Today, we dive into the world of leadership with Aaron Trahan, a performance coach who transformed his own leadership style from a rocky start to a thriving practice. Aaron emphasizes that becoming a great leader is not a natural talent; it requires dedication, intentionality, and the willingness to learn. He shares his unique "FOCA" method, which helps leaders receive feedback, take ownership, and ultimately take action to improve. We also discuss the critical importance of recognizing blind spots, which can be as detrimental to a leader as cigarettes are to health. Join us for insights that promise to elevate your leadership game and foster a culture of growth in your teams! Leadership isn't something you're born with; it's a skill you can develop. In this enlightening discussion, Aaron Trahan shares his personal journey from being an inexperienced leader to becoming a sought-after performance coach. He emphasizes that leadership requires preparation, hard work, and a commitment to continuous learning. Aaron introduces his 'three out' formula: out-prepare, out-work, and out-learn others around you. It’s all about showing up ready, being the hardest worker in the room, and constantly seeking knowledge. This formula helped him transform his own leadership style and can do the same for you. Aaron’s candid reflections on his early leadership challenges reveal that many of us face similar hurdles. He highlights the importance of humility and the willingness to receive feedback, especially the tough kind that can shine a light on our blind spots. Blind spots, he notes, can be as harmful as cigarettes to our leadership effectiveness. He encourages leaders to actively seek feedback from their peers and teams, understanding that this feedback is crucial to their growth and success. In a nutshell, this episode is a treasure trove of insights for anyone looking to enhance their leadership abilities. With Aaron's practical tips and relatable anecdotes, listeners can walk away with actionable strategies to become more effective leaders in their own right. So, if you're ready to level up your leadership game, tune in and take notes!

Takeaways:

1. Leadership is a skill that requires intentionality and hard work; it doesn't just happen.
2. Receiving constructive feedback is essential for leaders to identify and address their blind spots.
3. To become a great leader, one must out-prepare, outwork, and outlearn everyone else around them.
4. Understanding that people are the most crucial asset in any organization is key to effective leadership.
5. A strong leader helps their team reach their highest potential, creating a healthier work environment.
6. Continuous learning and feedback cycles are vital for a leader's growth and the team's success.

https://performancemindsetcoaching.co

https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarontrahancoaching/

www.leaptoyoursuccess.com

www.jaclynstrominger.com

Well, hello everybody and welcome to another amazing episode of Unstoppable Success.

And on this podcast, as you know, as your host, jacqueliner, we hear from amazing individuals, leaders, professionals who have had great success and have become unstoppable.

And they get to share their wisdom, their tips, their traits, and great things to help you be just as unstoppable.

And today I have the greatest pleasure to share with you, Aaron Trahan.

And let me tell you a little bit about Aaron.

He is, first of all, an amazing performance coach and professional speaker.

And he has spent his bunch of years in the corporate world where he, as he shared before, started out not being the best leader and actually honed his skills, learned and became where leadership went from not being a strength to, to becoming his strength and now actually leading his own firm and company to help other leaders become super successful at leading because it is not something that we come out of the womb learning.

So welcome Aaron, to Unstoppable Success.

Hi Jacqueline.

Thanks for having me.

I'm really looking forward to our conversation about leadership.

Yeah.

So you, you know, one of the things about leadership and you, we, we, as I just shared, you didn't start out as, as, as a, being the best leader.

Right.

So when you got your first leadership position, what did that feel like for you and what did you think?

Yeah, you know, for me it was, it was exhilarating.

You know, you, you now are put in charge.

You have these responsibilities, not only from a business operations standpoint but, but first time leading a team, being able to lead people.

And look, we don't come out of college regardless of what our degree is in knowing how to lead people.

And so that was one of the things, as you mentioned, was a massive learning curve for me.

And it is not something becoming a great leader that doesn't happen by accident, that requires work, that requires a deliberate focus, it requires intentionality.

And so I can honestly say sitting here today, that was not the strength that I had when I first took on a leadership role that had to, after some hard lessons learned along the journey, had to be something that I acquired after realizing you need to focus more here.

