In this enlightening episode, Tiffany Grant welcomes back Anthony Weaver, a repeat guest from episode 199. Anthony shares his in-depth knowledge and strategies for leaders through his concept of HOPE, which stands for Hero's journey, Organizational purpose, Passionate impact, and Empathy in action.

This episode dives into the essential stories leaders should communicate to effectively connect with their teams and inspire higher performance and engagement.

Key Takeaways

1. Hero’s Journey

- Share personal stories of challenges and growth to help team members relate and draw inspiration.

2. Organizational Purpose

- Communicate the vision and mission of the organization to give employees a clear target and purpose.

3. Passionate Impact

- Recognize and communicate the individual and collective impact your team has on the industry and the company.

4. Empathy in Action

- Share customer stories and feedback to emphasize the importance of their work and create a sense of fulfillment and motivation.

About Our Guest

Anthony Weaver is a leader in his field, managing hundreds of employees. He is known for his pragmatic approach to leadership, emphasizing the importance of storytelling to build stronger, more cohesive teams. Anthony also runs a popular YouTube channel, "About That Wallet," where he discusses financial literacy and leadership.

Connect with Anthony

• Website: https://aboutthatwallet.com
• Social Media: @aboutthatwallet
• YouTube: About That Wallet

Connect with Tiffany

• Website: https://moneytalkwitht.com
• Social Media: @moneytalkwitht

Call-to-Action

• Enjoy this episode? Make sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform.
• Share this episode with managers and leaders who could benefit from these insights.

Tune in next Thursday for another insightful episode of Money Talk with Tiff. Don't miss out on Tiffany's practical financial tips and inspiring guest interviews.

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Copyright 2024 Tiffany Grant

You know what it is. That's right. It's time to talk money with your money

nerd and financial coach. Now tighten those purse strings

and open those ears. It's the money talk with Tiff

podcast.

Hey, everyone. I am so excited because I have a repeat guest on the line.

I have my cousin, Anthony Weaver. Not my real cousin, though,

but if that name sounds familiar, he was on episode 199, and he

talked about building habits, and I got a lot of good feedback about

that episode, and so I'm bringing him back. And this time, we're

talking about four stories that every leader should

have to connect with your team. So. Hey, Anthony. How are you?

Hey, Tiffany. It's been a while, and I have

been doing really well. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, I know. Like, when we talked

the last time, it was episode 199, and now we're on,

like, 300 and something, so it's been. I know it's

been quite some time, so people might not remember your voice, so I had to

bring you back to refresh their memory.

I greatly appreciate it. All right, let's go ahead and hop right in.

So you are a leader in your career. So

you have a team of hundreds of employees that you manage.

And so what are some things that managers or

leaders should have in order to connect with their

team? Well, you have to think back about

why leaders are leaders in the first place. And one of the reasons why they're

leaders is because, one, that they have have somebody to follow them, and

two, they looking at the leader for direction. But also as a

leader, you're not just there for the mission. You're also there for the people, which

is putting the people first. And one of the ways to

actually connect with your staff,

your employer, your employees, is to really

tell a story, tell something that really can

resonate with the everyday person.

You've been in their shoes. What are the things that you're looking

to provide value to their lives and so forth, just to kind

of bring home that you're human. It's almost like, you ever talk to your parent

and be like, have you ever been a kid before? Like, you know, life

is hard, and you be like, well, the mother or the

parent or the dad. Be like, so suck

it up. That's what we had to do. So. And that's what

a thing is in leadership. It's like you have to kind of bring it back

to the staff. Now, when you say that, that sounds

very vulnerable. So are you saying that a leader or

a manager or what have you should be vulnerable with their

employee and if that's the case, how deep does this go?

Cause I'm like, are we talking about, oh, this is what I did for the

weekend, or, like, how vulnerable are we getting here?

Well. Cause I was preparing for this particular

interview, and I was going through all the stories that I've told my

teams, and I usually tell a new story every week, and

one of the things that I do in telling a story

is talk about the rags to riches stories, like those obstacles

that you've been through. And I kind of couple this together and call it the

hero's journey. So you, as a leader now,

you've been through this, even if you're a young

person, in leading a lot of older folks. I've been there.

