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Hosted by Masi Willis and Shannon Scott, Lead Like You Mean It is a leadership podcast for those who want more than inspiration—they want impact. We’ll help you lead from the inside out, with tools that stick and some truth that stretches you.
Everything Made Beautiful (00:01.896)
And we're back. We are back. We took a break, which I kind of love because everybody needs to take a break. And speaking of breaks, we are on a break right now recording the Lead Like You Mean It podcast from the Cayman Islands. This is when you know you can be mobile.
Yes, we have we packed up the mics and we brought the whole setup and we have are here for a week. And so this whole series is going to be done here. We're just going to do it right back to back one right after the other. So those of you that see the clips on social media, we will be in the same clothes. Yes, we will be. So I'm so excited about this. First of all, we love being in the Caymans. We have come a lot.
But this year we're particularly excited about this because while we're here in the Caribbean with sun and sand and the pool and all these things, we're actually most excited about Saturday. Go Dawgs. Well, yeah. So obviously by the time this airs, this will already be passed. But this coming Saturday is the first Saturday of college.
football. We've told you before we are frenemies in this area. So go Gators. but we also are both like no name teams. So let's hope for victories. otherwise our season will start very sadly. It's not like we're coming out of the gate with like some powerhouse teams, but we do have the thing that we've always promised. We love the most during our football season and road trips. Yes. We found boil peanuts on the island.
Yes. So just imagine us on Saturdays in our bathing suits and our boiled peanuts watching football. And our diet coke. And our diet coke always. All right. So for this next series on the podcast, you have already heard from Jeremy Kubitschek last week. was technically so good. my goodness. That was technically our first episode back and it was so good.
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And we promised that this series would be all about the five voices, which we have touched on earlier in the podcast. When we talked about the greenhouse, we talked about all the kinds of flowers in a greenhouse and how that relates to team members and people and the kinds of flowers they might be. But over the next five weeks, we're going to talk about each voice. Yeah. And we talked about even in the third episode with mile, just thinking about the mirror. And so often I think,
we considered a blueprint or like a lens. And I think this is a great tool to use for that. But like we said, you can't put a blueprint under your armpit and hope that it builds a house. Or you can't really build a greenhouse and be a gardener if you do not know how to individually treat each plant. And so this is just a great tool, great lens that Jeremy and Steve were so blessed for them to have had the brains and the five years of.
pouring into this to really make it a digestible, easy, transformational and transferable leadership language for us. Yeah. And I'd love for you just before we dive into the five voices themselves, we talked about this a little bit at the beginning of the podcast as well. If you'll just quickly talk about what sets five voices apart from
every other assessment that everybody listening to this podcast has taken 50 of and how it isn't a competitive but a collaborative assessment with all those things. I love the way you put that and I'm for and a champion of and I think everyone in even the giant community would say assessments of any any type that you're utilizing is beneficial that you're actually
Looking at and then transferring into something but what I believe sets five voices apart from others is that it's truly focusing in on our behavioral Leadership style. It's not focusing on our motive. It's not focusing only on you know what we do best in our work how we best relate in our strengths or It's really looking at
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What is our DNA? It's based and rooted in Myers Briggs. Myers Briggs has been around since the late 1800s. And Young used it, started the three dynamics, and studied our behavioral and just the way we were creating the dynamics. Myers and Briggs' mother, daughter, added the fourth dynamic in the mid 1900s. So it really sets itself apart for being a tool that is talking about behavior.
And when you have a core understanding, you can almost speak the language. So I would say it's like if you knew 10, 12, 40 words, if you're going to Italy in Italian, you could get around Italy and survive it. But when you speak ENFP or you speak, I'm a DI or I'm a woo or I'm a blue or a lion or, you know, it's a little bit cumbersome.
And I think their heart behind, I want to speak on their behalf, Jeremy talked a little bit about last week, but the heart behind it was that it would be easily communicatable across organizations, families, teams, communities. And that's why I think it's really an insightful and incredibly immediate way to really help the culture change by understanding each other. Yeah. And we have found that
the transferable language is actually true. Like once people can grab onto it, it almost makes all those other assessments understandable in a different way because it is so collaborative with all the things we've talked. We won't talk about all the leadership assessments again, but go ahead. Yeah, I would like to say to your point originally, which was about collaboration, thinking about we're passionate about layering these.