But yeah, I just think in summary, leadership is such an awesome responsibility that we all have to help others, not ourselves, but to help others get better.

Right.

And I love that.

I'm going to go back to that in a second.

But you also shared that you were a young leader, so, so walk me through and share like, how did you become that young leader?

Because I think some people, you know, there's probably Some traits that you had that helped elevate you to that.

Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, let's not discount the element of luck that played in it.

I think there is a right place, right time situation.

And while that was certainly true there, I think I was able to do some things that manufactured a position I put myself in to be in the right place at the right time.

And I kind of like to zoom out and call this my three out formula.

And it's something that showed up for me that I didn't realize was happening.

And over the past 20 years, I've also seen with every great leader that scales, their ability to lead show up in them as well.

And the first thing is you need to out prepare everyone around you.

Right.

So are you dotting the eyes, crossing the T's, doing your homework?

Are you showing up prepared across every single element that could be required?

Because that's going to go a long way of you getting in the right place at the right time.

Second is, are you outworking everyone around you?

And this doesn't mean some hustle culture thing of working 80 hours a week.

But I like to think about this in terms of productivity.

Can you get more things done in the 60 minute increments that we all kind of live our lives by as a leader?

So when you take charge, when you get, when something gets thrown on your desk, are you dependable to be able to produce, move things, move things along?

Can you outwork everyone around you?

And then third, out learn, can you stay in learning mode?

Can you continue to, you know, be the best student in the room, not act like the smartest person in the room to always figure out how to get better?

And so for me, that's what kind of showed up early on in my career.

I was doing those things without really knowing I was doing them.

But that's what helped elevate me above a lot of others at a very rapid pace?

I love that, I love what you just said about, you know, outlearn people and really not be the smartest person in the room because that's not what you want to be.

So did somebody, or like what gave you that mindset to out learn?

Like did some, did you have a mentor?

Did you have somebody that said, aaron, here's a book, like start reading?

Yeah, I think it was because of the position that I put myself in, call it imposter syndrome, call it insecurity.

But look, as a 23 year old kid kind of being put into a leadership role, everybody around me had at least 10 years more experience than me.

My team even had more experience than me.

And probably some of them thought that they should be in the role instead of me.

And so I kind of use the fear of, oh, shit, I really got to get my stuff together, like, right now.

That fear was kind of the fuel that drove just me to just be a learning machine.

I knew that I didn't have the experience that everyone else around me had.

I can't change that.

What I can change is the trajectory of how much and how fast I was able to learn and close some of those knowledge and experience gaps.

And that just became part of who I was, is just kind of using the insecurity of being inexperienced to drive such a learning accelerator as compared to everybody else around me.

Yeah, no, I absolutely love that.

Okay, so just kind of curious, is there one book or activity that you did, or course you took, that you feel had the biggest impact on your leadership?

Not really, but I would kind of combine those two.

That's when I really started to become an avid reader and really started to just take reading on to a whole different level and started to challenge myself to really read as much as I possibly could.

And that's when I started to kind of average reading a book a week almost.

And so said differently, reading became my hobby.

Reading became my sport of choice, and kind of became my superpower.

And so I kind of put myself through my own kind of program, through the different types of content that I started to read.

Yeah.

So do you still read a book a week?

Yes, absolutely.

It's now hardwired in.

It's something I track.

And so I have a reading goal every year.

I break that down into how many books I read a month, how many pages I read a day, for me, became the thing that accelerated me to such a degree that I committed to myself.

Don't change that.

If, you know, if it's the thing that drove your success, don't become so complacent to stop doing the thing that got you here.

Keep going.

So I look for ways as a forcing mechanism to ensure that that stays just tried and true of who I am, what I'm about.

Yeah.

Okay.

So do you read or do you listen?

I do some listening.

So I would say about 20% of the books that I.

That I read a year are through Audible, but for the vast majority, I read, I listen in terms of just when I'm in the car, I don't listen to music.

It's.

It's audio.

It's audio books.

