What is the real meaning of mentorship?

A mentor saved Garrett Mintz's life. Garrett was facing prison time his freshman year in college.  Today, he helps develop mentorship programs that can help you with your career choice and find fulfillment as you advance your career.

Garrett shares how he dug a really deep hole for himself. In fact he's had one heck of a learning experience. He knows how fortunate he is and he's paying it forward.  As CEO of Ambition In Motion, he develops personal development programs rooted in mentorship that serves CEO, managers, entrepreneurs and business leaders.

With the data Garrett's collected from real world evidence-based mentorship practices , Garrett has a deep understanding of what makes for a successful mentoring relationship which helps with career advancement.

That opens doors.

Garret shares 6 takeaways from this episode and blog post of the Close The Deal. Com Podcast: 

1. How he uses mentorship to develop leaders through professional development
2. How to help you find excitement and fulfillment in your work
3. He shares what makes for a good mentor
4. He addresses the massive skilled labor gap and what caused it
5. He provides 3 tips for CEOs
6. He provides 3 tips for managers who want to advance their careers

Connect with Gary:

https://ambition-in-motion.com/

Linkedin

https://www.linkedin.com/in/garrettmintz/

Products we ❤️  for our health: Athletic Greens -  AGI

Meaning / Definition of Mentorship

Per Merriam Webster, Mentorship is the the influence, guidance, or direction given by a mentor to a mentee 

The term mentor is a trusted counselor or guide.

A mentee can be viewed as a protege.

Garrett may have another meaning for mentorship.

At an early age Garrett's mentor was more than a sounding board, or a role model or coach sharing life's experiences, more than an advisor...in his case, his mentor was  a life-saver. The impact Garrett's mentor had on his life has been profound as he serves young professionals to CEOs today.

Albert Einstein's mentors

The reality is we all need mentorship or a mentorship program. Even Albert Einstein had several mentors in his field of interest, notably Max Planck, a German physicist who encouraged him to pursue his ideas on theoretical physics.  Marcel Grossmann, a Swiss mathematician,  helped Einstein develop the theory of general relativity.  Enistein's mentorship relationships are well documented and credited for his career development.

Clearly effective mentoring relationships matter. We all need them. No matter your career stage, Garret's insights will be helpful to you for the long run. Enjoy the show.

Show Notes with Garrett Mintz

Garrett: I bet on myself and I invested in myself and that was pretty much it. I knew this was an inflection point that I needed to make a change and very well, this investment may not work out.

I still may have to go to prison. I didn't know what the scenario would be, but I figured I was gonna bet on myself and this was the time to bet.

Ewell: That is Garrett Mintz. He is the founder of Ambition in Motion, and what he's talking about there is a hole that he dug for himself in his teens, a very deep hole and a very dark hole. And a mentor literally saved his life. He'll tell you that. And now he's working with CEOs, executives, managers, facilitating communications and fostering mentors to make an impact on the world today. 

[00:01:00] Now you're listening to the Close the Deal.com Podcast. I'm your host, Ewell Smith, and towards the end of the show, Garrett's got some great tips and guidance for CEOs, for the entrepreneurs out there, for the managers out there who want to move forward in their business or their careers.

Now, let's begin the show and you're gonna find out just how deep of a hole Garrett had gotten himself into. 

Ewell: Garrett, welcome to the Close The Deal.com Podcast. Where are you based out of?

Garrett: I am in Austin, Texas.

Garrett offers up 3 restaurants to close the deal in Austin - for breakfast , lunch & dinner

Ewell: I come from a food background promoting food and working with a lot of restaurants. I gotta ask you, if you have a client in town, where are you taking them? The dinner to earn their business.

Garrett: Oh, man. If I have the perfect. Spot where I, one, it depends on what kind of meal we're talking about. So, if we're talking about breakfast and I got no line, no weight, I can just get right in. Breakfast has gotta be Joe's Bakery down on East 7th Street. They've got some of the best breakfast tacos in town.

[00:02:00] They're fantastic. The weight though is out the door, even on a cold, rainy day. Like I got tacos from Joe's like a week and a half

Ewell: Tacos for breakfast. I love it.

