ProductiviTree: Cultivating Efficiency, Harvesting Joy

ProductiviTree #18 The Six Pillars of Leadership for Maximum Productivity with Jim Carlough

• Santiago Tacoronte • Season 1 • Episode 18

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Great leadership isn’t just about vision—it’s about execution. In this episode, Jim Carlough, leadership expert and author of The Six Pillars of Effective Leadership, reveals how the right leadership habits can boost productivity, build high-performing teams, and create lasting success. We’ll dive into time management, decision-making, change management, and the leadership mindset shifts that separate average managers from elite leaders. Whether you're leading a startup or a Fortune 500 team, this episode is packed with actionable insights to help you lead smarter and get more done. 

Takeaways 

  • Leaders must develop integrity to build trust. 
  • Compassion and empathy are essential leadership qualities. 
  • Focus helps leaders and teams achieve their goals. 
  • Meetings should be purposeful and minimal to avoid distractions. 
  • Collaboration enhances decision-making and productivity. 
  • Leaders should avoid burnout by managing their workload effectively. 
  • Approachability fosters a positive team environment. 
  • Introverts can lead effectively without being extroverted. 
  • Managing distractions is crucial in modern leadership. 
  • Building trust requires consistent communication and recognition. 

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With over 30 years of leadership experience, Jim Carlough is an accomplished business strategist, speaker, and author. Having successfully driven explosive growth for healthcare organizations from startups to industry leaders, Jim is a trusted expert in building high performing teams, revitalizing underperforming businesses and guiding organizations through transformational change. Jim's core philosophy, leaders aren't born, they are developed, challenges the myth of innate leadership. In his book, The Six Pillars of Effective Leadership, A Roadmap to Success, Jim delivers a practical and inspiring guide for leaders at every stage of the journey. His approach focuses on six essential traits. that empower individuals to embrace leadership as a skill that can be learned, honed and mastered through experience, mentorship and intentional growth. Hi Jim and welcome to ProductiviTree Santiago, thank you for having me here today. I am excited to meet you and to talk to your audience. Wow. Jim, leadership and productivity go hand in hand. Why do so many leaders struggle to be productive themselves? think a lot of people don't understand what's required to be a leader. I think people enter leadership with open eyes, but not necessarily with the experience of how to motivate people to be productive. And it does go hand in hand. A good leader who can assemble a good team and can lead a good team will have a team that's higher in productivity than someone who doesn't. And it's interesting when you look at any corporation, you may have super leaders and then you have middle leaders and they differ in quality and quantity and in terms of how they manage their teams and the productivities that they get. So I agree, they are tied hand to hand. Do you think that productivity is an attribute of someone that has more chances to reach higher in her or his career? I'm not, potentially yes. think if a leader, so when I lead and manage, I'm very collaborative. I'm not authoritarian. And so what I want to do is I want to make sure that the person that I'm leading is also growing and developing. I don't force people into leadership, but I at least pass on the skills that I use in leadership to my teams that work. for me. And out of that, there are people who will grasp onto leadership and want to go into that realm of a career path. And I certainly will help mentor them and support them in that as well. And then you have other employees who are just happy doing what they're doing day to day, and they have no aspiration for leadership. So that's not somebody I would push to be a leader. Obviously, you want people to do what They enjoy to do what they have fun doing and the career path they choose is really up to them. Their leader shouldn't dictate that. You argue that leaders aren't born, they're made. So what's one leadership habit anyone can develop to instantly improve their effectiveness? My number one characteristic, which I say is non-negotiable, is integrity. Integrity does have to be developed. Integrity is more than just doing the right thing. It's doing the right thing consistently and never wavering from that. If you don't operate with integrity, You can't build trust with your team. If your team doesn't trust you, they're not going to follow you and they're not gonna be as successful. So to me, integrity is non-negotiable. In fact, I would almost argue, I was speaking at the University of North Texas two months ago and it was a room of about 95 college students and we went through my six pillars. And at the end, there was a young woman who sat in the first seat of the second row who said, since integrity is so important, shouldn't that be the base underneath all of the pillars? Like at the base of a statue. And I kind of looked at her for a second and I said, you just ruined the title of my book. But she was correct because without integrity, you can't have trust. Without integrity, you can't manage consistently. And it's very important in terms of, from my perspective, that your employees trust that you have their back and that you're there to help them grow and develop. If they see that and sense that, you're