When I'm running and exercising.

It's not, you know, it's not music, it's audio books.

And so, yeah, when I can't be in front, in front of a book, I use audible to just keep the, keep the learning machine going.

Yeah, that's awesome.

That's, that's pretty cool.

I love that.

All right, so question for you.

So one of the things that I was looking at, you know, you know, leadership has a lot of different things.

And one of the things that you share and you talked about more recently is blind spots.

I was looking at something that you talked about and I, and I think as a leader, I think this kind of goes into a whole bunch of different levels.

How does a leader realize that they have a blind spot?

And, and, and if you, and how do you get past those.

Yeah, that's such an important question.

And you know, I talk with a lot of the leaders that I work with.

Is, is blind spots to an executive leader is like cigarettes to the body.

They will slowly kill you.

And so you can't expect to sit back and just be able to realize you have blind spots and shine light on, on your blind spots.

You've got to be an active and willing participant into gaining as much feedback and feed forward as you possibly can.

There is no other way.

And one of the things that I continue to see with successful leaders is they stop doing this.

They think they've reached a level where they can rely on their past success.

They only want to listen to the things that they want to hear and stop listening for the things that they most need to hear that will actually drive their improvement.

Actually shine light on the blind spots they have on where and how you can get better as a leader.

And that's exactly what happened to me.

There was a single piece of paper that changed the trajectory of my career and my life for that matter.

And it was at my most inflated, egotistical moment.

30 years old, running a billion dollar organization that's publicly traded, everybody telling you how great you are.

Look at what you've accomplished at such an early age.

Yeah.

And listeners, I'm going like this.

I'm putting my hands over my head, like his head's got a big head.

Yeah.

I thought I had this whole business thing all figured out.

Anything I touch was going to turn to gold.

Like.

Yeah.

And boy, was I wrong.

It was a 360 degree feedback assessment that a third party had administered where I got to hear for the first time what the 10 to 12 closest stakeholders that I had around me really thought about.

How I led and how I showed up.

And it was one of those jarring moments where the facade that my ego had led me to believe that I was this superhero leader couldn't have been further from the truth.

And so luckily I went down the path of saying I'm not going to be defensive about this and try to explain everything away.

I'm going to take this perception as reality and I'm going to go in the direction of solving these things.

But had I not gotten that feedback and for any leader that stops getting that feedback, you will have a warped reception of who you think you are to the world versus how the world actually views you.

And that's where decline and decay really starts to set in.

Yeah, no, you know, I love that you got that, that 360 assessment and that, that feedback.

It's hard, right?

It's hard to take.

I mean we always talk about constructive criticism, right?

Like, you know, like how can I do better?

What can I do better?

But you have to a hear it, be able to be able to take it, but you also have to receive it from the right people 100%.

And yeah, and it's, it's look, this is not for the, the weak of heart, right?

It's going to hurt.

We all have an ego and we proud of the things that we've done.

And so it takes a certain amount of courage for a leader to actively and consistently go out there and fine tune the feedback loops to keep this information coming in.

Because it's one thing to get it once and okay, I understand it, set it and forget it.

We're all human.

We all have a way of defaulting back to our most comfortable habits and traits.

And so if you're not actively bringing in this information, the information that will 100% bruise the ego, there is no way to get better.

There is no way to have that spotlight to shine on.

All the different blind spots that are blind by design, they're not going to be things that you realize and are aware of in your day in, day out way of operating.

You need help from outsiders, third parties that can help you understand where these blind spots are, how you can improve them and if you don't, where precisely they are holding you back from being the leader you're capable of being.

Yeah, you know, I love that, you know, helping people find their blind spots and you know, there's.

Because unless you know how to, how to get better, you don't.

You just don't know.

You just don't know.

You know, and you do need to know.

So when you took that assessment, what was the one thing that like the biggest thing that stood out that you felt like, oh my God, this is like the first thing that I need to change or I need not.

Yeah, people, people, plain and simple is yes, I may have been very skilled around strategy and operations and where in setting the vision, being able to communicate all that I was very, very skilled on, on that standpoint.

