Sparking Greatness with Danielle Baldwin
Watch/Listen here or on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts“I believe as the leadership team goes, so goes the rest of the company. So if you don't have that consistent and significant sustainable growth, you've got some work to do.” — Mike Goldman
Danielle Baldwin is a leadership coach, facilitator, and author of Sparking Greatness. She works with CEOs, business owners, and creatives who want to lead with courage, clarity, and inspiration. In this episode, Mike and Danielle explore how leaders can build workplaces where trust and inspiration fuel performance, growth, and a deeper sense of purpose.
The Foundation of Great Leadership Teams
Trust is the most important characteristic of any great leadership team.
Trust isn’t just about reliability—it’s about vulnerability, openness, and psychological safety.
Teams that operate like a family, grounded in trust, create the foundation for innovation and growth.
The Birth of Sparking Greatness
Danielle’s inspiration for the book came during a coaching conversation with a CEO during the pandemic.
A question—“What is inspiration, anyway?”—sparked her deep exploration into how inspiration functions and how leaders can create more of it in the workplace.
She found that only 1.2% of people feel inspired at work—a statistic she set out to change.
Motivation vs. Inspiration
Motivation and inspiration are like the Wonder Twins: powerful alone but unstoppable together.
Inspiration is spontaneous, transcendent, and heart-driven.
Motivation is more logical and sustained—grounded in consistent action.
Inspiration is fearless and limitless; motivation can come from fear or joy.
Great leadership fuses both: inspiring vision with motivated follow-through.
The Three Precursors to Inspiration
Spaciousness – Creating mental and physical space to think and feel.
Address the “culture of yes” and protect space for reflection.
Stillness – Allowing quiet and downtime to invite creativity and clarity.
Leaders need stillness for strategic thought—echoed in historical examples like Roosevelt and Lincoln.
Self-Forgetfulness – Shifting focus from self to community.
Inspiration often emerges in service and connection to others.
Danielle emphasizes that stillness doesn’t require sitting still—it can happen on a walk, in the shower, or doing simple, rhythmic activities.
Crafting Inspirational Narratives (CHART Model)
Danielle outlines five elements found in every inspiring story:
Courage – Facing fear and acting anyway.
Hardship – Overcoming real challenges.
Authenticity – Being true and transparent (e.g., the fall of Lance Armstrong illustrates what happens when authenticity breaks).
Resilience – Bouncing back repeatedly.
Transformation – Showing growth and what’s possible ahead.
When leaders share stories combining these five elements, they move people beyond compliance into inspiration.
Applying Inspiration in Leadership
Leaders must go beyond sharing a vision—they must tell the story behind it.
Storytelling connects the company’s past challenges with its future goals, making the vision tangible and inspiring.
Inspiration requires shared vision—especially vital for younger generations who prioritize purpose and values at work.
Vulnerability, Belonging, and Authentic Leadership
Authenticity builds trust and belonging.
Vulnerability inspires connection: when leaders remove their “superhero capes,” they allow others to do the same.
Danielle and Mike share personal stories about authenticity and how showing imperfection creates deeper trust.
Overcoming Burnout to Spark Greatness
Many leaders are overwhelmed or burned out—“carrying too many grocery bags at once.”
True inspiration can’t thrive in burnout.
Leaders must invest in self-care: rest, reflection, and personal growth.
The organization mirrors its leader’s state—when the leader is drained, the team follows.
The Power of an Inspired Team
Bain & Company found that inspired employees are 250% more productive than satisfied employees.
Leaders must surround themselves with great people who challenge and inspire—not just “good enough” performers.
To scale successfully, leaders must evolve their teams and let go of loyalty that limits growth.
The Greatest Leadership Obstacle
Leaders often neglect their own development—focused solely on serving others.
“You can’t pour from an empty cup.”
Making time for stillness, learning, and personal renewal is essential for sustainable inspiration.
Final Takeaway: Time-Block Stillness
Danielle’s practical advice:
Schedule stillness—even 15 minutes a few times per week.
Communicate to your team that it’s protected time.
Use it for reflection, clarity, or simply to breathe.
Consistent stillness leads to inspired thinking and greater clarity as a leader.
How Danielle Helps Leaders
Works with CEOs and executives through Vistage peer groups, private coaching, keynotes, and workshops.
Learn more at http://daniellebbaldwin.com/
Thanks for listening!
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[00:00:00]
Mike: Danielle Baldwin helps leaders find their spark as a coach, facilitator, and author of Sparking Greatness. She works with CEOs, business owners, and creatives who want to lead with courage, clarity, and inspiration. I can't wait to dive in. Danielle, welcome to the show.
Danielle: Thank you so much, Mike. It's good to be here.
Mike: Yeah, looking forward to it.
So first question as always is from all of your experience, what do you believe is the one most important characteristic of a great leadership team?
