the Enemy is Amazing. The Obstacle is the Way is Amazing. Stillness is the Key. Just so many good, and they're not, they're short books and Ryan's just a great humble leader and author and thinker. Who, who lives down in the Austin Texas area and just I think, the world of Ryan and and so he has helped me tremendously in the battle of of humanity way and trying to be a better human being, trying to be a better leader and trying to be a better friend, a husband, father, christian, whatever. He's just so helpful in recognizing some of the natural challenges that we all face and that we're up against. So one of the one of the statements that he makes that I just absolutely love is he said this and and this is a we actually have this as a slide in some of our decks Um, ryan holiday says silence is the ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation.

Speaker 1:

I want you to just think about that for a second. We're going to tie this to leading organizations and teams in a minute, but I want you to think about it more broadly than that. Silence is the ability Okay, now that's. Ryan is really good in the words that he chooses, so every word I feel like in this sentence is absolutely intentional, so listen to it again Silence is the ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation. Okay, and most leaders don't have that ability, or they've got it, but it's weak and they're not working hard at developing it. They suck so much oxygen out of the room, and I started this episode talking about the need for validation.

Speaker 1:

It's so interesting to listen to people in conversations and to think about, analyze, guess their objective or intention in what they're saying, and when you step back, and it could be a conversation about sports. And when you step back and it could be a conversation about sports. It could be a conversation, in fact, like X or Twitter, right, it's so funny to read, and I'm a huge college football fan and the team that I cheer for, my alma mater, byu's having, knock on wood, an exceptional season. It could end at any moment, but at least for right now it's been pretty amazing, and so I've been on Twitter, um, for a couple different reasons. One, the presidential election, reading tweets and staying up to date on on developments there the um, the, the college football season, and then some of the games that have been controversial or or really, um, exciting, that my teams have been my team, mainly, has been involved in, and so I'm on Twitter and it's interesting because there is there is such starvation for validation on Twitter there. There it's so bad Like, I make this tweet and then all of these people doesn't happen for me, cause I got like two followers Right, and I I I tweet like once every four years, um, cause Twitter.

Speaker 1:

I got into Twitter for a while. It just didn't work for me and I I don't have an audience and it just wasn't an efficient use of time. So I'm more, I'm a consumer on Twitter, not a contributor, right? And so I um, as you, as you're reading these tweets and then you see somebody who posts something and it's so interesting in in the, in the comments afterwards, for those that have a decent following, there's such a starvation, a need for validation, so so on, post something about a game or something. So on, post something about the election or their candidate or the way a certain race went.

Speaker 1:

And then there are all these comments that are just trashing the opinion of the person who originally did the tweet. Like, how could you possibly say that you're the big? And then they start name calling right, they just trashed the individual. You're such a bleepity, bleep. I mean just holy cow. We're just going to destroy this person because. Or there are comments where they agree, yeah, that's exactly right, you know, whatever. And then we're building the person we are the greatest ever, we love you, man, or whatever. And there's just this, this battle, this starvation, this, this, this quest for validation. You know what? It's not different in companies. We're way more civilized about it. But we we, when we talk and we share ideas in a meeting and we talk to our clients all the time about the word agreement. The word agreement is so loaded and so bad in an organization and so bad in an organization If you and I'll just go back to my example If you've got a company of one, it's incredibly easy to get everyone in the company to agree.

Speaker 1:

Right, cause you are the company, everyone in the company you agrees with the decisions that the company you make. Now you add 10 people, you've got a company of 10. How easy is it to get everybody to agree? Very hard, very, very hard. Just like a family agreeing to where to go to eat, or a family agreeing to what movie to watch or whatever. So you're not seeking agreement. You might seek some. Then you might move to consensus. Well, as long as, like, the majority of us agree on this movie or that restaurant, or this strategic decision, or that hiring, whatever. And so now we could just get consensus. So a majority or a group of people? No, that's not what we're looking for. We're looking for alignment, which we talk about right in lead in 30.