But as my people responsibility grew, as I mentioned earlier, we don't come out of college naturally knowing how to effectively lead people.

And as my teams grew to just a 10 person team to 20 to 50 to 100 plus indirect reports, that was the one thing that jumped out loud and clear.

Because of the ego, because of my confidence in my ability to do all these other things, it was pretty clear that being on my team was a very miserable experience.

It was, it was kind of one of those, it's like, you better follow me and keep up or you're getting left behind and replaced type of, type of environments that I unintentionally created because I was in a very tough working culture.

It's all I had seen, it's all I knew and you know it.

I learned from a lot of bad examples on how to lead people.

And so without knowing that and hearing that feedback, I literally would not have known anything different.

And the beautiful thing about feedback and feed forward is, is a weakness you were unaware of can never be developed and strengthened.

And so this was a gift that hurt in the moment, but it was loud and clear.

I had to get better at how to lead, coach, nurture and develop people.

And strangely enough, if you would have told me back then that I would actually be in 10 years time running a coaching organization of my creation, I would have said 0% chance.

It was something that I was terrible at.

I was not good in this area.

But it's amazing what happens when you go after and start developing something that was a weakness into a strength and a passion emerges out of that.

So when you found that out, you know people, because people, I mean that's, that's also becomes a cultural shift within your team, not the company.

But like each team has its own culture.

What was the one thing that you or the first three steps that if you could share with somebody like that, if they're in a similar situation or maybe their team is not rising up that, that they could do to help become that people leader?

Yeah, I, over the years and seeing how I was able to effectively navigate this, I've kind of Created what I now call the FOCA method.

Foca and this is kind of a blueprint and a playbook that I run leaders through that.

If you want to get better at getting better, this is your four step process.

This will ultimately determine how good or ineffective you are at getting better.

And first is receiving the information.

Are you actively receiving constructive feedback?

Not feedback that says you're doing great, keep it up.

But more feedback around, how do I get better?

What more am I capable of?

What does improvement for me look like in the future as compared to today?

So are, number one, are you open to getting that feedback?

Number two, what is your openness to taking ownership of that?

The most common issue I see with successful leaders who receive constructive feedback, they always have very eloquent and polished stories around how the other person gets it wrong.

Well, they just don't understand this.

They're missing that context.

Maybe so.

But what you are hearing is someone else's perception of reality.

Own it.

Do not be defensive.

Own it, which then and only then takes you to the sea.

If you don't own it, you will have no openness to generate change.

If you're going to be defensive and explain everything away and saying they're wrong, I'm great.

They, they're the ones that, that don't have this figured out.

You will never generate the change that's required for you to actually improve.

So the third one, the C, is you have to be open to receiving the information, owning the information, and then changing behavior based on that information.

And then fourth, the arguably the most important one is are you open to now taking action?

It's one thing to acknowledge the change that needs to occur.

A lot of people can do that, find the insights.

Only the most courageous leaders actually get uncomfortable and take the required action to develop.

And so what I have leaders do is to rate themselves in these four areas.

How open are you to getting feedback?

How open are you to taking ownership of it?

How open are you to changing?

And how open are you to take action?

And then I have them go ask the others around them.

It's one thing that to rate yourself in these areas, have others rate you, ideally find a third party to do it for you because you're probably going to get a different rating from your stakeholders than you are the ratings you give yourself.

But if you become effective in these four areas, I have never not seen an executive leader develop, grow and get better at getting better.

You know, I love that you just said, I mean I love having other people like take an assessment, maybe Even have a third party, because if you can make it even as a third party, that's blind to you so that you don't know who's answered what to what.

You just know that that is, you know, reality versus perception.

We're all going to score ourselves pretty highly across the board on just about everything.

Right, Right.

But and also people that you know, if people that you know, like, you know, the, the, your peers, the people around you, if they know that it's anonymous, you're just going to get the, that you, the leader, getting the feedback basically with just the results and not the people, then it makes it so much easier for them to be open and honest.

That's right.