Danielle: When I work with members and I look at their leadership teams, for me the most important characteristic is trust. So we can build a lot from a foundation of trust, but if we don't have that very bottom layer. We're not building anything. They have to have trust in the room in order to build something great.[00:01:00]
Mike: And when you say trust, is it trust that people are going to do what they say they are going to do? Or is it kind of that task-based, I'm gonna do what I say I'm gonna do, or is it more that vulnerability? I can say anything. We can give and receive feedback. Like what? How do you define trust?
Danielle: I the latter. So certainly there's an element of Hey, if you tell me to do this thing, I'm gonna do this thing. But more importantly, it's the vulnerability in the room. It's the openness in the room, it's the freedom to fail. That's the, you know, in the Lencioni lexicon of all of his beautiful work.
But it really is about, are we a team first and then we have our separate fiefdoms, but like, how are we supporting each other? Like we are the family and we trust each other, and then building the organization out on top of that foundation.
Mike: Excellent, excellent. and you'll [00:02:00] notice that, when Danielle gave her answer, she used the term members, she said with her members. And what I didn't say as part of,your intro is that you are a Vistage. Chair, and I'm a big fan of Vistage, Vistage certified speakers. So we'll get that, we'll get that Vistage plug in there.
But what that means is,for you listening that Danielle, it not only coaches, CEOs and leaders, but just. Chairing a Vistage group. you get to see those issues front and center, all the time. So I think that's a great background to have.
so I wanna dive in and I wanna talk about your book, your new book, Sparking Greatness.
Talk a little bit about, well, I guess I'll ask what, why this book, you've had so much experience, this is the book you decided to write. Why.
Danielle: I am one of those people. I believe that the books choose. So there are these things in life that choose you. I feel like your pets choose you. I feel like musical instruments choose you. I kind of feel like [00:03:00] houses choose you, and I definitely feel like books choose you. So I had no. I was not on the inspiration parade.
That was not a thing for me. I was very happily working on a fiction project that I was very happy with, and I had a one-to-one with a member. It was the middle of the pandemic. It was July. So everybody's sitting at their kitchen table, right? So I'm talking with him and he's telling me the story about the fact that he just did skip levels with his entire organization. So he said, Dee, you know, we asked them these three questions at the end of the meetings. So they met with their direct manager first, and we said, do you understand your role? Do you know where the company's headed? and how are you feeling? Right? Because it's kind of wacky. And he said when they met with their direct manager, the answers were, yes, I understand.
Yes, I understand where the company's going, and I'm feeling very motivated. And I was like, yeah, I got it. Great. And he was like, but then to a person, when they met with me, the first two answers were the same, and the [00:04:00] third one was, they felt inspired. And I was like, huh. He's like, why do you think that is?
And I was like, I don't really know. And he was like, well, what is inspiration anyway? And I was like, I don't know. And then I fell down this rabbit hole for a really long time and then I popped back out of it. So that is how the book came to be. I just got really curious because we so often do throw that word of inspiration around, and I don't, to me at least, it wasn't really clearly defined. And then, I mean, you've had a moment of inspiration. Yeah.
You know what? That lightning bolt, absolutely. It's a beautiful thing. And so then I was thinking to myself, well, what if we could bring more inspiration into the world? I mean, I feel like we certainly need it. So how would we do that? And how would we bring it to a workplace where only 1.2% of people feel inspired at work?
Like, how freaking sad is that? So what could we do? So that's how this thing, this is how the party of the inspiration party started.
Mike: What [00:05:00] is the difference?
you could feel the difference in the word motivated versus inspired
Danielle: and inspiration. Certainly, in my mind, that's got a lot more heat than just saying I'm motivated. But what is the difference between the two?
So there are a lot. So the first thing that I wanna say is sometimes I feel like motivation gets a bad rap and it shouldn't because they're like the Wonder Twins. Do you remember that cartoon
Mike: I do one to twin powers, activate shape. one was the shape of the other was form the younger folks listening have no idea what we're talking about, but that was very cool.
Danielle: Yes. So inspiration and motivation are like the wonder twins. So they can do, they can fight the bad guys by themselves, but they are far more powerful when they're together. So inspiration by definition. If we were to talk to a psychologist. And we would say, define, there are these two psychologists, Thrash and Elliot, that have done a lot of work in the inspiration realm. And they would say inspiration is defined [00:06:00] by three characteristics. the first is that, it's sparked spontaneity, meaning it hits us like kablam, right? It's the, you're out for a run and you get this zap of inspiration. The second, thing that they would say is, that it's a, there's an approach, motivation to it, which in psychology essentially means that you are motivated to do something.