Garrett: Oh yeah, breakfast tacos for sure. If we're talking about lunch, it's gotta be Franklin's Barbecue, but the wait for Franklin's barbecue is three hours without fail.

Like you can't get Franklin's and they always sell out every day. But like I said, if this was a perfect scenario where I don't have to wait in any lines and I can immediately go up and get food and not wanna impress people, Franklin's barbecue is where I go. And then for dinner man, there's this restaurant on E. 6th that I really am a big fan of.

It's called Suerte. It's a nice restaurant. They have it, it's hoity-toity in a sense that they've got small plates and that sort of thing. But man, I love it.

Ewell: What style of food is.

Garrett: It's Mexican food, but it's like Mexican fusion food. So, it's like this new age

Ewell: Yeah, that's good

Garrett: you. Hippie hippie dippy, fusion small plates type of thing.

But the flavors are fantastic. They're really excellent. They've got really good food.

Ewell: You're making us hungry.  I figured we hit one, but we got breakfast, lunch, and dinner taken care of. Thanks to this thanks to this call.

[00:03:00] Garrett: I'm, I live to.

Ewell: Oh yeah, I'm my foodie. All right, so the question for you is, before we get one more thing, before we get started, I'd love to ask this question.

What are you grateful for that helped you get to where you, who or what are you grateful for? Who helped you get to where today?

Garrett: Man, I'm grateful for so much. I do a gratitude exercise every morning where I think about for 10 minutes. I close my eyes, I sit in my backyard, I've got a little meditation pillow, and I think about who or what I'm grateful for. And sometimes it can be just the little thing, like the breeze on my face to the, and the birds chirping to.

People who have made introductions for me, people that took a chance on me, people gave me an opportunity. There's a lot of things that I'm grateful for, but, probably the number one thing I'm grateful for, and this may sound cheesy, but it's my wife. 

She's fantastic and she we've been together for a little over 10 years now and when I was first getting my business going, there's a lot of guys or a lot of partners she could have chosen and when I was first getting started, we were, I, we were not making a ton of money. 

[00:04:00] I was a bartender and server on nights and weekends working, 60 plus hours during the day on my business, plus another 30 to 35 hours bartending and serving to pay for rent. And like it was difficult.

And, she persevered and stuck with me and I'm super grateful for that. Gosh, I, not everyone has partners like that and I've got one that's pretty fantastic and willing to stick with me, even though when we were early on, our lifestyles weren't necessarily commensurate with what our friends' lifestyles were, that were of our age.

Ewell: That's you just described the entrepreneur's journey. All right, of entrepreneurship, you got in the business, you saw a space where you, there's a problem that you're gonna identify. Let's talk about the problem and then let's talk about the solution that you provide.

The problem Garrett solves...

Garrett: Yeah. It's funny, I think it's not a clear cut. I saw this problem, I said I'm gonna solve it. I think it was more of I stumbled into this and kept discovering more and more new things. 

[00:05:00] So for me, I got started in all of this work around leadership, around developing people, around people becoming better selves at work and really honing my vision.

My vision's a world where the vast majority of people are excited to go to work. When they're there, their expectations meet reality, and when they come home, they feel fulfilled. And I believe it starts with leaders because people don't quit jobs, they quit bosses.

Ewell: That's very true.

The path that almost led Garrett going to jail

Garrett: So I got into all of this because I needed mentorship…it all starts with mentorship. So, from age 15 to age 19, I was a drug dealer. And at the end of my freshman year at Indiana University, I got arrested. 

I received five felony distribution charge.  I was expelled from Indiana University. I was facing prison time. Life had just hit rock bottom.

But I had some people in my life who saw something in me that I didn't quite see in myself, and they gave me some opportunities.

Garrett couldn't see what others saw in him...the beginning of turning it around with a mentoring program

And I then was really grateful for that. So, I started helping out other young men and women who had made similar choices as me get mentors in the community to help them with the challenges and the business aspirations that they had for themselves. 

