Kevin Hancock joins the Leadership from the Core “Love in Action” podcast with Episode 53, Finding Your Authentic Voice. Host Marcel Schwantes chats with Kevin, who shares his inspirational story of finding purpose in the midst of adversity and re-scripting his definition of leadership as a result. They also discuss his new book, The Seventh Power: One CEO’s Journey into the Business of Shared Leadership. Marcel Schwantes is the founder and chief human officer of Leadership from the Core, a global leadership training and executive coaching boutique with one core purpose: to grow profitable and powerful servant leaders through “Love in Action.”
“Leaders who want to create a culture of shared leadership should talk less, sit still more, have faith in their people, and engage their power. The way to get people to pick up more is simply to occupy less. The power of them all leading is just immeasurably greater than anything I could do on my own.” – Kevin Hancock
Click here to listen to the full podcast.
Here are a few highlights from the podcast (click here for the full transcription):
- Because what I found through repeatedly asking this question was lovely. It was Love In Action. What I found was that people already knew what to do. They did not actually need most of the time a CEO manager-direct directive. They knew what to do. What they really needed was encouragement and a safe culture to trust their own voice and to do what they knew was the best thing to do. (08:19-08:53)
- Everyone has a valuable, powerful, unique, never to be repeated voice. And the best cultural model for an organization is to release those voices, not restrict them. So once people kind of got the idea around the cultural concept of what we wanted to do, everything actually got a lot easier and smoother. And our company’s performance took off, and employee engagement took off, and so I really kind of came to see what happened with me as a hinder or our liability, to actually be a bit of a gift and an invitation to strengthen the voices of others. (10:51-11:44)
- What struck me at Pine Ridge was I met in an entire community that felt as if a piece of their voice had been taken, or stolen, or was missing, and that they were not fully heard. And the combination of those two events created some really powerful, personal learnings. First, I knew what it was like to not feel heard because of my disorder. And second, at Pine Ridge I realized there were lots of ways for people to lose their voice in this world. And putting two and two together even started to think about the very purpose of a human life on earth and considered maybe it was to self-actualize. Maybe we’re all here just trying to find our unique, never to be repeated voice. (14:01-14:55)