There's action. And there are two types of inspiration. There's inspired by and inspired to for, in this conversation we're just gonna talk about inspired to. And then the, last element is this feeling of transcendence. Right. It's that opening in your chest. You get this greater perspective, you get this like astounding level of clarity. You're like, oh my gosh, this is clear. For the first time in a long time, motivation is beautiful, but it's far more the way that I describe, it's more terrestrial. So inspiration is like up on this mountaintop. It's this vision, it's this clarity and motivation is [00:07:00] kind of the trudging backup to the mountaintop that you just saw. It's far more based in logic than it is heart-based. and it can be motivated by fear or kind of by joy. Inspiration by nature is an absence of fear. When we think about those moments, right, it's 'cause there's that limitless quality motivation can be like, okay, so lemme give you an example. I just went to my niece's wedding and I wanted to look good, right?
For my niece's wedding. So I could be inspired to say, Hey,I wanna look good. I wanna feel good in my body. I wanna have a day of joy, or I can be inspired by fear. Hey, I don't wanna look like crap in these photos, and be like the pudgy one. Right? So motivation has these two different possible ways that we get into it, and inspiration does not, but they kind of need each other. If we're gonna thread this whole thing along.
Mike: That's super helpful and I know one of the things that, that I [00:08:00] always communicate. To the leaders that I work with when they're talk, when we're talking about their company vision, and certainly there's gotta be clarity around a company vision, but I always say that's not enough. as a leader, you need clarity.
You also need everyone around the table to understand it, understand what that vision is, but even that's not enough. And then, where I go, which as I say, I believe leaders around that table, the senior leadership table, they need to be evangelists of that vision. And to me now hearing how you define.
Inspiration versus motivation. That to me is what is much more about inspiration than it is and again, it is both, but I think that's much more about having a vision that inspires you to take action.
Danielle: Mm-hmm.
Mike: Love that. Love that. so is that what sparking greatness, that what the book [00:09:00] is all about?
It's really just finding that inspiration or is sparking greatness bigger than that?
Danielle: It. It's kind of split into two different parts, so the first or three different parts. The first part is really giving you these definitions of what inspiration is, what motivation is, how do they work, how are they different. The second part, there are three precursors. To a state of inspiration. 'cause we know it's fleeting by nature, right?
So it's kind of like field of dreams. If you build it, they will come. Not quite the same with inspiration 'cause you gotta build it and sometimes it shows up and sometimes it doesn't. But these three precursors are, spaciousness. So that's like physical and mental space. So often when you and I, we go on a retreat or we go to a conference, we are more likely to be inspired because we have both physical and mental space from our day to day. So that's the first one. The second one is spaciousness. So when we are able to kind of create this, sense [00:10:00] of spaciousness physically and mentally, then we're able to quiet our mental chatter and eliminate our distractions. And then the third precursor is self forgetfulness. So we so often find that in community, it's when we take that giant spotlight that is. Constantly on ourselves and we shift it outward. So that's the second part of the book. The third part is about creating an inspirational narrative, which can be really helpful for leaders. it can be really helpful for anybody. When I read through tons and tons of inspirational stories, they're connected in these five ways.
They each have these elements, and I, it's the acronym is chart.
Mike: Well, hold on. Be before you go to those narratives. and I'm taking notes as we're talking, so we're gonna get back to it. I wanna go back to the, I wanna go back to the precursors and dig into that a little bit first. So, and I screwed up 'cause I think I wrote spaciousness twice.
What's the first one is
Danielle: one is spaciousness, so you
Mike: and what's the second one?
Danielle: Stillness.[00:11:00]
Mike: Stillness. I put, okay, so the second is stillness. So spaciousness, which is physical and mental stillness. And then the, and the last one was
Danielle: Self forgetfulness.
Mike: that's what I wrote down, self forgetfulness.
So as a leader,how do we bring those precursors?
To life. How do we set the foundation and then we'll talk about the narrative, but how do we make those real? How should I be thinking about those three things as a leader in terms of what actions I ought to be taking?
Danielle: So the good news is in part two of this book, and I'll go through a few of these, there are exercises at the end of every chapter for you as a leader and then for your team. So, when we look at spaciousness, I wanna talk a little bit about mental spaciousness. 'cause physical spaciousness is like, I got a D.
I have a member who taught me this term called helium hand, which I love. Right. So it's the, you're in the meeting [00:12:00] and everybody's looking around, or you're at a board meeting, or you're at the PTA and somebody says, we have this important initiative, Mike, who's gonna take it on? And you hear this cheap, cheap, little crickets.
Nobody's doing anything. And then all of a sudden you see this happen, you don't even know it's gonna happen, and your hand is going up like it's full of helium. And so many of us have helium hand, which is not helpful. Because I think in this day and age, we're inundated with so much. So one of the exercises we talk about is you sitting down with your team and having a discussion about the impact of your culture.
Of Yes, how is it impacting your productivity? How is it impacting the team's ability to get things done? What are we looking at here? So it's things like that when we're talking about spaciousness. Stillness is about, creating downtime during the day, allowing that culturally, maybe taking meetings outside, right?