[00:06:00] And eventually we grew into universities connecting college students with alumni for mentorship, the need I saw was there's a lot of students that were taking additional semesters of college or just trying to figure out what the heck they wanted to do.

And there's a ton of people that wanted to be mentors. And so, I figured let's connect them together. And we facilitated thousands of mentor relationships.

The traditional model of mentoring wasn't working.

And one of the early things we learned was that this traditional model of mentoring wasn't working. This idea of saying Hey, you're a senior person, you're a junior person, you're both in the same field.

We found that only 18% of those relationships lasted for six months and were considered productive and quality to both participants. So, I partnered with these industrial organizational psychologists. We started, we studied that 18%, and we identified these factors that if you adjusted right before a mentor relationship starts, has a profound impact on the longevity and quality of those relationships.

Ewell: Can you describe a few of the factors, the key factors that bubbled up that, you see a trend across the board.

[00:07:00] Garrett: Absolutely. Yeah. So the two probably biggest factors were how you view the relationship, and two, how you view the work. When I say how you view the relationship, what I mean is. , how do you view your fellow mentor?

What we found was this hierarchical nature was not conducive to long-lasting and successful mentorships because if I feel like, oh, I'm clearly the mentor and they're clearly the protege, or vice versa, I'm clearly the protege, they're clearly the mentor.

It creates a power imbalance and when there's a power imbalance, essentially people, if let's say, if I'm thinking I'm the mentor, I think it's my philanthropy time, it's okay if I show up late. It's okay if I just ramble. An hour long because they're here to just soak up whatever. I've got to say, there's lack of mutual respect.

What makes for the best mentors?

There's a lack of question asking, and what I found was that the best mentor relationships were ones where there's a mutual respect, a mutual learning between the two, and a mutual willingness to ask questions. Those were critical to the success of mentorship.

So, if I can set the tone where I say, Hey, I don't care how old you are, I don't care how much money you make, I don't care what your title is, you must be open to learning from this person.

[00:08:00] They must be open to learning from you. If that can't happen, the relationship can't start. Boom. That had a huge impact.

Ewell: What pulled you out of the dark space? Was it somebody close to your age or was somebody older when you,

Garrett: Good question. So, I had a variety of mentors at that time period. They were all older. Yes. One of which was a guy named Brian Virgin, or is a guy named Brian Virgin. He started this program called At the Crossroads. It was the program that was in to help me turn my life around and yeah, I...

for anybody who wants to enact any change in their life, at the end of the day, you have gotta be at a mindset where you're willing to accept that change. Like you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make a horse drink. And I know that sounds like a cliche term that people use a lot, but it is a hundred percent true.

[00:09:00] And I was in a position in my life where, I didn't like the way my life was going, and I didn't like where my life was at. And I realized that I had pushed all my chips to the pot, and I'm like, man, if this doesn't work out in my favor, I could be going to prison and this could be, the end of me.

And that was a reality check that I needed to. and I needed to acknowledge, and that helped me just say, okay, you know what, I'm just gonna do whatever positive actions I can do. And, even if still very well could go to prison, I knew that was a very real reality in my situation.

The right personal decisions matter. Being intentional matters...

But I decided that I wanted to be  an agent for positive change and not somebody that was thinking that they could get a get by or get away with doing things that were negatively impacting people. because I thought I was sneaky enough or good enough or, I could do it. I could make it work because I knew of other people who could make it work.

I realized that's not the life I wanted to live, and I made a conscious change.

Ewell: Did you stumble into that or did they found you? How, what? I I'm just curious cuz pe that's a pivotal point in your career that has set you on a very mission-driven course if you would.

[00:10:00] Garrett: Totally. Yeah. I found them there was a variety of programs I was looking at and I just decided on this program really of happenstance and I just knew that I needed to make a change in my life. And by the way, I recognize that not everyone gets to go through this program. I am a white man in America who was raised socioeconomically privileged, so I had parents who could afford to put me in a program.

Not every person has those that luxury. And I was at a point where, I, my parents were like, this is the savings we got saved up for you. We had essentially anticipated using it on your college, but right now you've already, gotten expelled for your first year.