I'm actually been doing it. Doing it now, the reason

why you want to share this story is to kind of bring to them

how did you actually get to the position where you are? Or you can say,

hey, I started, you know, building

a machine in the basement. Like, actually, that's how I

started in it. Like, I broke the family computer. Back then,

you only had one computer for the whole house. I broke it, and I had

to fix it. That's how I learned to. To do it in the

first place, and that's what got me started in my journey

in it, and then now become a leader, because I was like, hey, I've been

there now. Let me just pass the torch on to the next person that wants

to learn. Gotcha. And I have a. Yeah, I have a full

acronym, though. It's really called Hope. And let me just share that out

right quick. It's, h is for the hero's journey, which we just talked

about. O is for the organizational purpose,

p is for the passionate impact, and e is for the

empathy and action. Gotcha.

Okay, so for h, the hero's journey. So

you want to let your team know. Like, this is how I got started. This

is how I got here. This is what my whole, like, my career looked like.

The highlights, y'all, we don't have to get into. Yes, yes. So, at this last

job, I don't know what happened. We getting into the highlights.

Okay. And so, for o, what other stories do we need to tell our team?

So, with o, you're looking at the or organizational purpose, which is

you. This is your vision story. So think of Steve jobs. He

was very good at saying, like, hey,

I want to see people having these three items in

their pocket, and people's like, how

nobody knew what that would look like, but that was his

vision. And to order to make that happen,

he just had to keep saying, like, we need to get here, not sure how.

And that's where the team comes in and figure out that how.

And that is one of the things that I think that's the most, uh,

impactful ways that you can actually lead. For me personally,

I am more of like a sage. Like, I'm not a sage on

the stage, I'm more of a guide on the side kind of guy, where it's

like, I know exactly kind of what y'all doing, but I don't,

I don't need to know what y'all doing. I just know I need to get

here. And having that vision story is really

impactful from a leader perspective. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. And that makes

complete sense. So give them the target, give them the

vision of where the organization is trying to go, where your department's

trying to go, and then let them figure out how they're gonna get there.

Now with that being said, do you tie this into

like their KPI's or their goals or things like that? So you allow them

to create that to get towards the company goals? Yes,

because allowing them in the KPI's are key performance indicators

to kind of help them understand on where the measurements are. So it's

like, hey, if I want to move the

industry to have at least 5000

computers deployed out, they had to figure out,

okay, well, what does it take? Work backwards. Let the team

figure that out. Because that's the whole purpose of why you hired them in the

first place, is to do the work. Everybody wants to do the

work. That's the reason why they want to do the job. Sometimes people are

forced to do the job, but you know, if you love them, that

autonomy, it opens them up to actually feel

like they part of the team. Yeah, I definitely agree with that. And I'm sure

we have all been in situations where we had a micromanager that tried to tell

us everything to do in our job and that is not a

pleasure, full experience. So I definitely like

this, this guide to the side approach that you have now

let's go into P. What is the p? So P is about the

passionate impact. And this combines like the world and

individual impact stories where some of these

things, they can't be measured by things.

So usually they try to say, like, in order to build success,

you have to have things that are measured. But this one right here is

mostly about the stories. What is the business or

your team in general have an impact to the

company? So think of Chick fil A.

Actually, not Chick fil A. Well, we can. You can do anybody. So

think about Chick fil A, even Chick fil A, even though they just a fast

food restaurant, but you go there for the experience and

you go for the smiles. And that is one of the things that the

owners were shooting for. The owner S.

Truett Cathy, who started this back in

1946 for Chick fil A. Like, this is one of

the things that they were looking for is how can they provide impact to

the community while giving them quality service at the same time?

So you can do that with your team. It's just talk about, like, what is

that one. One impact that you providing to the

industry? Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay, so what is

the impact that you are providing to the industry? And does

this also include themselves? So, like, their professional

impact as well? Yes, there is a story. I

believe some people who are biblical, you might have heard

this story already, but when you start changing the language

of your staff, so say if there was a guy that was

cleaning and he was actually sweeping the church

or whatever that was in the process of being done, it

wasn't the fact that he was saying that, oh, I'm here every day sweeping.

He was like, no, I get the opportunity to clean the house of God.

I get the opportunity to put. Make sure that people

come into a clean, poor pit, have the opportunity to come into

a sanctuary where they proud to be in. This is my

contribution. This is my impact to the congregation,

is almost taking yourself out of the equation. But

what are. What are your actions doing to improve

the lives of everybody else? Gotcha. Gotcha. So, making

that connection or helping your employees make that connection,

how do I fit into this bigger picture? And I'm not just here to

just get a paycheck. Like, my job is actually important and

makes everything else move. Yes. Gotcha.