But, really giving people [00:13:00] the space to be still, because as you move up in an organization, especially, and I'm sure you see this with your clients. Stillness is not an option anymore. The level of strategic thinking that you need to do in higher levels of organizations demands it. and there are a ton of examples of this.
Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote an entire book, she wrote this book called Leadership and Turbulent Times, and she compared the presidencies of both Roosevelt's Lincoln and LBJ. And in it, one of the things that she talks about. All of them had turbulent times and each of them knew the power of stillness that they needed and took time out.
So Teddy Roosevelt is like cruising around on a horse in the bad lands, right? Everybody has their escape hatch, but the stillness is really important in order for us to be able to get a moment of inspiration, to be able to get the clarity, to be able to get the perspective. And then self forgetfulness can be like a community or a [00:14:00] team day. It's how do we take our. That spotlight, like I said, that we always have trained on ourselves and flip it out. It's why so often, in community is the easiest way for us to see that
Mike: I love that. and that sounds you know, when it comes to the stillness and the mental space is somewhat sometimes why we have the best ideas in the shower, right. When we're kind of by ourselves and we're not trying to think of a great idea for me. My what, when I get the most. I don't wanna say the most inspired, but when I get the inspirational ideas, typically for me comes on a long walk.
I'll take a four mile walk and I will come back and have recorded 15 new ideas on my phone. Just 'cause as I'm walking, something will pop in my head. So I see that happen all the time.
Danielle: So you're giving yourself both the mental and the physical spaciousness. Right. And then what I tell people is we're so accustomed to being productive all the time, which makes me [00:15:00] a little nuts. But don't take your, take your phone, but don't be on it. you don't have to listen to an audio book.
You don't have to listen to a podcast. You don't have to be reading your email. Like just go and drop into the stillness. And there's also this misnomer for stillness. I do not mean physical stillness like. What I do mean I have a, a humming rule. So you need to be able to participate in an activity that's gonna give you mental stillness and still hum. So if you are too physically. Exerted, you don't have the space for the inspiration. Like I used to do CrossFit. I was freaking terrible at CrossFit. Oh my goodness. But, it wouldn't, it's not a good place for me to be still. 'cause I was just kept thinking all the time, like, how do I not die? Like how do I not die in this workout?
How do I not throw up in this workout? How do I not die? So whether it's running, you can be a great runner, but you're not sprinting. Right. You can be. Gardening. You can be playing guitar, you can be cleaning, you can be doing all of these things. It's why it's on a walk. It's why it's when we're [00:16:00] in the shower, it's why we're standing at the kitchen doing dishes. So we have activity that allows our brain to kind of slide into this, static mode and give us space for inspiration to fill in. But we're not so overexerted in our movement that there isn't space for anything except for us to be like. So I
think it's important.
Mike: Love it, love it, And it just makes sense. I don't think about it that way, but that's the way it's always happened for me.
So now let's go back where you started going and go to the inspired narrative. So we've gotta give ourselves these precursors. For inspiration, but now, and the narrative, what does that mean?
the is the narrative about once you have that inspiration, how you communicate it.
Danielle: I think especially in leaders, I'm gonna backtrack for one second. There was this super cool study that came out in 2015 that Bain & Company did, and they essentially created a pyramid, just like Maslow's Hierarchy, but they did it with employees. And so what they [00:17:00] said was they split them into these three different levels.
So the first level of employee down at the bottom was a satisfied employee. And they had their basics needs covered, physically and mentally safe, right? Had the tools that they needed, felt rewarded and appreciated at work. So that's satisfied. When we move up, we go to engaged. So an engaged employee has all of those, but they feel like they're part of this incredible team. They have autonomy. They feel like they can do what they need. They understand their impact on the organization. And then this top tier is an inspired employee. An inspired employee is inspired not only by the company's mission and vision, but also by its leadership. And what they found in this Bain & Company study is that inspired employees are 250% more productive than a satisfied employee, which as you and I know, I mean our organizations of the people that we work with.
I mean, wouldn't we love to have an entire organization of just [00:18:00] satisfied. Not even. Right. Not even inspired. So when we're looking to inspire and share that company mission and that company vision that you were so eloquently talking about earlier and making sure that the leadership could do that as well.
There are these five elements that we find in inspirational stories. So the first one is courage. having fear and doing it anyway. So what does that look like? What, when were times were bad and we were still able to push through? So, you know, sometimes when we see, somebody and they just get listed on the stock exchange and they ring the bell and we're like, oh, wow, man, that's pretty cool.