We can use it on you working through this program. And that's just pretty much it. I was like, okay, I'm gonna take it.

I bet on myself and I invested in myself and that was pretty much. That was pretty much it. I knew this was an inflection point that I needed to make a change and very well, this investment may not work out.

I still may have to go to prison. I didn't know what the scenario would be, but I figured I was gonna bet on myself and this was the time to bet. 

[00:11:00] Ewell: Wow. So now you're in your own business, helping people find their mentorships, connecting people. Talk about your business a little bit, who you serve. Are there certain industries you like to target? Just give us some overview of how…

Garrett’s mentorship experiences evolve to serve others.

Garrett: Yeah, so we started in the higher education space. We grew what we were doing to over 300 campuses and we facilitated thousands of mentoring relationships. And eventually in around 2018 we started having some alumni mentors come to me and many of 'em were go in companies that were going through some form of merger and acquisition, some form of something going on with private equity of some form or fashion, and they said, Hey man, this mentor program is fantastic.

Can we do this in my company? Because we're now merging 3, 4, 5, 6 HR departments, finance departments, sales departments, whatever, operations departments, tech departments, and we don't know who's gonna get fired, who like how we're gonna merge with these different organizations.

[00:12:00] We don't know really how we all fit in. You've done the research behind why people get along with each. In mentor relationships, can you create some connectivity between people? And so, we started doing that, and then the pandemic hit. And when the pandemic hit, a lot of our alumni mentors came back to me, especially ones that were CEOs and executives and said, Hey, don't get me wrong.

Leaders seeking mentorship for career growth shape Garrett's journey.

I'm happy to be a mentor for a student, but I would love to maybe get a mentor myself. My team is changing constant. My human challenges are changing. I'm having to deal with a board that's super frustrating and I don't, maybe I got family members on a board or investors that don't know the business and I'm trying to communicate and just keep everything all together and copacetic.

Can you help me with that? And I said, sure. So, we started building these executive mastermind groups where we connect CEOs. , vice presidents, even managers, like we just connect leaders of people together to work through those challenges, leading their teams and managing up and managing down. 

So, managing a board, managing the direct reports, managing skip level, direct reports, managing, a direct reporting structure of four, 500 people.

[00:13:00] And or even managing a small business and the human challenges that come with that. And what we found was that those human challenges are pretty consistent across the board and it can be really helpful to realize that you're not alone and that leadership is constantly evolving.

And if we're not constantly refining our leadership skills, we're not putting ourselves in the best position to continuously be a good leader.

Like we might be a great leader right now, or we might have been a great leader five years ago, but if we think, oh, I've been doing this for 15 years, or I've been a leader for X, Y, Z number of years, I got this stuff together, I'm, I've got everything on lock. You're eventually gonna get passed by because those things that were relevant five years ago are constantly evolving and could be potentially outdated by this time.

And if you're not open to experimenting and learning and growing, you will get left in the dust. Things are moving quickly,

[00:14:00] Ewell: We used to have a t-shirt made. that said, change or die for when I was with the seafood industry. Cuz things do move so fast and you have to adapt. 

So I really appreciate how you got into this and the impact that has had on your life to the point you do this for a. How did you get started? Obviously you're at a place now. You have your business, you're established, you've been going at this for 10 years, you know what you do today.

Building a mentorship network in higher education

Garrett: Very much. I started, in, on university campuses running like in-person workshops a lot of times with students in fraternities and sororities because they were the ones who seemed to be most interested in and like honor societies and that sort of stuff. Who would pay me to come and lead these how to network, how to become a professional workshop, that's where I got started.

And yeah, eventually it expanded into yeah what we're doing today and our main focus today is, so we, the kind of to the whole point, like I practice what I preach in the sense that if I'm not constantly changing, if I'm not constantly looking, adapting, pivoting, iterating, seeing what's happening in the market and making changes and updating.

Building mentorship programs for business elders (masterminds)

[00:15:00] I know I'm gonna be left behind. And so, through our mastermind groups, eventually we had enough CEOs come to me and say, Hey, I've got, I've been doing a lot of this leadership stuff. I feel like I'm pretty strong in my leadership, but I've recently appointed some new managers, or I've got some managers that have been doing this for a while, but they've maybe not really gone through any training before.

