Week after week at xMonks Drive Podcast, we thrive to bring the best names with the most zealous driving stories. This week we have Mr. Spence.

John Spence, who is widely recognized as one of the top business and leadership development experts in the world, spoke with Gaurav. The podcast is what every business owner should have with his morning tea. It is a power-packed episode to learn about value sets as a leader, developing an effective coaching strategy and business growth patterns.

Here is an edited transcript of the conversation for you.

Keep Your Value Set Tight

A leader is always questioned about their own value system. When asked the value he personally believes, Kevin’s answer was honesty.

“My highest value, personally, is honesty.”

Emphasizing the need of holding a strong value set, he mentioned an incident from his life-

“One time, a gentleman had been chasing me to become the CEO of his business. It was a global sales strategy and strategic planning firm. I went there at about 34 years old, and worked there for a couple of years. Again, I had a value mismatch with the owner of that company, and I left to go out on my own.”

Another value he specifically believes in is not to try to fix people. Of course he had a backstory to share.

“So I became a coach literally, because my clients, my training clients, the people I was doing strategy for started to request, could you come and help me with these other things, or could you get me up to speed on this topic?

So I just sort of fell into it. And the interesting thing is, when I started coaching, mostly companies would hire me to try to fix their broken employees. When someone was struggling or about to get fired or had a problem, they’d say, “John, will you coach him and try to get them back on track?”

“I learned early in my coaching career that you can’t fix other people, if they don’t want to be fixed.”

So when a problem can not be fixed, what should a leader do next? Coach Spence tells to develop an effective leadership strategy.

Developing An Effective Leadership Strategy

As everything in James’ life comes from experience, the lesson to develop a strategy is based on one such incident.

“I’m mainly what I call a business acumen coach. 85% of my work is helping someone get better at a specific topic. Usually the first engagement when people bring me in is either leadership or strategy. They want to develop a more effective leadership strategy.

“The methodology I use is basically like a professor. I give them homework, I have articles for them to read. I do case studies, all of that. Let’s just say we pick a topic, strategic thinking. We will spend six months assigning work, discussing it, pushing each other and then I will give them a final assignment to teach strategic thinking to me.”

“From their philosophy, everything, they’ve learned everything. I’ve taught them everything we discussed. I do not tell them what strategic thinking is. I give them a lot of background. A lot of advice or experience. But they create their own view. So they own it.”