You know, and I think that's so critical.

So critical.

Because if you're not doing that work, when we really break down how a leader becomes more effective, if you're not doing this and you're not finding out where these gaps are, you're not finding out where these variances in perception of how you see yourself versus how you're being received from your approach to leading others, I really don't know how you would go about.

Sure, you can read all the books in the world and attend all the conferences and listen to all the podcasts, but how does that help you in your world, in your business, around your team, actually make yourself better?

That can be quantifiable and tracked.

And if you can't understand these gaps where that, where you have blind spots and then change the behavior and take the action to close those gaps?

Yeah, I think everything else is improvement and becoming a more effective leader then becomes highly subjective.

You may think that you're getting better.

You may, your coach who you're working with may think you're getting better, but are you really getting better of those around you, those key people, those key stakeholders in your life, if they're not seeing the results, my question is, are you really getting better?

Right.

That's so true.

So do you have your, do you have your clients go through a system or a process?

I mean, obviously we talked about the foca, but that you bring them through to help them become a better leader?

Because, I mean, we all, I mean, I know, like, systems are so important.

Yes, I do.

And I've, I've kind of learned and trained under the best.

And so Marshall Goldsmith, who's kind of the top rated executive coach in the, in the world for God knows how long.

It's kind of the first call for any Fortune 500 CEO when they, when they need help, you know, because an assessment like this was so life altering for me.

I went and kind of studied under his approach.

And I use something very similar called stakeholder centered coaching, where everything is based around this, how you're perceived by others.

That starts with a 360 assessment kind of understanding where you need to improve.

And then we really target, based on that, based on that feedback the one or two areas.

Just like for me where people management jumped off the page and almost slapped you in the face, like, here's the alarm bell, this is where you need to improve.

We then get very surgical on picking an area or two that we go after and we keep this process going and we do this through kind of more of a Feed Forward approach where they meet with their stakeholders every single month and asking not what could I have done differently in the past?

And feedback because you don't always get good results there.

Nobody wants to tell you where you screwed up.

And it could be a little challenging to get the right content.

We use Feed forward.

What can I do to get better going forward in these areas, we're mining the stakeholders for suggestions, ideas.

Where can you think I can improve in this particular area?

We then create a 30 day action plan and then go act.

The next month we do it all over again.

And over the course of 12 months we track it.

How are we actually doing through measurable, verifiable data by sending our stakeholders a survey and having them rate the improvements in these areas.

And so now we have data to tell us, not from ourselves, but through our stakeholders, are we actually improving or not?

And so for leaders that go through this, it is a guaranteed way to get better at getting better because it's very high flame.

There is no avoiding the feedback, there is no avoiding the ideas, and there is no avoiding creating the action plans and then rating the action plans on a month over month basis.

And I've just found it to be the most effective.

There's a reason one in three Fortune 500 companies use the same process.

That's, it's, it's actually fantastic.

And the biggest thing is, is tracking, as I always like to say, measure, monitor, adjust, mma, right?

Oh, I love that.

Yeah, mma, you can use it.

We always have to be, we always have to be measure, monitoring and adjusting, you know, in that because, you know, that's the only way for us to get better.

You know, one thing that you said that I think is also really important listeners.

You know, it's, it's not a, it's not a 30 day process.

It doesn't happen Overnight, it takes time.

And, and also you said pick one or two.

You can't.

That's right.

You can't change everything.

Focus on a couple of things, One or two things, the big things, you can always keep going and focus on the other things and fix and, and not only say fix, but change or become better.

Right, right.

So we can always be improving.

Right.

So I think that is really key.

Listeners just like to, you know, it's a key takeaway on that.

I'm curious on the roi, you know, as a leader goes through this, what have you seen as the roi, you know, for their team and their businesses?

Yeah, I mean, for this one, I think I could be a good use case for this.

Right.

Just from my own personal roi.

You know, when you look at the cost of key employee turnover, when you look at the cost of a business, when you're missing kind of the ingredients around how to put people in the right place to do their best.