Or I've got some managers that might be struggling. Do you have something that you can help them with? And so my team and I created a tool called Name Insights. It's a program. and what it does is it helps managers have a pulse as to how their direct reports feel about them as a leader as well as themselves at work.

And it closes the perception gap because we know that almost always there's a perception gap between a, what a manager thinks about their team and what their team thinks about themselves.

 Ewell: Okay. I want to take a break for just a second. When we come back, . We'll go a little bit deeper with what you're doing and then you can share some guidance for the audience. And I think you can break that down into a couple tiers of how you coach people and mentor people and what they should be looking to do, 

[00:16:00] You've heard me talk about it before, and I love this product. It's called AG1. I take it every single morning before I go to the gym. It's a little green powder, scoop of green powder, goes in my shaker, shake it, boom, I'm done out the door and I get all my nutrients, all the vitamins and minerals that I need for the day, and it's helped me to keep my blood work in the green, which is critical along, and of course that's along with working out and eating healthy, et cetera, et cetera.

 Our health, that's the most important thing we do. So, Ag1 is really important to me. I love the product. I wouldn't be talking about it if I didn’t. You can learn more about it at closethedeal.com. Go to the show notes for Garrett Mintz and you'll find a link for the product ag one. Now let's get back to the show. 

Garrett. Welcome back to close the deal.com. Your why is very compelling is that the, is has that shifted too, because you go from getting out of a very dark place to helping people in the business world is, how's that transition?

[00:17:00] And do you ever get into helping people get out of a dark place too?

Garrett on creating expectations that meet reality as the best way to help his clients find fulfillment

Garrett: Yeah, so great question. So, my why, that's the one thing I wanna be very clear with the strategies I use to achieve my why. Constantly change, constantly pivoting, constantly iterating, like we've created software, we've run workshops, we've done executive mastermind groups, set up corporate mentor programs, but my why has never changed.

That I think is the most important thing. I really wanna be very clear.  It's like when any organization's creating a why for the company. And if you don't have a why, if you don't have a vision statement for what you're trying to achieve. I'm a big fan of the book, the Infinite Game, by Simon Sinek.

You can read it if you want any help with that, I'd be happy to help you with your team setting that thing up. But I think it a starting point could be just to start reading the book, the Infinite Game by Simon Sinek. But my why has been the constant throughout the entire business. It's, my vision is a world where the vast majority of people are excited to go to work.

[00:18:00] When they're there, their expectations meet reality. When they come home, they feel fulfilled. Everything I do works towards that outcome and it's never changed. So, whether when I was in higher ed, I was helping students figure out what they wanted to do. My vision is in a world where people are excited to go to work, people get excited to go to work when they know what they're going into doing and they've got a mentor that's helped guide them to get them to where they.

Then when it pivoted into corporate mentorship, connecting people across teams and departments, same exact concept. It's, expectations meet reality that is so critical to the work that we're doing, especially if we've recently gone through some form of merger or acquisition.

I want to know what to expect from this work, and therefore I need to have other mentors that are helping guide me go through this. And yeah, I ultimately as the business, as my business has pivoted and iterated, the vision has main retained, maintained the same the entire time.

Ewell: So, what you've done also is you really figure out how to get people, find, help people find their joy and fulfillment from work is what you're, what I'm hearing you say,

Garrett: Yeah. I'm a crazy person and believes that you can actually be happy in your work. It's funny

[00:19:00] Ewell: you a hundred percent.

Work-Life Balance – United States Vs. Europe

Garrett: You, I just got back from my honeymoon. My wife and I got married over the summer. We just got back from our honeymoon. We were in Thailand and Vietnam and we meet a lot of European people on our honeymoon.

And we'd say things because we had two weeks for our honeymoon and we were so proud that we had two weeks for our honeymoon because we thought that was just un unheard of two weeks of vacation. We thought that was incredible. And we meet these European people and they'd be like, oh, how long are you here for 'em?