going to have a much more productive team as a result of that. So that's a pillar that is you may be born with, but you really have to develop it and apply it because we're all hit from all different sides in every day of our work life. And it's important that in my world that you operate consistently like driving down the center of the roadway and never wavering one way or the other for self-benefit as an example. How is the integrity meter looking in 2025 Jim? So let me go back to 1983. So in 1983, I graduated college and also got elected to be a city councilman in the town I grew up in. Shortly after the election, the city manager invited me in to chat with him. And he said, I'm not going to give you advice or tell you how to do the job of a city councilman. He said, but I'm going to ask you to ask yourself one question. And he said, every night before you go to bed, before you close your eyes, but when you put your head on the pillow, ask yourself this question. Did I do anything today for my own self-benefit at the expense of another individual, organization, team, or community? He said, if you can answer no to that question, you've done the right thing. If you've answered yes, you need to rethink your approach and what you're doing. Do you know every night since that day in 1983, I asked myself that very question, and I've never said yes to that question. And to me, that is something that Integrity has to be at the cornerstone of everything that you do. I truly believe that. I have worked for some great leaders who operate with awesome integrity. There's also people in the real world who use that. As an example, the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, one of his key characteristics that he brought in in 2014 to Microsoft was integrity. And he pushed that through the organization that people were gonna be open and honest and direct and he has followed through with that. And I totally believe that. Let's talk a little bit about your bestseller book, The Six Pillars of Leadership. Can you take us quickly through each one of them? I can, we've already talked about integrity. The next two are, and these are two different pillars, compassion and empathy. And they have different meanings. And it's important for a leader to understand and to also have compassion and empathy. And one of the reasons I can say these things are learned and developed is when I think back to my first management job. I didn't have compassion or empathy. I didn't know how to deal with employees who are having issues at home or issues on the job. I had to learn and develop those. And those become very, very important for individuals in order to have stability and again, reinforce the trust and also understand that there are going to be times where employee A is not gonna be as productive because their child is ill as an example. And being able to deal with things like that, even in the workplace, even though it's something that's happening at home. And so those are the next two pillars in terms of importance. From there, I typically talk about focus and stability. Again, two very different things. When I think of focus, I think of Jeff Bezos and Amazon. Ever since he founded Amazon in the mid 90s, he has had one singular focus, and that is to be the biggest, the largest distributor of retail items directly to people's homes. And he has been highly successful at that. Now he had some early year troubles, but which he overcame, but his singular focus has never wavered. And when I think of stability, I think of Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett has done the same thing the same way over and over and over again. And if you're a fan of Warren Buffett, you understand that he may find assets that are undervalued and then he improves them and makes a lot of money off of them. But he also is somebody who does the same thing every day. Every day. So his employees... everybody in his organization understands what his next step is going to be. And then the last pillar is humor. And when I say humor, I don't mean the leader has to have be a standup comedian, but I use humor as a way of introducing new subjects, getting people back on track when they may derail in a meeting and go off on tangents. and also to refocus people. And lastly, in times of conflict, use it to level set people and bring people back. And it has worked highly successfully for me. And a lot of times it's self-deprecating humor, laughing at something stupid that I did, but that also humanizes me as a leader amongst my teams. Let's stop for a second in focus. today's leadership is full of noise. How can leaders eliminate distractions and get meaningful work done by staying focused? In order to have focus, you have to constantly remind people what the goal line is, right? What are we trying to accomplish? And that focus will allow you to see the forest through the trees. So as an example, I had two coworkers at one point in my career who, one was a manager, one was a subordinate, and they were having a disagreement over something in the hallway, and it got quite escalated. And so I invited them into my office and I sat them down and what I immediately saw was they were so wrapped around the axle about their own personal biases that if they looked at it collectively, they had the perfect solution, but they didn't give it focus. in order to be able to see the forest through the trees. All I did was help them see the forest through the trees and to kind of get them away from where they were, I don't want to say attacking each other, but arguing with each other and understanding that both had valid points and they both were right. But what they