In this episode, Dianna Booher shares what it takes to be a real leader—which is to expand influence through communicating exemplarily and building confident trust! Dianna is a hall-of-fame speaker, a bestselling author of 49 books, a leadership communication & executive presence expert, a book writing & publishing coach, among the Global Gurus Top 30 Communication Experts, and among Marshall Goldsmith's Top 100 Coaches. Tune in to learn all about Dianna’s insights about paying the price of leadership, her passion for writing, and how effective communication is still the key to being a great leader!
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Dianna Booher - Leaders on Leadership
I am truly excited because my guest is Dianna Booher. Dianna, welcome.
Thank you. It's great to be with you.
Thank you so much. She goes way back with The Joneses. She knew my mom and dad for many decades. She’s a veteran speaker and author. I'm going to tell you all about her before we dive right into this. She helps organizations communicate clearly, and she helps leaders expand their influence through a strong executive presence, occasionally by her own published book, which we are going to unpack here too.
She's the bestselling author of 49 books, some from Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, and McGraw Hill, and these have been published in 62 Foreign Languages. Her latest books include Faster, Fewer, Better Emails, Communicate Like a Leader, Creating Personal Presence, What More Can I Say? and Communicate With Confidence. Her clients include more than 1/3 of Fortune 100 companies. Dianna, I cannot wait to hear what you have to share about paying the price of leadership. Welcome again.
Thank you.
You knew my father. He was a very pragmatic and jubilant man, but he also knew what it takes to pay the price of leadership. One of his speeches was called Just That, and he did this many years ago, and it's still one of our bestsellers. In it, he unpacks the four tenets of what leaders are going to have to be paying in order to be paying the price of leadership. The first of those is loneliness, and we have all heard, “It's lonely at the top. Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” but can you unpack for us what loneliness has meant to you throughout your life and maybe share some tools for any of our readers out there that may be in a season of loneliness?
I had a company, a training firm until 2017 when I sold it, but loneliness there encompassed a lot of angst around cashflow. When you are a small firm, and we were about fifteen employees at max, every time there is a dot-com boat when we went through that, there's an energy crisis. We had mostly Fortune 500 organizations. We had about eight major oil companies. When they went through a big crunch as happens over and over, there's always a cashflow problem. That's something you can't talk to your employees about because you don't want them to go, “I’ve got to go look for another job,” so you swept that out.
There's usually a lot of travel involved with most organizations. With mine certainly as a consultant and as a professional speaker and even going on or off the tours, I would be on the road 3 or 4 weeks, sometimes 10 days in a row, not even having the weekend off. That was part of the loneliest time. If you are setting up partnerships from executive to executive, you want to show up in their office.
Now, people do more of that via Zoom because of COVID, but traveling was always a huge thing. Probably the third area that was the loneliest was when you had a poor performer and you had to do something about it. You can't talk to other people in the organization to say, “I'm thinking about letting Jim, Tom, Harry, Carol, or whatever go.” Those are lonely decisions that you have to make.
Thank you for sharing that because sometimes people look at great leaders and think, “Surely they were able to motivate everybody.” It's like we got the good, bad, and ugly. Like everybody else, we got to know when to hold them and know when to fold them. I love that you talked about cashflow, you have to keep that quiet.
I'm working with a client right now and that's one of the things that their boss does constantly vent on. “We are rich. We are poor,” and that's exhausting. You want to be transparent but I love that you share that, as leaders, there are certain things that we have to burden alone. If we need to get expert advisement, we get expert advisement.
This was another big energy crunch and the high-tech IBM was a big client of ours. HP was a big client. We had a lot of people that are in the industry. They're well-known and written up in the media. We are going through tough times and we are going to cancel any unusual or unnecessary activity like a speech, consulting, coaching, and training. During those times, I finally got to the point where I'm going to open the books. I'm going to show employees the profit level here and how it's dropped during this crunch and that helps, but they do not bear being responsible for everybody's salary.
That's a great point. You don't want them to know the details of that. Talk to me about when you sold the company in 2017. Did you feel a sense of loneliness after that? I know you reshaped yourself and we'll talk about that with your vision, but did you feel lonely then?