Speaker 1:

Clarity, alignment and movement. Those are the three core competencies of the leaders that scale results, get engaged employees to scale their career and their impact. They're able to create clarity, build alignment build alignment, not agreement, not alignment fundamentally different and then create movement, right. So you think about agreement. You're not looking for everyone to agree. You want them to understand where you're coming from. You want them to uh, to, to uh like, analyze your reasoning or to at least consider it and then to go. Okay, I think I can see why you're going in that direction, which, again, what you're really looking for is validation from them saying that, yeah, that's a good choice. It might not be the one that I would make, but it's good. I could see why you would choose that. Yeah, that's understandable Validation. That's what we're seeking in that right. So let's tie that back to silence.

Speaker 1:

So it's really interesting in in a dynamic, in an organization, when a leader, a manager, decides to develop the skill, the ability, as ryan holiday calls it, the ability to remove themselves from the conversation, deliberately remove themselves from the conversation. So what does themselves from the conversation? So what does that look like? It looks like hey, team. So this is on the agenda today. I'd really be interested in your perspective. Right, you understand this fundamentally, at least on paper, doesn't mean any of you are good at it or you, specifically, are really good at it. Some of you are, no doubt you've developed this ability, but the idea is you let them speak first. Right, and and, but it's more. It's so much more than that, like that's. That's a fundamental ability and skill and habit that the vast majority of leaders don't employ letting the team speak first. So this is on the agenda.

Speaker 1:

I'd love to hear your perspective. Team, let them speak. And the reason you don't do that many of you is because you're seeking efficiency. So I've already made a decision. I've already had a lot of discussion, I've already thought this through, so I'm just going to tell the team where we're going Now. React to that. So you're trying to drive the conversation forward. I get it, but it doesn't work real well, doesn't create alignment, doesn't create buy-in, doesn't create ownership and involvement. So instead, what you're doing is you're just you're keeping your position, keeping deliberately keeping yourself out of the conversation.

Speaker 1:

What do you all think about this thing? They speak. Then you know we've, we've taught this um, this cadence to you in other podcast episodes. This cadence of listen position, listen, right, so you listen, then you take a position. Hey team, great discussion. Thanks so much.

Speaker 1:

I really appreciate hearing where you are on this issue. I'm leaning toward as a decision maker on this. I'm leaning toward this choice, that direction, that strategy, this, whatever. React to that. I'm really curious on how you react to that. That's listen again, listen, position, listen, you listen, you take or state your position. You listen again. Why let them get another run at moving. You double check, triple check that you're thinking about all your, you're processing all the data, all the options, all the impact before you make that final decision. So listen, position, listen.

Speaker 1:

So then, and then when you take that, when you state your position and you're listening, and then you come back with your decision, what you and I this is so hard, you all decision. What you and I this is so hard, you all, it's so hard. It's why we all suck at it most of us, I do is then, when you state that decision you so desperately want people to validate it okay, yep, I, I got that. Okay, whatever, and and and I. I just think that I'm convinced that what we need to do is not seek the validation Right. It doesn't really matter if they think it's a great idea or not.

Speaker 1:

You've considered all the options. You've looked at it from all different directions. You've heard the different viewpoints. You make the decision Now we move forward. You've heard the different viewpoints. You make the decision. Now we move forward.

Speaker 1:

And then, if you're you're so insecure or so whatever, to where you're like, okay, which, by the way, I mean, I mean this is me right, this is all of us that we want. We want validation from it. No, we got to lean away from that. And how do you do that? The validation comes in. Okay, I can sit, it's it. It's got to be internal and so it's inside of you.

Speaker 1:

You think, yeah, I did, I did consider all those things and, um, and so we're going that direction. And there's. There's hardly ever, hardly ever, will you know without a doubt, with absolute certainty, that you made the right choice. How could you? There's so many variables, there's so much that's unpredictable and unknown and whatever else. And if it was totally certain, then everyone would be doing it and everyone would be capitalizing and monetizing on that thing. You tracking with me, but it's not known, it's not certain, you don't have a hundred percent certainty. So there is some gamble and risk involved. So you make the decision and then internally it's okay. Yep, this is.