You you take Five Voices and layer it with Myers-Briggs and you really can get into a predictive leadership behavior. You layer Five Voices with Working Genius and you can understand not only how someone's going to behave in an office or in a work environment, but their genius in what they're behaving in. Or you layer it with CliftonStrengths.
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And you really can look at, as they behave, they're going to naturally draw to these strengths in the space. that's one thing that I think I can say personally in my experience with the Giant community and Steve and Jeremy is it's a generosity community. And really the idea is not one or the other. The idea is all, but take them and do something with them. Don't weaponize them. Don't, you're a two.
bless your heart, you sweet little supporter. That's not what we're doing with Five Voices. And it's why I believe those of us in the coaching community do love having multiple certifications to be able to layer in around the behavioral leadership style. Yeah, so good. So before we jump into the Voices specifically, we always, when we are teaching this in a coaching context, we start with a group of assumptions.
And these assumptions guide how we talk about the voices, how we think about the voices, and how we process the words that we hear when we describe the voices. Now I will say, for these several episodes, we have got our notes in front of us, we have got our computers, because we would normally be teaching this in a multi-hour training and workshop context, and we're gonna just really condense it down.
just to give you a fly over on each of these episodes, but there's several things we want to be sure we hit so that if you only ever listen to these episodes, you at least have a good, accurate understanding of each of the five voices. So Macy, start with the assumptions that we want to make sure are on the table before we talk about them specifically. These assumptions are crucial. And really we're saying what we want to make sure you understand are some
key pillars of a, when you go and assume you know something, you can sometimes relate it in a wrong way. So the first assumption you need to know is that our voice is made up of all five voices. And that is different than a lot of assessments. And when you realize you're made up of all five voices, it's really the order in which they show up.
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to how you actually behave or your leadership style. so understanding that someone's first voice may be my last voice, we still can pull from all five of them. And it's why you probably have experienced life and you're like, I think I've changed my numbers or my colors. It's because we learn and can pull from all five of them. It's just how they're ordered really matters. Yeah, that's good.
And when you say you can pull from all five of them, the way that I tend to teach this principle and everybody has their own way is if you think about driving a car, your foundational voice is the driver's seat. That's the voice that you're in. That's the one that you are getting places. Your second voice is over in your passenger seat. If you're anything like me, I can easily access everything in my passenger seat. It is well within reach. I don't have to lean. I'll even
put things there for convenience, that would be where a second voice would sit. If you think about the back seat, the one that's diagonal from you behind the passenger seat that you can reach in and you might have to lean a little bit, but you can get it pretty quickly would be your third voice behind the driver's seat would be your fourth voice. And then often riding in the trunk or in the hatchback is that last voice. It doesn't mean it's not on the trip and it doesn't mean you can't use it.
but you're likely going to have to pull over in order to access it because it's going to take a lot of thought and it's going to take a lot of intentionality to get something out of the trunk differently than to grab it out of the passenger seat. Yeah. And I, in some of my workshops, I love, the way you related that to the voices is to be able to, is knowing that we call it nature and nurture. And if you're in your mind thinking, okay, I can easily,
reach over to your side seat. You can, but what we look at as our nature is just natural. You just do it. So think about your dominant hand. If I ask you to sign your signature, you do it all day long easily and not even think about it. But if I ask you to switch hands and you started riding with the other hand, that's what we call nurture. And you can ride, you can reach over to your side seat, but you're not gonna drive from over there.
Everything Made Beautiful (11:46.464)
And so it still is that nurture. And then you talked about the person behind you. I mean, like, I've not been a mom, you've been a mom, but the world has created different kind of mirrors for us to see our blind spots. That is what your fourth voice is. It's that blind spot behind you. You think you understand it better than you do. And so it's blind to you, really not anyone else. And then that hatchback, that trunk, it's kind of the nemesis. It's like,
I believe that's in the Our bull peanuts are in the trunk. What were we thinking? And that's what we sometimes call the nemesis voice. That's good. So the second assumption beyond our voice being made up of all five voices is that some voices are more natural to us than others. So your foundational voice is not going to be something that is not natural to you.