missed was they didn't put those two things together. which would have created the ultimate solution to what their challenge was. Time is leaders, not only leaders, people's most valuable asset. What are your to-go strategies for leaders who feel like there is never enough? So we all struggle with that. I asked somebody the other day if they could add a few hours to the day because there was too much to get done. And they said, no, they hadn't mastered that task yet. I think having a clear agenda of what you need to accomplish and focusing on that agenda and those steps to achievement, I'm a very big planner, writer, journaling person. I try to keep my focus on what is the goal I'm trying to achieve. If is it a revenue goal, is it a profit goal, is it a productivity goal? And then try not to waver from that. I think the distractions that we get are often noise that we need to filter out to allow us to have greater focus to zero in on getting the tasks done that we need to achieve in order to hit the goals that we've set. Let's talk a little bit about meetings. I am a big critic for meetings, excessive meetings. What do you think about them? Are they a productivity killer? Is it an essential leadership tool? What's your rule to make meetings worth the time? So I'm a minimalist when it comes to meetings. I do believe that they, for purpose, I have two types of meetings with my teams. I have a team meeting once a week for a half hour. I also have an individual one-on-one meeting with each of my direct reports also for a half hour. The difference between the two meetings is the group meeting is my opportunity to speak to the group about where we are and what we need to accomplish. The individual meeting is my employees meeting to take my time to help them. So it's not me speaking and directing at both of those. Those are the only two meetings I typically host. Periodically we'll have an all hands meeting or interdepartmental meeting. and things of that nature. But for my team, I keep it at a minimum. And then I try to help minimize the other meetings that the corporation wants to have. So for example, we have a big marketing department that puts out a ton of content. And every time they push out content, they want to review it with everyone. Well, there was one week we had a marketing meeting every day. And I said, The salespeople can't sell if they're sitting in a marketing meeting every day. So we need to redirect and find another way to be able to educate them on the content without taking them out of the active role of selling because it was a productivity killer. And we were very successful at doing that. And it also helped the marketing department synthesize their message concisely. so that they were also very focused when they had the opportunity to be in front of the sales organization in order to talk about the things that they were doing in marketing. Decision fatigue is real. leaders are forced to take dozens if not hundreds of decisions every day. How can they make sure that they are not stuck on guessing themselves and they are using their decision-making power wisely? So I'm very collaborative in my management style. so I often, there are some decisions clearly that I have to make on my own. Like is employee A going to make it? But in terms of, let's talk about a product or a service or how we want to package a product, I may not have all the answers. So I typically will go through with a few people, small audience. and talk through what our options are to come up with the best solution. I've learned throughout my career that I don't have all the answers, but I do have the people around me where collectively we can make the right answer. And so that collaborative management style has served me quite well. And I would encourage other leaders to follow that also. Some leaders burn themselves out trying to be, superheroes for the teams. Should leaders stop doing that? I keep thinking of a good friend of mine who used to work for me. He often told me I work too hard. And I told him, I don't understand what you mean, I work too hard. He said, you put in a lot of hours and you have a lot of throughput and you get a lot of stuff done, but you're gonna kill yourself. And I looked at him and I said, I don't... I feel I'm not doing enough. And so when you go back to the how many hours in the day question, I try to make sure that I'm as efficient as possible. What's really interesting is I'm more productive when I'm busy. I'm less productive when my calendar is empty. Because having three open spots on my calendar forces me to get the day-to-day things done in a certain period of time. Whereas if I have an open calendar and no meetings or no appointments, my mind tends to wander, wander into other areas where it defocuses me. And so, you know, to me, I'm more productive when I'm very busy. What is the worst advice you hear about leadership productivity? The worst things that I hear is when leader, the worst thing is when I see leaders who are not approachable. Someone asked me the question once, when does leadership start? Does it start when you sit down at your desk or does it start when you have your first meeting of the day? And my response to that was leadership starts when your feet hit the floor. and you get out of bed in the morning. And leadership is a 24-7 job. So I always took the opportunity that when I got out of my vehicle to walk into the office building, I took the opportunity to interact with people, whether they worked for me, with me or not. Only because it was an opportunity to meet and learn more people or learn about more people. and the things that they were interested in. I once worked