That's inspiring, but how much more inspiring is it when we know that they almost faced bankruptcy. Or that, you know, things went horribly awry. It gets great that you've gotten there, but there's more inspiration if we know that there's courage, which gets me to the second, which is H, which is hardship. When things are too easy. That's not really that inspiring 'cause we're like, Hey, I [00:19:00] can do that. I do that every day. A is for authenticity. So, the best example I can give of authenticity is Lance Armstrong. The world was wildly inspired by Lance Armstrong, great courage in the face of debilitating disease, this amazing comeback until all of a sudden we weren't. 'cause the doping scandal broke and the authenticity of his recovery just fell right out of the bottom of that resilience is the fourth element. So it's not just somebody like lifting a car off of a child. That happens once. It's the ability to come back again and to face those challenges. And then the last one is transformation. So when we're, talking about that from a leadership perspective, the transformation is what's ahead of us? who will the organization become? Who will we become? Who are we? So if you look at any truly inspirational story, it's gonna have all five of those elements.[00:20:00]
Mike: So let's make this real. If I am a. If I'm a leader and I want to, my goal is to inspire my team around our vision as a company.
Danielle: How do these all. Fit together. Like I understand the five, but if I'm saying here's our vision, does that mean like,how do I get, if I'm talking about vision, how does hardship become a part of that?
Mike: How does resilience become a part of that? how do I work these into that kind of inspiring communication about vision?
Danielle: So when I think of it, I look back at something that's happened in the organization that was either a milestone, a growth milestone, or a tough milestone. So remember when we had this competitor entered the market?
Remember when we launched this product and it didn't go the way that we wanted it to. and some organizations remember when we had the, this cutback or something that was challenging and [00:21:00] hard because you're reinforcing the resilience in that. And here we are, and here we are today and now we know where we're headed, right? So it's a little bit of a mix of using your rear view mirror in order to look through the windshield. You're looking up at the rear view to say, look at these things that we've done so far. Look at where we've been courageous, where, we made a choice and stood in the market for something, or our product stood for something or we did something, that might not have been popular or, was difficult for us to do. And then talking about that, because again, if employees feel like it's been Easy Street the whole time and you are asking them to do something difficult, you just gotta be like, remember when we did that thing? That was hard? Oh yeah, I do. We can do that again. We can get back up to that mountaintop.
Mike: That's a great challenge for me, for other leaders because I think we come up with a vision or even we collaborate with our team on a [00:22:00] vision, and then we wanna go and tell people what that vision is. but what you're helping me to realize is I think as leaders we can fall into the trap.
We may already be inspired by it, so we think others will too. So we can say, you know, our big hairy audacious goal 10 years from now iswe're gonna land on the moon and we're gonna, and we're think others should be inspired. But what you're challenging, I think all leaders to think about is you've gotta put that in the context of a story.
and you know, why is this something we should be doing? And who are we to think we can do this? What have we done before that prove, you know, we can do this? why should we go do this? How are we get, take it and make it a story? Using these five elements, I think is something most leaders don't do, which is of course why someone like you needed to write this book.
but I think most of us don't. Turn our vision into stories. We just say, here's our vision. Is that your experience as well?[00:23:00]
Danielle: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I used to do that too, right? Because I was so inspired by it and I was like, oh, this is great. And then, I don't know if you've ever had, had this experience I certainly have where you walk out and you share it with the team and you just get like the. You're like, oh, this isn't landing very well. So there are two elements of it. Like when we look at storytelling, there's a story. There are different stories for different audiences. There's the story for our client where our client is the hero. There's the story for our employees, we're the employees or the hero. They understand kind of where we're headed. when I look at inspiration at an individual level in an organization, it's showing it's mirroring to an employee. The highest version of them that you see. It's saying, this is your mountaintop, this is what I see you could do. And so often the employee's I don't even see that. So from a leadership perspective, if we can do that for an organization like, Hey guys, this is what we're capable of.
We could totally do this. this could be us. then I think [00:24:00] it can be wildly inspirational. And I'd say one more thing about this, this goes all the way back to our hiring practices. That's why I encourage my members to make sure that they have some sort of cultural question that they can dig around for in an interview.
Inspiration is also centered on shared visions and goals, so I'll use a personal example first. So let's say Mike, you've got a good friend who's training for an Ironman. I mean pretty, that's like physically pretty brutal. If you are also training for an Iron Man or you have some sort of physical goal, you're like, oh, wow, I'm inspired. I'm inspired by my friend Sam, who is doing all these things. Now, Mike, if you're like, Hey, that's not my jam. You might be inspired by, but not inspired too. So the same thing is true when we look at an organization and we are finding more and more. A lot of the research is coming out that we're seeing Gen Z as far more, of [00:25:00] course wanna be compensated like any normal human. But, the mission and vision of an organization is far more important to them than it has been for other generations. And so being able to clearly articulate that and make sure employees on the way in the door are aligned with the mission and vision will make it so much easier for you as a leadership team to actually inspire them. There's only so far that they're gonna be able to go, as we saw from that Bain & Company, study. If they are not aligned with the company's mission and leadership, we can't ever really get them to that inspired top tier.
Mike: Yeah, I see that. It. You know, my, my daughter is 29 years old, so that's not gen. Is that's millennial Gen Y. I forget all the different, but that's not Gen Z. Gen Z is younger than that. Right.