We'd say two weeks. and they would say, oh, why so short? We're like, what do you mean? Why so short? How long are you here for? And they're like, four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks. You're like, holy moly, are you on sabbatical? Like, how do you get this much time off? And they were like, no, it's just part of our normal P T O policy.

But the thing that I found fascinating was that these European people, now granted this, were about 50 people that I met on my trip. So, this is not necessarily. Overview of how all European people face, but felt, feel, but this is just my experience. Almost all of 'em were burned out with their job.

Life's too short to hate your job.

[00:20:00] Almost all of 'em hated their boss. Almost all of 'em hated the work that they were doing. I think as Americans, we associate that, oh, more vacation times means less burnout. That is not necessarily accurate because we're still gonna spend the majority of our waking hours working. So whether we've got eight weeks of paid vacation, or two weeks of paid vacation, or even one week of paid, , we're still spending the majority of our waking hours at work doing this job, and so if we can't find ways to be happy with it, we're constantly gonna be searching for that next outside of work activity to bring us happiness.

But we're still not spending the majority of our time doing that thing.

Ewell: Yeah. And the, and then the purpose too, I think when you're purpose driven, the burnout. Is not you. You are gonna work hard, but you love what you do, right? And, but the burnout comes from bad leadership, maybe from above and frustration with what you're doing. So, you're helping to solve, those are huge problems.

[00:21:00] You're helping people to identify so they can make a shift, right?

And vice versa too, because you're trying to help the managers understand how to manage, or the CEOs, the owners, entrepreneurs, help them be better leaders to keep and retain their team.

Garrett: Absolutely. And that makes them more engaged as well. Like I don't think you necessarily need to love what you do. I think that's a myth. I don't think you have. Absolutely be in love with the work that you're doing. In fact, my team is done research on this topic called Work Orient Orientation. So, some people are job oriented, meaning they're motivated by work-life balance.

Some people are career oriented, meaning they're motivated by growth and skill development. Some people are calling oriented, meaning they're motivated by impact and having a positive impact on the world. It's a spectrum, so you can be in between categories and it's fluid. 

So, where you were five years ago could be different than where you're at now, but what's critical is that there's difference in engagement levels at work, we found that there was no correlation between being more or less engaged at work and any one work orientation.

Finding meaning in the work we do matters...

[00:22:00] But what we did find was that if we can find flow in the work, if we can find meaning in the work, if we can find connection in the work, we are much more likely to be engaged in our work.

We're much more likely to find satisfaction in it.

So, there are four core pillars to engagement.

Those core pillars are camaraderie with team members. So how well do I get along with those that I'm working? , does the work compliment my strengths? do I feel like what I'm really good at, I'm actually doing do I connect to the mission of the company?

So, does you know, is the mission of what we're trying to accomplish is it connected to me? Which is why when I said if there's any CEOs listening to this, if you don't have a mission or a vision statement, you should absolutely start with getting one because it's so critical, because that's 25% of all engagement is that.

And then the last pillar is we're complement strength. Energy. Oh, and does work. Give me energy. That's it. So, do I get energy from doing this work? And so those are the core pillars of engagement.

Ewell: Those are all, that's spot on. I love that. Before we get outta here today, share some of your guidance for the different layers of people that you work with. I think will be very, he helpful and insightful to the audience.

3 takeaways for CEOs

[00:23:00] Garrett: Yeah. So, I've got two core, I've got three kind of key takeaways I want for CEOs and for managers. For CEOs. The first tip is, the best time to plant a tree was 25 years ago. The next best time is right now.

What I mean by that is there might be some leadership things that you would've liked to have set up with your team a while back, and maybe you didn't, and you think, ah I could, I missed the ball.

I'm doing this thing. It's, it's okay. Get started now. Don't delay, get going. My second tip for CEOs and business. The status quo is constantly changing. You will get left behind. I can guarantee you that, especially if you're in the construction or manufacturing space. I know you'll we've talked a lot about construction and manufacturing.

Skill development is an issue - here's a big reason why.