for a leader who would park at the side of the building and go in a private entrance and take the freight elevator up to their office so they didn't have to interact with people. And that's not a leader. That's an authoritative person who just wants to push things down versus someone who wants to work in concert with people. So I... whether it's in the elevator or whether it's walking into the building or whether it's just standing in the lunch line, I would always talk to people and interact with them. I wanted people to know that I was approachable, that I was human, and that I was no different than they were. We put a lot of stress on communications and public speaking for leaders. But what happens to introverts? How can introverts be leaders without necessarily being great at public speaking or have a great charisma? It's interesting because I never thought that I was a great public speaker. But when I've seen other, I mean, if you think about, I don't want to pick on former presidents, but in the United States, there's been some former presidents who were not as good at public speaking. And then there's the people like a Ronald Reagan or George Bush that were more attuned to be able to do public speaking. I used to watch Bill Clinton when he was president, and Bill Clinton always held his hand with his thumb between the first and second finger. And he did that basically pinching himself to keep himself focused on what he needed to say. No different than somebody who, to relax to speak, will play with a paperclip in their hand. And I always thought that that was very interesting to look at Bill Clinton and see that whenever he spoke, he always had that thumb between those two fingers. Let's move into time, energy. We have a lot of distractions around us, Jim. We have teams, slacks, notifications. Are we designing leadership for distraction? It's the modern tech. undermining thought leaders and the ability to stay focused and make good decisions. I don't think so. think used properly, it is an efficient way of communicating. We currently use both Slack and Teams to communicate and email to communicate internally. And it doesn't matter to me how people, what method they use to communicate with me, but my team knows. that if it is something urgent, they are to send me a text message because that is something that's going to pop up on my phone, which I will visibly see, because I turn off all of those notifications on my laptop. If I had a banner coming up and a ding every time an email arrived, it would be total distraction. I'm getting more than 100 emails a day. And so having that type of distraction really impacts productivity. So I have focused time for dealing with email and responding to Slack or to responding to Teams. But I know if something is important, my phone is either going to ring or I will get a text message that says, Hey, Jim, I need five minutes of your time. And, and so that works very effective for me. Now there are others who like to have that ding every time an email hits. To me, would just be a stressor. I mean, it would be such a distraction that I would lose my train of thought. So in terms of my laptop, in this conversation, I may have gotten 20 emails, but I haven't gotten a single notification and there hasn't been a single ding that you've heard. because my focus is here. My focus isn't on the disruptions that are happening around. What are behaviors that instantly signals that someone is a bad leader? I would say a bad leader would be leaders who you see their inability to listen. and leaders who are just total authoritarian and, and I almost said dictator and just, you know, giving out demands to me, that's not a leader because you're not developing your people. Our goal as leaders is to make people better. If you're, you and I are working together and I can help you. become better at what you're doing, you will be more successful, you'll be happier, and you'll enjoy the work that you're doing more. Whereas if I'm just coming to you and saying, Santiago, I need these three things today. I don't care what else you're working on, I need these three things. You're go off and do those three things like a robot, come back and deliver those three things. but we really haven't talked about what we're trying to accomplish with those three things. So how are you going to be able to do that? So if a leader is going to act and behave that way, they're really not guiding and leading their team. Sort of like American football and a quarterback. The quarterback goes in the huddle. Well, the quarterback doesn't make up the play the coach does, but the quarterback has to relay the play to the team. And in that huddle, the team says, okay, we're gonna run play X, Y, Z. So if you're the tight end, you know that in that play, what you have to do. If you're the guard, you know who you're blocking. And so I think the leader has to perform in the same way and be able to give advice to their team as to how they're going to accomplish that and what play they're going to run. You say that trust is essential for productivity. But why is one way that leaders break trust without realizing? I think just simple communication, interpersonal communication and spending time with individuals to learn more about their interests, their family, what they did on the weekend. A leader who is in tune with his or her population is going to be more successful than a leader who doesn't know the person's spouse's first name. I'll give you an example. I worked in a company at one time and I had on this one floor about 40 people that worked in my area. And there was a woman who twice a day cleaned the kitchen and took out