Danielle: I think she might, I don't. She might. Maybe she's on the cusp. I don't know either.
Mike: You know what,
Danielle: don't know her
Mike: it doesn't matter. she's 29. Believe it at that. But I, you know, back when [00:26:00] I was. I just turned 60 this year and back when I was in my twenties and I worked for a big management consulting firm, which is now Accenture. but they weren't called Accenture back then. But my attitude was you could beat me, whip me, kick me, work me 24 hours a day.
I'm making partner and I want the big house, and I want the nice car,and I think it's so easy for. Folks from my generation, and I'm not baby boomer, I'm like the oldest gen Xes out there. I was born in 65, but it's easy to look and say, well, these kids today don't wanna work hard. But I actually think my attitude back then was not very healthy.
Danielle: No.
Mike: like, I just want more and more. and it didn't matter how I was treated or how long I needed to work. And I think, you know, I know with my daughter it takes a lot more to inspire her now. She's a really hard worker. She's really smart. She does really [00:27:00] well. You know, it, you know, at her job.
Is she inspired by what she does? Is she, you know, she does it because it's a job. I think it takes a lot more for good or bad, I'm not judging it. It takes a lot more to inspire these folks. And I think, you know, part of it, you know, I've been focused my questions on things like the inspiring vision, but.
What you're helping me realize as well, and I think this goes back to the trust in your answer to the question on most important thing for a great leadership team, is when I look at the five different narratives and I wrote, you know, courage, hardship, authenticity, resilience, transformation, I think of that as a leader, I need to be comfortable enough.
With myself and with my team that I could share all those things about me. I could remember years ago I was doing a small speech for a chamber. [00:28:00] Way, way back. And I remember telling a story about my son and my son who's 31 now. he has Asperger's syndrome. He was much younger back then. It was really a challenge for us.
And I told a pretty emotional story about my son and frankly, what a crappy dad I was for a long time. And I had someone come up to me after that speech and say, I wanna work with you. And I said, oh, well, and I, you know, I was a coach at the time, but I did more one-on-one coaching. I said, oh. What, you know, what makes you say that?
How did you make that decision? She said, if you can get up in front of a room like this and be as vulnerable as you were, and she actually used the word inspired. She said, it's vulnerable as you were. That inspired me and I just, I said, I have to work with you. And it's just, and it's because of how vulnerable I was, so I think it's so easy, and I can remember when [00:29:00] COVID hit and we were all learning how to work remotely for the first time.
Danielle: Mm-hmm.
Mike: Is I found the CEO. Some of the CEOs I worked with felt like they needed to be Superman or Superwoman. They had to show strength because everybody else is nervous. We don't know what's going on with the business. We don't know what's going on. We're with our health with the world, so I need to put my superhero cape on and talk.
nothing but pos. Everything's gonna be great, and I'm getting along fine, showing no vulnerability
Danielle: Mm-hmm.
Mike: and. Where, what they needed to do and what I helped them to do, and now you're helping me understand it more, is I'm like, you've gotta take that superhero cape off and you've gotta be real for your people so they feel like they could be real right back.
So I think these, you know, these five narratives are narratives in how you tell a story, but also narratives in how vulnerable you need to be about yourself.
Danielle: I totally agree. I think [00:30:00] that authenticity element. It's so funny that you use capes at the door. 'cause it's one of the things I tell my members when they come into a Vistage meeting, I'm like, leave that cape at the door. I do not need that thing on you today. You can just hang that thing right up and then you can put it back on when you leave.
But when you come in, no cape. and so often we do, we feel like, I feel like especially Gen Xers, right? Because we were the latchkey kids and all of these other reasons, but there was this vision of leadership. That was very like, you know, we're strong and we're gonna do it. And it doesn't resonate nearly as much as if, when you can show up and say, Hey, I know that it's crazy out there.
I know that we. I work with some smaller businesses and so there's a lot more fluctuation in cash flow and it can be really scary sometimes. And the employees know, right? They know what's going on. And being able to share authentically without terrifying anybody. Of course, you're not gonna go in front of your employees and start crying, but, being able to show up like an authentic leader and say, Hey, [00:31:00] here are the things I'm gonna, I'm gonna give it to you straight. This is what's going on, and these are the things that we're gonna do to be able to get out of it. But when we don't acknowledge and we don't show up authentically, we're kind of trashing our ability to be inspirational because people don't trust. People don't trust it. People have better spidey sense than we give them credit for.
They're like, yeah, that's a load of crap. So,
Mike: Yeah, and I think what it tells us, you know, one of the. One of the questions I thought about when I was preparing for our discussion, and I was gonna ask it as a question, but I think I've already got the answer, is, you know it, how do we spark greatness in others and inspire others when.
Sometimes we're not feeling great about our business, right?