Not really because I was ready to turn loose of that company. Not loneliness after that happened, but up to the point of discussing it, yes. Not having a peer. In the past, I have been part of mastermind groups and CEO executive groups, but at that particular time, I was not. This was a heavy decision to turn over your life's work to somebody else.
Charlie was turning it over to you and that was great. That was an ongoing feeling. He had a feel for you, your character, and your faith, and knowing the integrity would be maintained. You don't have that when you are selling an outside, your family outside, a good friend, or a best friend. That was a huge decision to decide to turn over my reputation to my training clients and my work and all my books. I have kept the rights too. We have taken those books and we have created more than 200 other products. You are turning over the integrity and the reputation for those other products and those trainings for with somebody else that you don't know. That was a lonely decision for sure.
I love that you brought up the mastermind groups and for our leaders out there, every leader we have been on here talks to it. I have mine. I have my coach that I pay. I have my mastermind groups that are so important because they are going to be some things you have to discuss cohort to cohort outside the company and familial bonds, and get some advisement and counsel. Thank you for that, Dianna.
First of all, we talked about loneliness, and then he says weariness. Charles would say in his funny way, “My problem isn't staying motivated. It's keeping other people from demotivating me.” That's worked with people. We get it, but he was always like, “You are going to encounter people that are always doing more than what they need to do, and then you are going to have people that are not carrying their weight.” As a leader, it stops with us, so we got to pick it up. We can't let anything fall. How do you combat and deal with weariness?
That's probably the weakest part of my life as a leader because I traveled, doing research for the books, doing author tours, and then traveling to do speeches and training. I was often on the road. I have already mentioned how often and that is very lonely, even though you have 40 other people that have flown in executives.
For example, IBM would fly in executives from all over the world and put them in this week-long program. There are people all around you but they are temporary people. They are not people whom you've built a connection and relationship with. They don't know about your business. It's a very surface interaction every night over dinner for five nights. The awareness comes from not having that support group, but it also comes from long hours.
Weariness as a businessperson comes not only from not having that support group but also from long hours of work.
I never managed to work just 40 or 45 hours a week. As a business owner, I was always working 55 to 60 hours. Sometimes on occasion, it would be 80 hours, but most of the time 55 to 60 hours a week. That wears you down after a while. You get physically exhausted and that's when I would practically sleep all day Saturday to catch up and that's not true. Physically, you can't catch up by sleeping it all in one day, but you trick your mind to think, “I can do that.” That's a weird time because of the long hours.
When you are chasing your passion or honing in your vision, there are times when you have to will your body to say, “We got this much downtime and we are going to keep going.” I think of Charles and the pace that he kept. It was relentless up until his last breath. He may not have been physically moving but spiritually and mentally, he wanted to finish that race strong. I love that you talked about being conscious.
I was going to mention also as an author that weariness sets in. I write a book in about three weeks, and most people go, “What?” I have a process that I used to use in course development that I intuitively transferred to books and I do write quickly. That means locking myself away, clearing the calendar for 2 to 3 weeks, and writing 12 to 14 hours a day. There's no rest period in a meeting or talking to somebody. There's no mental downtime. My dad used to talk to me about working so hard and working so long. When I was growing up, he would always say about homework, “You can't go out and play.”
I was a big basketball player, “You can't play basketball until you get your homework done. You always have to have your homework done.” Now when I have grown a company and I'm working long hours, my dad's always saying, “Slow down. Don't work so hard.” I said, “My work is never done. Remember how you told me to do my homework before I could play? I'm a writer. It's never done. You continue to go, rewrite, perfect, and polish.” Even when you send it off to the publisher, you think, “It's still not done. I could still have improved that.” There's that mental drive and that mental stress that being the best that you can be is wearing on your mind.
Leadership Communication: As a writer, the work is never done. You just continue to go and rewrite and perfect and polish. Even when you send it off to the publisher, it's still not done.
I know some people take a month off. How do you recharge?