the garbage. Her name was Kathy. And I noticed one day that she was cleaning the kitchen and there were people in the kitchen getting coffee, getting lunch, doing other things. And that one person said hello to Kathy. I always talked to Kathy on the way in, on the way out, whenever I saw her. And I knew her and I knew her about her family. But I realized that she was a part of our team, but our team didn't recognize her. They ignored her. So I sent an email to the entire team and I said, the first person who can come to my office and tell me the name of the person who takes out our garbage and cleans up after us in the kitchen twice a day, I will give a $50 Starbucks card too. And then I left my office and I just stood outside my office door and all of a sudden these people all got out of their chair and started running around like helter-skelter trying to find this woman. and they cornered her and scared the living daylights out of her because they wanted to know her name. And then they come rushing to my office. And I was happy to give out a gift card, but somebody then said to me, why did you do that? And I said, because you all ignore her. She is part of our team. She's a human being and she's picking up after us. treat her with respect, and remember she's part of us. She's not the enemy. And from that day forward, the interaction between the team and Kathy, you could see the excitement in Kathy every time she came through the doors on our floor, because she knew she was going to be talking to people. And I'm sure it made her job easier and happier. And the employees learned a valuable lesson that day that They shouldn't be so with blinders on that they shouldn't take care of the people that pick up after us. In fact, the other thing that we found out or noticed afterwards is the employees started to take better care of the kitchen. Because now they knew the person who was cleaning up after them. So they were washing their cups out and putting them in the dishwasher, not leaving them in the sink. So there were also some good things that came out of that as well. Jim, leaders often micromanage in the name of productivity. How do you strike a good balance between control and delegation? That is a great question. so in terms of how I lead, I don't consider myself a micromanager. However, I do measure a lot of things in terms of productivity in the sales organization. So for example, we have KPIs that a salesperson has to accomplish every month. They could be certain number of meetings, certain number of prospect calls, certain number of whatever. And so I let the data come to me so I can evaluate the performance versus having meetings and keeping people too busy and being too authoritarian. So if I know that you've made five sales calls last week, and I know that your pipeline grew by $2 million in the last four weeks, I know that you're moving in the right direction. I don't need a meeting for that. I don't need to pull people together for that. And it allows me to be able to see where the problem areas are through the numbers that we gather. And so I think a better leader is one who can take that data and apply it and make change or use that to the benefit of the team. And I think it's also good to then review those numbers with the team. So we often talk about the productivity of the organization and the productivity of the team, but I'm a person who doesn't measure, for example, I don't measure just the close ratio. The close ratios at the end of the sale. I measure the things that impact the close ratio. How many emails did you send out? How many phone calls did you make? How big is your pipeline? Do you have enough in your pipeline? Is it sustainable? are the things, what is the speed at which things are accelerating through your pipeline to closure? So I measure all of those points in the process, all through Salesforce. And it allows me to help coach somebody to be able to say, hey, you know, those three weeks you took off to go to the Caribbean to play golf, your productivity dropped off. There was no regaining of what you lost while you were out. And so as a result, they had a decline in their pipeline. that then they had to recover from. And so I let the data do the talking as opposed to trying to micromanage and being in people's face every 30 seconds to get answers. very powerful. Every company says they want an accountability culture, but most of them fail. I do believe also the reason why there are so many meetings in companies is because there is not a clear ownership. How can leaders actually create an accountability culture that drives results, reduce meetings and make things clear for everybody? leader has to demonstrate that they own the results. And if I own the results that have to happen and you're on my team, you need to know what components you own in order for us to meet the expectations of the organization. There's a great book that's out called Extreme Ownership. written by a couple of, I believe it was Navy SEALs. They definitely were SEALs. I think they were Navy SEALs. And it was a number one New York Times bestseller. It sold 15 million copies or more, but it was all about extreme ownership. Knowing what it is that you own and ensuring that you never lose focus on that component or that activity or whatever it is that you're owning. So in my world, it would be the revenue number. I own the revenue number. And my team knows that I own the revenue number, and they know that I'm going to do whatever I can to impact that in a positive way. And if that means helping you on a sales call, I'm going to go with you on a sales call. If that means strategizing with you on how we get