So often we hear of C level executives, founders, CEOs, owners, not able to get out of the business enough to be able to work on the business.

And so they're firefighting all day long.

And as a result of that, there's probably a reason that the average tenure for a CEO is lower today than it ever has been in history.

I think in the Fortune 500, it's now at or around five years or less.

And so when you think about the roi, I would think about it this way.

What happens when you become a more effective leader to your team?

You're helping them become better, you're helping your team elevate, you're helping your team tap into their highest potential.

And for me personally, it was, I mean, a greater than a 10x unlock for me because whenever I made the mindset shift of for me to ultimately get to where I want to go in my leadership journey, I would not be able to get there if those around me are not equipped to also take their next level up.

And that's where I continue to jump up the, you know, the corporate, you know, leadership hierarchy.

And I would have more problems, more chaos, more sleepless nights.

I'm pretty sure my hairstyle is what it is.

Not because of genetics, but because the stress that I had from bad leadership and all of a sudden, from a productivity and efficiency standpoint, I, once I started to focus on leadership and what I needed to do to become a more effective leader, everyone around me started to become more effective.

I was able to help them develop and grow.

And so my operating leverage as a leader My inputs could actually lower while the outputs started to increase.

And so the ROI could probably look different for every business.

But here's what I do know.

When you are guaranteed to have a system around you that helps you become a more effective leader, the ROI is infinite.

It compounds.

It's almost like interest and compound interest is the most beautiful creation ever.

You keep getting better at getting better and it starts to have a cultural ecosystem around you when everybody else around you is also able to get better by way of your leadership.

That's how leaders scale.

When you don't have that and you can't get better and it's then that chaos starts running downhill.

That's where you start to find a lower and lower ceiling of how far you can go as a leader.

So, yeah, I think the easy answer to that question from an ROI standpoint is infinite.

Right, right.

No, it's true.

And I, and you know, it's crazy is that I, what I see so much is that, and what you're also sharing is that you know, the cost value obviously of employees, if you can keep them and keep them in the right place and keep people working together, it's really amazing.

And having them in the right seat value people.

People don't leave companies really for money.

They leave companies because they don't feel valued and they don't feel like they're in the right place.

They'll say it's because of the money.

But it's really important.

It's never bad leadership.

Yeah, even people working at a company they love in a job they love can go home miserable if they have a bad leader.

Right on the opposite side, even if they're doing a job they're not passionate about in a company that they're not crazy about, if they've got a great leader that helps them reach their full potential and do their best work, they'll still be tap dancing into work.

So everything is about leadership.

Yeah, it really matters.

So, Scott, I'm so.

Aaron, I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours about this because I think it is so important and it's, it's such an important, it's, it's so key for, for business owners to have great leaders and for businesses who, you know and people, as you're flourishing in your careers, is to also seek out great leaders.

And if you are the CEO, the founder of a company, really become the best leader that you can possibly be so that as you, as you go and grow, you're going to actually be able to keep your company going and keep your people that are working with you happy and motivated.

So, Aaron, tell everybody how they can connect with you.

Yeah, I'm very active on LinkedIn, so I would encourage all of your listeners to let's connect there.

I'm always trying to share the lessons that I've learned along the journey and pass them along at no cost so you can take advantage of the learnings and not have to acquire the same scars that I did.

And then also on my website, which is performance mindset coaching co that's where you'll learn a bit more about my approach to helping leaders and organizations get better and scale themselves through becoming more effective at leadership through this great thing called stakeholder centered coaching.

That's awesome.

I love it.

All right, so listeners, do me a favor.

Leadership is so important and it is the crux to making a great company, having a great team.

And I would love for you to reach out and connect with Aaron and then also do me the favor.

Hit subscribe to Unstoppable Success and then also share this episode with your friends and your colleagues.

Because we know if we could have better leaders out there, just think about how much happier the world will be and it's so important.

So please do me that favor.

I am Jacqueline Schremminger, your host.

This is Unstoppable Success.

Thank you, Erin.

And thank you listeners for being present and I hope everybody has a great, amazing day.