Speaker 1:

I did listen to everything, I did consider those things and this is why this is my reasoning for making this decision. We're going in that direction and we'll see how it plays out. We'll see how it plays out and I'm going to I'm going to either move forward and and advance my career and this organization and my compensation, and all of that because of this decision, or I'm not. And I'm okay with some of them, absolutely. Some of these are going to go wrong. Some of them are not going to make money. They're going to lose money. We're going to make the wrong decision, we're going to get hurt by this. It's going to happen. But as long as I'm making more better decisions than I am bad decisions, then we're okay. But I'm not going to bat a thousand. It's not going to be a hundred percent, it's going to be 60, 70, 80, if we're lucky, percent.

Speaker 1:

So a couple of things to think about, takeaways from this episode that I hope you're considering. One is how desperate are you for validation and is that your objective? It's so interesting in a conversation If you. The older I get the more I do this, and it's actually kind of fun in that likely we'll be having a conversation about politics, be having a conversation outside of the workplace, right? So we're having a conversation about politics, we're having a conversation about sports or whatever, and someone says something I disagree with.

Speaker 1:

I've got a different position, I offer my perspective and they adamantly disagree with what I'm saying. No, it's not that way. Russ, russ, no, no, no, no, no, it's this way. And then I just listen like, oh, okay, cool. And they don't, they don't know what to do with that. They don't like, because they want you to keep arguing Like, oh well, oh, like, no, okay, cool, yeah, all right, yeah. And I'm thinking in my head no, that's cool, I totally.

Speaker 1:

There's room for your opinion and my opinion. There's room for you to think that about my team and me to think this about my team and you to think that about your team and me to think this about your team. And it doesn't really matter to me if you agree with me or see it my way. It doesn't really matter. I've considered your viewpoint and I respect your ability to have it, so I'm not bitter about it. I've got no emotion tied to it Okay, cool, thanks.

Speaker 1:

Next, and people, they don't know what to do with that because they're so used to just debate and debate, and debate, and you come back and they come back, and you come back, and they come back. You offer that and then you do this debate. That just goes on forever. And so when you just silence the ability to deliberately remove yourself from the conversation, I've stated my opinion deliberately remove yourself from the conversation. I've stated my opinion. I'm deliberately not with, not with ego, not with arrogance, not with bitterness, none of that. No, just that's what it is. You, we were having a conversation, that's my opinion. I think that your candidate sucks or whatever. You know what I mean. And I just say whatever. And then you say, well, no, but yours does, and this is the way it is and this is why this is going to be terrible or wonderful or whatever. Okay, cool, thank you.

Speaker 1:

What else did you want to talk about? And this starvation for validation. People just get so lost, and I, and so I'm really good at it in some areas and I really suck at it in other areas. Oh my gosh, am I bad at it in other areas. But it's something that I'm working on. So validation, the less we can seek that, the better Silence, the more we can develop, strengthen our ability, as Ryan Holiday calls it, our ability to deliberately remove ourself, keep ourself out of a conversation, the better we're listening. And it's not that we're like, okay, I'm just going to walk away. No, that's not what he's talking about. It's just that it's not about us, it's not about my opinion.

Speaker 1:

I'm interested in yours, I'm curious about it, I want to hear it, and so it's not about, it's not about me. It's just about okay, what do you have to say? And so, as a leader in an organization, I'm practicing that. Okay, what do you have to say? And so, as a leader in an organization, I'm practicing that, getting really good at listening. So those are a couple of the things that are on my mind in this episode of the Lead in 30 podcast. Share this episode with a colleague, your team or a friend. Tap on the share button and text the link. Thanks for listening to the Lead in 30 podcast with Russ Hill.