Okay. Right on spot. Perfect. All right. And then let's get

into the e. What is the e? For now,

e is the empathy in action, which is

your customer's story. And I want to bring up chick fil a

again, because how many times you heard somebody say, you know,

my pleasure, and it just give you that little tingly feeling, like, oh,

yeah, I just come here just to hear somebody say, my pleasure today. Because, you

know, the world is nice, but sometimes you just have

a bad day. You just go to chick fil a bars,

but you go head on,

and you have somebody who's like, my pleasure, just put a smile on your face.

And this is one of the things that happened with

Truett he said that he was at a hotel, staying at

a hotel. An employee responded to his thanks in a

sincere my pleasure. And because he

remembered that feeling, he wanted that for every customer

in his store. So he put that part of their training

program. So because you're,

again, it's that customer impact

that could actually change the way how you run your business. It's like, this

is why, like, you can take a live snapshot

if you actually give out interviews, surveys.

And when you get surveys from your customers and you say, this

is why we do what we do. This is

why we continue on to provide good

customer service. We put smiles on our faces. We do the best that we can

do because of the stories that we

are receiving from the customers. And this is your empathy in

action. Okay? So getting the

customer stories or getting the customer impact and relaying

that to the team, I feel like that's super important because

how many times have you been in a situation you didn't get any feedback about

how you did or how you're doing? And it's kind

of demotivating. Like, I remember when I was in corporate

America and, you know, we would do, like,

the yearly reviews or whatever, and I would practically have to

beg for some critical feedback because I'm like, if I'm

doing everything right, like you're saying, then

what's, like, what are we doing here? Like,

there has to be something that I can improve there. Because

if not, like, why am I not in your position? Then, you know?

Exactly. You gotta tell me something. And so I

really like that you are putting that as one of the

acronyms, is to make sure that you share out with your team what's

going on and sharing those stories that you hear from the customers or other

departments hear from the customers. And that's another point, too.

A lot of times, departments are siloed. And so you

never hear about, like, for instance, the good stories that sales

has never hears that in product management, who never hears

that in it, you know, so on and so forth. Right? And

so I feel like even just having this shared out

company wide and then disseminating down to your team

is awesome. So let's recap for the people. Cause we went over a

lot. We wanna give our teams hope. And what does hope stand

for? Hope stands for hero's journey.

O is for the organizational

purpose, p is for passionate

impact, and e is for empathy and

action. Gotcha. Gotcha. So this was really good information. I

know there are business owners listening or people that are in

positions either in management or even as employees.

And if you're an employee and you're listening to this episode, you're probably

like, this does not apply to me. My manager does not do this. But maybe

you can say, you know what? You should listen to the money talk with TIFF

podcast and listen to this episode with Anthony

Weaver where he goes over some things that can help, you

know, get us motivated. You might not want to say it like that. They might

be like, okay, what you talking about? But edge that in there

because I feel like this is really important for leaders to know

and leaders and managers to know. So,

Anthony, with all of that being said, if people were interested in

finding out more about you or learning more about hope,

see what I did there? How could they find you?

They can find me on the socials at about that

wallet, or you can even come to aboutthat wallet.com

and just check out all the latest and greatest things that ive been up to.

And, you know, if you ever want to just have some management

questions or just want to connect, just

hit me up and shoot me an email. All right, sounds good. Well, thank you

so much, Anthony. And ill also add there. So Anthony is being very,

very, hold on.

Okay. Anthony's being very, very humble right now.

He has a bomb. YouTube channel has

way more subscribers than I do. But if

you check out about that wallet, his show is very entertaining and

very fun. There's a whole drinking segment I tell everybody about that.

Anthony's like, why are you telling people this?

But I think it's just so cool and how he has everything set up.

It's like YouTube goals. So definitely check out his

channel about that wallet, and I'll make sure I have all of these links in

the show notes as well. So thank you so much, anthony, for coming on the

show today. Tiffany, thank you

so much for having me on. And, I mean, you're amazing, and I

wish you the best in everything that you do. Thank you. I appreciate all y'all.

McCrack no. All right, y'all have a good one. Bye.

Thank you for listening, joining and being a part of the Money Talk with TIFF

podcast this week. You can check Tiff out every Thursday for a

new Money talk podcast. But if you just can't wait until next week,

you can listen to previous podcast

episodes@moneytalkwitht.com or

follow TIFF on all social media platforms at

moneytalkwitht. Until next time, spend wise

by spending less than you make. A word to the money wise is

always sufficient.