Getting through the book is recharging. When I'm working on a long book, I drive fourteen hours a day until I get it done. Doing everything else is relaxation to me. What most people would consider play, I don't necessarily spend a lot of time on a hobby. My hobby is reading for my grandkids, but I love my job so much. I'm so passionate about writing that doing anything that's not that is a mental rest, like cooking a meal.
I don't normally cook. My husband does most of the cooking. If I decide I need a rest, then I go into the kitchen and bake something or cook, and I consider that's off. People might think that's work. For me, it's not work. I like visiting with my parents. That's a relief because I know I'm doing something for them. I'm helping them. That's a downtime.
Loneliness and weariness. The next term he used is abandonment. We think that abandonment gets a negative stereotype for those of us in pet rescue, abandoned as a child, or fear of abandonment. He would say abandonment is stopping doing what you like and want to think about and do in favor of what you ought and need to.
I remember saying, “Dad, you are so successful.” He's like, “I do more in a day to contribute to my failure than my success.” I'm like, “What?” He kept saying, “You got to abandon. You've got to hone it in.” Your books and products, you probably got 100 million people. Can you talk about this? Can you do this? Can you do a book on this? How do you stay so tightly focused?
That is tough. When I brought in a general manager, one of his first comments is, “You are doing 1,000 things. How can you stop doing 1,000 things? We need to focus.” I finally got aboard with that, but it took me a while to do that. I always felt like I was called and I know I was called. I know God called me to write. I had a very unusual experience when that came through very strongly and clear.
Anytime I was on the road speaking or doing training, I felt like I was abandoning what God had called me to do. The logistics, even like you say a show, there's a lot of preparation for that. You've got to send information or here's a description. Tune in to some past episodes so you get the feel of the show. Any little thing like that is logistics. Publishing and training have the same logistics. They are a “waste of time” because I'm not writing another book. I know they are essential. I agree with your dad about feeling like you are abandoning your calling.
As you said, the calling is intrinsic but then you have to have where the rubber meets the road. You have to have the resources. Jesus had His anointing but He still needed His disciples out doing their thing because otherwise, the word is written down and shared. You go here. I love that. It is essential. For leaders, that's a great point.
Even the management task or the task that I liked the least. I was one of those, “Here's the project, here's the goal, go do it and let me know when it's done.” That's probably not the best management philosophy in life, but one thing I did not enjoy is telling people how to do something. I say, “Here's the goal, and here's the end product. Here are your resources, budget, and deadline. Please go do it,” and that gave me less sense of I'm wasting time.
I love that you linked abandonment to delegation. General Patton said, “Don't tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” It’s exactly what you said. If you have the right follower, you got to have a follower that says, “Boss, give me the big picture and I will take it over the goal line.” Not somebody that says, “You have to tell me every day what to do.” Your bench has to be full of self-starters, and I would think of the creative space it would be. You did a pretty good job. Perhaps abandonment, you need to look at your delegation and see what you can offload to other people.
Our tendency is to offload things we don't like to do and that's good when we can do that. We probably should be offloading things that we don't do well. We might enjoy it but we don't do well.
We have the tendency to offload things. It’s good when you can do what you don’t like, but we probably should be offloading things that we just don't do.
Loneliness, awareness, abandonment, and last of all is vision. I can remember sitting under people like you and everybody else growing up. I'm like, “This is like Nostradamus with these people. They’re visionary.” My dad was like, “No. It's just seeing what needs to be done and doing it.” I'm like, “I'm an operations girl. I can get my head wrapped around this.” Talk to me about what vision means to you, and also, I want to go back to something you said earlier about how you got the calling to write because clearly, that was a vision given to you.
As I said, when I started out being multi-focused, people would call and say, “Do you want to do an online course?” “I can do that.” “Do you want to create this big webinar series?” “I can do that.” “Do you want to do public seminars on publishing around the country?” “Yes, I can do that.” I was so scattered that it was so frustrating.