One of the ways that five voices is so helpful is that in the assessment process and as you learn about each voice, it's not really a mystery usually because there's natural voices and then those voices that are riding in the trunk. And so the second assumption about five voices, besides that you have all of them.
is in having all of them, some of them will be more natural than others. Yeah. Also, when you think about the third assumption is to realize that with maturity allows us to value everyone's contribution as well as appreciate those voices. and I don't say maturity in meaning old. I'm saying maturity in learning and transforming into a
healthy version of yourself where you really understand your voice I The more I mean granted I'm 56 so there is an age thing there But I've been in this world of giant now a little over five years and what I understood and valued and appreciated in the guardian voice as my nemesis fifth voice Used to irritate me and now I crave that voice around me and so that's a maturity
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of learning and understanding. And so the assumption and to remember is you will mature into valuing and appreciating the contribution of all the voices. So good. Talk about this fourth assumption a little bit because you touched on it talking about the nurture versus nature, but also choice. So how have nature, nurture and choice played a part in the makeup of our five voices?
So nature, like I said, and you mentioned, is it's just how our DNA, was how we were made. And it is the most natural state to us. We don't even think about that first voice. It just comes out of us easy. The nurture part of it is when we look at our nature, the time that we can see it come out the most natural is most often between 16 and 19 years old. We rationalize around 13.
We really come into our own if we're under some type of authoritative or parental, you know, advisement or guardianship. Then from 16 to 19, we're kind of coming into our own, like, selves. And so we're confident in choosing, I don't really want to go out with all my friends Friday night, and I'm exhausted, or hey, I'm up for it, I'm ready to go, or I study at the last minute and cram, or I plan five days in advance. We start getting into
what we know is our most natural. Once we're about 18, 19, graduate from high school or we leave, we go to college, we get married, we get our new house, whatever our next step in life is, that's the nature. Because the world starts saying to us, our parents, our community, our culture, maybe mentors, professors, spouses, parents, this is what you ought to do in life, or this is what you should be, or,
you should act or you should wear or you should show up. That's what we start nurturing. And so we start shifting our thought process, not becoming a different person, but adapting to what is influencing us by nature, I mean, nurture. Then finally is choice. We can't miss the fact that things in life we choose impact us and also choices put on us impact us. It could be
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forms of trauma. It could be a parent that filed divorce and it made your life totally different in high school or younger. It could be the loss of a child or a divorce or drugs or substance abuse. It could be trauma forms that different forms of PTSD not only from a military perspective but from any kind of abuse perspective. So when choice hits our lives sometimes.
we adjust that first natural voice. And it doesn't mean we become somebody we're not. It means we've just adapted to almost shield and protect ourselves from something that was a choice on us. Yeah, that's good. So nature, nurture, and choice have all played a part or combined to make up your voice order.
The fifth assumption that we make is about what we won't assume, which is that we know what somebody else's foundational voice is just because we know them, or we've done what can tend to happen with assessments, which is weaponization, which is, I see this trait in them, so they must be a such and such, and that's what I'm going to assign to them. The best thing to do with five voices is to let each
person because they know themselves, determine what their voice is. We are not to determine what other people's foundational voices are. Amen. Let me just say an amen to that. That's a tough one because I have often coached and people have taken assessments and me, I myself changed my first foundational voice after I experienced about six months of studying.
and facilitating an understanding that I had so badly wanted to show up as a nurture. And it was that blind spot. And really I realized my natural voice when I get pushed up against stress. I can put on the face of a nurture, but my motive behind my behavior was not really pure and that's when I realized it was connector. So I can't say that more.