I mean, you and I both in what you do as a coach, as a business chair, what I do, coaching leadership teams, we wanna run across leaders all the time who are overwhelmed. Who [00:32:00] are starting to fall out of love with their business, who are, you know, really have to start guarding against burnout.
And it's you know, how can I spark greatness in other people? How can I be inspirational when I'm feeling that way? And it's, you know, what I'm realizing is it's not about faking it. and no, you're not gonna cry and curl up in a fetal position on a zoom call, you know, in front of folks, but it's not about.
You know, totally hiding how you're feeling and just being rah rah. it's about being real and authentic with people, and people will be inspired by that. They're not gonna be inspired by rah rah bullshit. Thatthat's just you covering up what's really going on in the business.
Danielle: Yeah, there's this, my mom taught me this moons and moons ago, very popular in the recovery community. And she would tell, she told me when I was in high school, she was like, she took a drag of her cigarette. She's nobody ever died. A terminal uniqueness [00:33:00] is what she told me. And at the time I was like, what are you talking about? But I feel like. That is such an important, there's this, the other concept that I'm fascinated by is belonging and the importance of belonging. And I think vulnerability and being authentic really gives us that sense because so many, so often, especially in this world, we walk around and we feel like we're the only ones and it's only ever happened to us.
And, I don't feel that way. And so it can be really empowering for your team who. Maybe feeling that same way, like that person in the audience, I was like, oh my gosh. that really hit me. being able to share that authenticity because then people don't feel alone. They actually feel more together.
It's like one of the powers of one of the reasons I love working with Vistage and working with Vistage as a peer group. You get a bunch of CEOs in there and they think well, I'm the only one who has, and then they bring something into the room and it's oh, look at all these other people that have done the same thing. So I think that it is really important, and one of [00:34:00] the things that I talk about in the book, it's funny you say this, the first part of section two, because I know you saw it, I certainly saw it post pandemic. I saw so many not overwhelmed, they had pushed into burnout. I cannot tell you how many burned out leaders I had. Because they were kind of carrying the weight of the world. And the way that I describe burnout, like burnout is your arms are full of groceries. You got your car keys, a coffee and a dog leash and you're like staggering around to try and balance it and then that's overwhelm and burnout is when you finally faceplant.
And I've seen so many face planted and it's really hard to be inspired to get to that mountaintop if you are 20 leagues under the sea.
So a lot of inspiration is showing up authentically, but it's also putting time into yourself as a leader because there's only so long an employee can look at you and they can see the bags under your eyes [00:35:00] and they can see you army crawling in and outta the office every day, and also trust.
So it is, it's taking, it's. Flipping the paradigm that I think we have as leaders that we may have grown up with, like just grin and bear it. Just, you know, get through another day and shifting the, how do I take care of myself as a person? How do I give myself spaciousness, stillness, and self forgetfulness so that I can then provide that for my employees?
Mike: Yeah. And I think what it goes back to, I'll go back to that hierarchy you mentioned earlier, where it's satisfied, engaged, inspired, and inspired. Folks were to, was it a Bain, and company study? I think you said 250% more productive. It just makes sense, right? We, when you think of the over overwhelm, and then further than that, the burnout, I think sometimes.
As leaders, we could fall into that trap because we feel like we're in it alone, especially CEOs or founders. No one cares as much as I do. It's all on me. All of the [00:36:00] complexity, all of the pressure, all of that's on me. But if we can as leaders, not only. Inspire others, but surround ourselves with people that inspire us and give,and create that, you know, through those precursors you talked about through the narratives, to be able to create an environment where that inspiration goes back and forth between leader and team members.
To me, you know, that's part of where that 250% comes from, because as a CEO, I'm gonna be way more. inspired, I'm gonna be way more productive, way less chance of me burning out if I've got a team around me that is, is challenging me to be at my best and inspiring me to be at my best. and I think for a lot of leaders, they have very mediocre teams around them and they're not.
I don't know if all of them see how big a problem that is. I always say good [00:37:00] enough is not good enough. You know, if you've got a bunch of people around you that are just fine, they're doing good enough not to be fired, then you're slowly killing yourself and your company. We need great people around us that inspire us, but I think too many leaders are they're willing to settle for mediocre.
Danielle: I agree. I think they're willing to settle for mediocre, and I feel like a lot of what I also see, which is like. A lovely trait of loyalty, but the other common phrase of what got you here won't get you there. So you have somebody that was a great bookkeeper or even a great controller, but you're getting to the point where you need a CFO and that person doesn't have that skillset, and so they get to a point of grow, right?
We get to the Peter principle, whether it's through their role in the organization or the scaling of the organization and their ability to either keep up or not. And they wanna keep them around because I never would've [00:38:00] gotten here without them. And that, while that's certainly true, if you wanna break the 10 million mark, if you wanna break the 50 million mark, if you wanna break the a hundred million mark, right?