Once I got focused to say, “It's okay. God called me to do this. What I do well is write in communication coaching, coaching presenters, and things like that, but that's the umbrella.” Even the book writing is under the umbrella of communication because I'm helping other people communicate their vision, their management philosophy, or their idea of life balance. It's still under that umbrella of communication, but focusing tightly on what I do well which is right. That's a skill that God has given me. I feel better about that, and I feel like that is my vision for where my influence is and where I can most impact other people.
I love that you talked about it being under the umbrella because a lot of people scattered singularity, but then there are people that are multi-gifted. They are not going to want to do, “Dianna, you got to be a speaker. You can't write books.” That's not going to happen. I love how you link it all up to the one overarching vision. What's next? Talk to me about after selling your company and what you are doing now with the book camps.
I have a folder that is thick, so I could be writing ideas. I love to help other people get their idea and meet their dream. So many people call and they are so excited. “I have wanted to write this book for fifteen years, and now that I'm retired or I'm in my second career, I want to do that.” I love helping them as well. I have been doing Booher Book Camps. It's a three-day event where people come and they bring their idea. Keep a very small and it's virtual, so there are only six of us at max online.
We can help you outline your book, do your book proposal, and query the whole thing in three days, and that's real exciting. I'm very passionate about that because it's allowing me to deal with writing and publishing in that whole industry and staying up to date. Some people say that they like to work at this and that or the other. I always say, “I'd rather write than eat,” and I love to eat. I do love to eat but I love to write and help people write their books.
I love that at this stage of your life that you got it all back down to your true original love and calling. I love that you did all those other things because I know you love writing, but you still are a phenomenal leader, and other leaders need to learn from you. As a communication expert, if you are not a good communicator, you can forget about being a leader type thing.
How leaders get their job done is to communicate with other people. If they cannot communicate and motivate other people, they can't lead. It's essential.
If they cannot communicate and motivate other people, they can't lead.
Now we covered vision. For our readers out there that I'm sure are hanging on this every word, are there any other leadership tidbits or nuggets that you would like to leave them with?
No, other than empowering your people. I know that's a catchphrase. Everybody is saying that, but in these last few years, I have run into so many organizations who have let people work at home, and now they don't quite trust them because they can't see them. They have usurped power back where they could make a decision, call somebody back, and to give a discount if a customer had a hard time.
I'm seeing leaders not do that so much anymore. The lower-ranking person who may be interacting online with the customer or on the phone does not have that power. As strong leaders, they have to go back to trusting their employees, building trust, and building that connection so that they do feel empowered to take care of the customer.
Leadership Communication: A strong leader goes back to trusting their employees, building that connection, so they feel empowered to take care of the customer.
Thank you for that. It does take a secured and evolved leader for that. Where can people get in touch with you?
On my website. I'm on social media everywhere, but BooherResearch.com. If you want to go directly to the Book Camp, I have also that domain, BooherBookCamp.com.
Dianna, thank you so much. It was so great to connect with you again as a sister. You are my idol. I hope I can grow up and be half as tremendous as you. You've been a dear friend of my family. I go back and look at some old pictures. I had everything digitized, and you are in many of them with my mother and father.
I love them. They are precious people and role models for me. Your dad specifically because we were in a mastermind group, but he was particularly a role model for me.
Thank you, Dianna. For our readers out there, thank you so much for tuning in to the show. If you like what you read, please be sure and hit the subscribe button. Share it with somebody else, and we would be honored if you would give us a five-star review. Until then, I want you to reach out to Dianna. Also, if you have a book inside of you, I want you to reach out to Dianna. Check out her books on Amazon. To our leaders out there, I want to thank you all for continuing to pay the price of leadership. Have a tremendous rest of the day.
Important Links
Amazon – Dianne Booher Books
About Dianna Booher
Dianna Booher helps organizations communicate clearly and leaders to expand their influence by a strong executive presence—and occasionally by their own published book. She’s the bestselling author of 49 books (Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, McGraw-Hill), published in 62 foreign-language editions. Her latest books include Faster, Fewer, Better Emails; Communicate Like a Leader; Creating Personal Presence; What More Can I Say? and Communicate With Confidence. Clients include more than one-third of Fortune 500 companies.