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Enough because even with my clients I have asked them to not put Label foundational voices on people in their offices I've had someone to think they were their nemesis voice because they so bad did not want to be the voice they truly were but once they got into that Natural voice it was like wearing a custom suit. We call it a best fit and there's relief in it because it's not hard it's
just unconscious competence to you. had a did a workshop, Five Voices workshop recently, and I felt like I knew that one of the people on the team had assessed one way, but was probably actually another way. But knowing this assumption, I held it because I felt confident that in the second session or the third session for sure,
he would understand it differently. And that's exactly what happened. So there wasn't this need to convince him of something different. and I was glad that I held that assumption, even if I was thinking it internally. and then number six, talk about the last one, which is also a something we won't assume, which is that we know what each word means. Right. Each, each voice has a distinct work connector, creative pioneer.
nurture guardian and in the you know the western world we think pioneering is like yeah we went out west and we find here yes out on the frontier but like imagine in Europe they do not see that or understand that word from our perspective they understand and define it from their perspective and the great thing about five voices is that it is.
you know, worldwide and we are in over 120 countries. And so converting that into each place that lets you know that the foundation of this really is not, you know, singularly pointed at a culture. It really is for everyone. And so do not think that you hear the word creative and that you have to be an artist. cause creative really means something different inside of Five Voices. So.
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Do not assume you know what each word means until you've gone through a full coaching session with us or others to fully understand it. Yeah, it's good. All right. So on this episode with the couple of minutes that we have left, we're going to talk about the nurturer. That is the first voice that we will talk about of the five. And you'll want to make sure to come back for each subsequent week to hear about all of them.
We'll probably remind you of the assumptions in every episode, but we did need to give you all of that kind of background and foundation so that you could understand the nurturer. Take it away, Mace. Yes, I'm going to speak on the nurturer, but I'm going to ask Shannon to give all the expertise because I can speak from the factual piece of it. I've already told you it's my blind spot, but Shannon's first voice actually is nurturer.
But we're going to go through these in a particular order, I'll explain that now is when you think about the capacity that a voice is heard inside of a room, not volume in a loudness or in an amount, but if a voice was inside the room, how much of what they say is actually taken in and impacts the leadership decisions we're making.
So we start with the nurturer because they are the champion of people, relational harmony and values. So I would love for you just to quickly expound on what does that truly mean to you when you're like, I'm the champion of that. Yes, I think about everything in every context in terms of people first. I know how everyone feels in a room. can,
assess when the temperature or the atmosphere in a room changes. I know when something doesn't land the way it should have or that somebody took something personally or was offended or hurt. Everything is people to me. So I just have a real high pulse on the atmosphere. And I always have that when I think back to middle school and high school and that that was my
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experience was I always knew how everybody felt and it was actually a little confounding to me that everybody didn't but truly everybody doesn't and so the more especially over the last three or four years that we have talked through the five voices language so much I've realized that's not something that is true of every person that I encounter and so people that I've encountered in my past that don't seem to
consider people, it isn't because they don't care about people, it's because they don't see with the same set of lenses that I do. Yeah, that's a good point because I think it's really hard, especially if you have some kind of values-based life, whether it's faith or whether it's the way you were raised by your parents, it's really hard to say that you actually value profit over people.
but in the nurturer's voice, they value people will always come before profit. It doesn't make the people who value profit before they consider people. And we'll talk about what that means maybe on a later episode. But also the nurturer's the relational oil. I like to think about a car engine. If we run out of oil, my daddy always told me, do not run out of oil in your car.
Run out of power steering fluid before you run out of oil. Because the engine will come to a screeching halt. And without a nurturer around the table or on your team, you do not have that relational oil that keeps that machine moving. And the nurturer will always be thinking, you know, has this idea or this result we're looking for actually been thought through? Like where some voices will just jump at any
pop of a moment, they have a decision, really that nurture is going to say, we thought through this? They really delight in celebration. They're fantastic at celebration where most of us are not. And they are, you guys are actual natural team players. You want to, I would, I'm sure there are nurturers out there playing.
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tennis or golf, but when you look at lot of nurturers, they probably were on sports teams that were team focused or team together. Those team meetings really are important to them. that is the nurturer when it comes to their strengths. Now, let's talk a little bit about the nurturers challenges, because we all have challenges, but when the nurture, because they are not hurt as much, and we'll talk a little bit about that in a second.