There are these distinct milestones that we see in the scalability of an organization, and it requires different talent. So it can be really hard for people. And I understand that. I understand how hard it is, and I think also as leaders, we have a tendency to have blind spots. I know I had my blind spot.
I feel like all of us have had one or two of those. So it can be really hard. And sometimes it's not from like conflict avoidant. Well, there's some in that, of that in there, but some of it can be like, well, this person was an A player for the first seven years, 10 years of the organization. You're like, yeah, you're right. How are they doing right now? Oh, and you're like, oh, we need to talk about that,
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. what do you find, you mentioned blind spots and we talked about a whole bunch of things leaders should be doing. What do you [00:39:00] find when you work with leaders on this? what's the hardest part or what's the biggest obstacle in their way to really sparking greatness in themselves, in their team, in their companies?
Is there one. Biggest mistake leaders make or one big obstacle in their way.
Danielle: The biggest obstacle that, well, everybody, we're all our own biggest obstacle. Right? And the biggest one that I see is. Especially, the leaders that I work with is they are so servant leadership focused that they don't give themselves any time. And then what happens, for better or for worse is the organization will mirror where you are. And so they're out of gas and then they're not putting any time into themselves. and then the organization like starts to tilt over a little bit, but it's not prioritizing. Themselves as leaders and understanding that if they put this time into [00:40:00] growing themselves as leaders, that it will trickle down. So there I'll say, you know, what's your professional development budget for your team? Oh, it's a zillion dollars. I wanna make sure, and then I will ask, so what are you doing for you? I listen to podcasts, which is great. You should, but what are else are you doing for you? That's really about it. So it's really about taking the time. To do the self-development work, to make time that you're getting some spaciousness, stillness, self forgetfulness time so that you can come up and kind of do the Wayne Gretzky of staying, keeping where the puck of your company is going. You need the time and space to do it
Mike: and that includes, I don't know how many leaders I talk to, and I'm sure you do as well. And it's almost, sometimes it's, it's like they, they're prideful about it. I haven't taken a vacation in five years. don't be proud of that. That's messed up.
Danielle: yeah, that
Mike: But we see it, I see it all the [00:41:00] time.
And that's. That's such a great example of not taking time for yourself, not finding time to take a breath and plus the fact that sometimes you gotta get outta out of the hair of your team and let them just go do their job and prove they could do it without you. But that's just one example.
Like t take a vacation figure, you know? And then, and if you don't have the team around you that allows you to take a vacation, then realize you got the wrong team around you and take some action.
what's one if we were to leave folks with one thing that when they're done with this one thing they can just go do, to kind of get started on one of these things, like what is one thing a leader could do right after listening to this podcast?
Danielle: I would encourage, like where I want everybody to start is just to start getting in the habit. And one of the things I talk about in the book is like mentally giving yourself permission. There's a whole nother thing about that. But I want you to start time blocking stillness time. I don't care how long it is, no less than 15 minutes, [00:42:00] but I want a few blocks during the week where you are giving yourself permission, where you are clearly communicating with your team that this is what you were doing.
So if somebody rolls by your office and they see you staring out the window, it's not the knock time, right? So you are giving yourself some time. and then I want you to come back and figure out what, how that has impacted your leadership, how that's impacted the organization. When you are just do me the favor of giving yourself a few times a week and will increase it over time and tell me how that impacts you and your organization. And I guarantee you if you do that and you begin to build a habit around it, right? You have flexible discipline, so it's not, it doesn't have to be the same time every day. You don't have to be in the same spot. It doesn't have to be the same amount of time. But if you are consistent with that, how much more often are you being inspired because you are giving yourself the time and space for the difficult, the solution to the difficult problem [00:43:00] you have to the where am I headed as a leader, where is the organization headed? You have time and space for that to be able to come into your brain. You have built the field of dreams, right? And now we will see shoeless Joe Jackson walk outta the corn fields, but you gotta build a field
Mike: And a lot of people when they think stillness, think, oh, you want me to meditate? I guess it could be, but it could also be stare out the window, go take a walk, you know, do something. in addition to your work with your Vistage group,
Danielle: how else do you work with clients to help them execute on these things?
I work, I do some private coaching with, individuals, not in a peer group setting. I do keynote speaking. I do workshop facilitation. So I do all the things.
Mike: All the, you do all the things. Wow.
where's the best place for people to go if they wanna find out more about you? Your coaching, your speaking, your book. where should we tell people to go?
Danielle: best [00:44:00] place is my website, so that is daniellebbaldwin.com.
Mike: Excellent. And that will be in the show notes. This is great. I always learn, you know, I learned a ton from this. You probably, if you're watching on video versus just listening, you would see me taking notes. So I took a lot of notes, on this. So this is great. I always say, if you want a great company, you need a great leadership team.
Danielle, thanks for helping us get there today.
Danielle: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me, Mike. This was so fun.