deal X over the goal line, or how do we get to the key decision maker if we haven't gotten to that person? We're gonna work together on that. To me, that's how you build those teams and get everyone to be accountable and to have that extreme ownership of the goal at hand. RTO, return to office. What's the best leadership approach to keep teams engaged and happy So interestingly enough, M-PULSE, the company that I work for, we have about 460 employees. We don't have a single office. We are 100 % remote. And always have been. And we do a couple of things. There's a company wide 30 minute all hands meeting once a week. And that is an opportunity for not just leadership, but the organization to talk about accomplishments from the last seven days. So sales, for example, even though I own sales, I don't speak about sales. the team presents or the salesperson presents a specific sale that they close that week. Marketing talks about what certain, what conferences they attended the week before and the outcomes from that. Development and engineering and all of the various teams have the ability to have input. And so every Monday, the I can't think of Jill's title, but she sends a note out saying, the new deck is out on Teams. We need speakers for Wednesdays, all hands. And so leaders like me will go and I'll say, Santiago, I want you to go talk, I want you this week to present on SaleX from last week. Here's the link to the deck. Go add a one, you know, one slide to talk about it. And then each of the departments do it. So every week there's an all hands meeting. And once a month, the CFO will present the numbers from the prior month. So there's total visibility and transparency. And so I believe when you're working with remote people, that you have to have complete transparency. Because if you don't have complete transparency, you're not going to be able to move the needle. People will become disillusioned. I'll give you an example. Yesterday. So the woman who runs our HR department wanted to see a demonstration of one of our products. So I said, that's easy enough. said, so send an email out and I want Dan to be on it and he's going to do the demo for you. So Ann sent an email out to Dan and I saying, hey, I'd like to see a demo on this. Dan, Jim said that you would do the demo for Dan picked up the phone and called me and said, why do I have to present to HR what's really happening here? Because I wasn't transparent and I didn't tell Dan that he was going to get an invite to a meeting and this was what the meeting was for. Because I didn't take that one step and because Ann was faster than I was to send out the email, that employee got immediately concerned. that HR was having a meeting with him, I was being invited because he was being terminated, which was the last thing that we were doing. But that glimpse of non-transparency caused a concern that I should have never allowed to happen. And so that accountability to me is on me. And I apologize to Dan that Ann was faster than I was, but I assured him. that he was not being terminated. But that's a real life example of where transparency, when you don't have that transparency, what can happen to a person on the receiving end of something, in this case an email. Let's do rapid fire questions answering less than 30 seconds. Number one, what is the biggest productivity myth in leadership? The biggest productivity myth is that. All things are fixable. Mm-hmm. Some things aren't. Okay. Number two, annual performance reviews. Useful or outdated? Both. I think they've become too complicated. And I think organizations have tried to use them and put people into a certain arc. And in that case, I see them failing. They are useful in terms of professional development. And when I do reviews, we talk about what you want to learn over the next 12 months. And we put a plan in place for that. In that case, those are useful. Number three, what's one quickly daily habit that makes a leader instantly more productive? clear and concise communication. 4. If a team is missing deadlines, what's the first thing a leader should do? Take ownership for it. And number five, what's your first leadership, your number one leadership tip for getting more done with less stress? Get a mentor. I'm very big on mentoring. I mentor other people and I have people that I go to as a mentor that helps me work and talk through things. Jim, let's wrap this up. What's one mindset shift that separates productive leaders from reactive ones? The mind shift that the leader has all the answers to all of the problems. A leader has to understand that they probably don't, but that the answer is probably within the organization that they run. Jim, where can people find your book, The Six Pillars of Effective Leadership, and also how can they know more about you? So the easiest way to learn more about me and also to get a copy of the book is to go to my website, which is simply www.jimcarlough, no spaces, no periods, .com. The book is also available on Amazon, on Google, and also at Barnes and Noble online. So you can get a book there or you can purchase a book right through my website. Great. Jim, thank you very much for giving us 40 minutes of wisdom. As someone that leads teams, I am taking a big takeaway with me, which is accountability. And you have shown through many examples that you are a very, very much accountable leader. Thanks so much for being with us and we wish you all the best. Well, thank you for having me. I've enjoyed being here. If anyone in your audience has any questions, please reach out to me. I am approachable. I will answer questions. I will do whatever I can to help you. Thank you, Thank you,