They can become a little bit resistant to change because, you know, everything needs to be considered. They're not, they don't, not sure you've thought that all the way through or consider the people that it will impact that you did it. You just thought about the result, but really didn't think about the people in that decision. And because they will hold their tongue quite a bit when pushed, they might become demonstrate some passive aggressive attendancies and kind of feel volcanic.
about volcanic, volcanic when it gets to a really tense moment, but it takes a lot to get them. And they actually rarely value the contribution they make. I can say this on behalf of Shannon, because I know she's confident in herself, but she will hold back and make sure that the contribution at the table, everyone's been heard. And in her maturity, she's learned to speak up in her nurture voice, but most nurturers
It is the quietest voice on, what's that little thing called that's the bar graph? Yeah, like the volume scale. Like decibel or whatever that word is. Meter. It's like one bar because they're quiet. They will rarely speak in a meeting first.
They will wait till the whole room has answered number one because they don't want to go against someone else's idea number two somebody might have the same idea they have and they're just going to allow that person to have the glory in it and they really do not want to cause disruption in in in the meeting or in the space and so The they are the quietest voice now. Here's the problem with that voice It is the highest
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percentage of the population are nurturers. At 43 % of the overall population, nurturers make up 43%, which is the highest across all five of the voices. I mean, that's crazy. And they're the least likely to be heard. So can I just say that to organizations or people running teams or people in communities, almost half of your room is silenced.
It's why we do not operate at the best, highest performance that we can is because 82, we'll get to these statistics a little bit later on possibly, but 82 % of the voices around the table are not heard, valued, and appreciated. And 43 % of that 82 are the nurturers. So what do we need to watch out for? If you were like, hey, this is what I want you to watch out for for me, and no.
What would we be looking for? It's interesting because nurturers and to Macy's point, because I've been in leadership for as many decades as I have, this probably isn't quite as true of me as it once was. But because nurturers will not be speaking first and they'll be waiting and possibly not speaking at all if they don't feel safe in a room, it's really important to pay attention to silence.
When nurturers are completely silent, it is often because they don't feel safe. It is rarely because they don't have anything to say. But when they don't feel safe and they don't feel heard, they will not speak. And so beware of silence. Also, we care about harmony. We care about the state of the team. We care about the state of people. We are always giving people the benefit of the doubt for their bad behavior.
But unfortunately, that gives us a bit of a fear of conflict because if there's conflict, there will no longer be harmony, at least for a short time. And we'd rather have harmony than conflict. But a really healthy nurturer can engage in conflict because they understand that this is going to cause a better team dynamic, a better atmosphere. It's actually going to lead to more and deeper harmony in the future if we address conflict now.
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But the biggest thing to look out for is when nurturers are silent, you should start asking why. And if you're a nurturer, you think you're a nurture out there, let me say also, we undermine our own leadership and we use that language a lot because I want to, when I'm working with people, allow them to understand these are actually the things that you do that on the other side of you.
you are reducing your influence. And so when nurturers go silent or they're conflict avoidant, like Shannon said, it doesn't mean they don't have something to say. But without speaking, people on the other side of you may think that you're not competent or that you don't have credibility in the subject matter. And so remember, even though you feel like your silence might be a form of humility, it could, on the other side of you, look like
ignorance or the lack of knowledge when that is not the fact. Yeah, it's good. The other thing I'd like to say just at the very end of each one is how we empower the voice. And I'm going to speak this over Shannon and all the nurturers. We need to let them speak first. We need to affirm their competence and we need to give genuine value to their contribution. And when I say let them speak first, literally.
That is the order in which I run all of my coaching sessions, all of my conversations with my friends or people around me is, hey, Shannon, what do you think? I want to hear from you first. Now, nurturers can defer and say, you know, let me come back. Great, but hey, remember nurturers, if you do not speak and you wait, then you could undermine your competence as you're showing up because people can make wrong assumptions about you. But we need to.
power nurturers by inviting them to speak first. It's good. Awesome. Okay. All right. So nurture this first week. If you think you might be a nurturer or you're like, I actually want to know what I am now that we're into the five voices. Now I really want to know what I am. We will provide a link for you to be able to take an assessment. Then it will link to Macy and somebody can follow up with you after the fact. So be sure and check the show notes for that.
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When you come back next week, we will be learning about our second in the five voices. But in the meantime, we want to make sure that you go out into your sphere of influence and lead like you mean it. We'll see you next time. Bye.