There's a 30 year gap from 1990 to 2020 where a lot of parents were highly encouraging their kids to go to college, which means that essentially there is not nearly as many people working in the trades industry. So back historically, unfortunately. What was that,

[00:24:00] Ewell: That's an understatement.

 Garrett: Yeah it's crazy. There's so few people working in these trades industries.

So, to hire people, find people, and keep people, it's extremely critical. Like we in the construction space, cannot treat our people like crap. And just think there's this backfill of qualified talent that's just to fill in the void because we, we're jerks as leaders to our people. Now we've gotta really invest in our leadership because the retention is critical.

And I think we're starting to get better now. Do more things to encourage high school students to get into the trades. But there's a third year window that we're making up for. There's a massive gap of people that we're missing in the trades industries to work with our people and teams. And so, if we are a CEO business owner, we're an executive for a construction or manufacturing company, and we wanna be ahead of the time, so we need to invest in.

Ewell: Agreed.

Garrett: And the third thing I have for CEOs is have an experimental mindset. At the end of the day, if we're not constantly experimenting, if we're not constantly adjusting and changing, we are not growing. And by the way, most of our experiments are bad. I would say 90% of our experiments don't work out. But if we're not experimenting, we're not gonna discover the 10% of things that could have a multiple 3, 4, 5, 10 x impact on our business.

[00:25:00] Ewell: Wise tips. A lot of background past 10 years have helped get you to this point, right?

3 Core takeaways for mangers

Garrett: Yeah I'm lucky. I'm grateful. Oh, and I've got three tips for managers.

So, if you're a manager for within a team in an organization, tip number one. Leadership is evolving. You might have been, you might be in a leadership role for 15 years and you might think, oh, I've been doing this for forever.

I'm a great leader. What was really best practices five years ago could be considered outdated. Now it's constantly evolving. It's constantly changing.

Changing tip number two, almost always, your perceptions of how you think about your team is not what your team thinks about themselves. So, it's critical that we close that gap.

[00:26:00] Essentially, what I'm saying, Your people may not feel comfortable sharing the things that are on their mind straight to your face. So, you need to have some form of gathering feedback that's not necessarily direct face-to-face.

Honest feedback matters



And then the third object objectivity is critical to improving our performance as leader.

And by objectivity I mean getting feedback from those that have been there before that are willing to tell us straight and challenge us on our perceptions and our on our abilities. Because if we don't have people to give it to us straight, we are gonna be left behind. And. because of conditioning from our childhood, because of the ways that were raised in society and western society, we respect those that are in charge.

Meaning that if we disagree with those that are in charge, we are highly unlikely to voice that disagreement. We're highly likely to seem respectful, but underneath the surface, stew about it, and eventually leave. If we wanna be the best leaders we can, we need to foster an environment where people feel comfortable being objective with us and giving us that straight feedback.

Ewell: That is the perfect place to button this up. Where can people find you? What's the best place for people to get in touch with you? 

[00:27:00] Garrett: Yeah, so I'm really heavy on LinkedIn. You can find me at Garrett Manson LinkedIn. My website's ambition in motion.com. But yeah, LinkedIn would be the best place to connect with me. I'm very active on LinkedIn. I pull, I post polls every Wednesday around leadership. So, if you're listening to this and you.

Casually get involved in the work that we're doing or seeing, some of the trends that we're observing. I post polls of what we're seeing in our mastermind groups in our Aim Inside software tool every single Wednesday. And so, if you'd like to engage on the survey or if you'd like to, comment on it, that'd be awesome.

But yeah, I love showcasing and sharing insight and information as to what's going on with leadership and what are some of the new trends and. . Yeah. If you're a manager or a business owner and you'd love to, you'd like to learn more about what we do, please reach out on LinkedIn. I'd love to.

Ewell: All right, Garrett, this has been fantastic. Thank you very much. 

[00:28:00] And that is a wrap with Garrett. Now imagine what his life may have been like had he not had a mentor. I mean, he, he may be sitting in jail today. He could possibly be dead today. That's how important mentorship is to the extreme levels, right?

If you are in the service business, what he was talking about regarding jobs, Trying to find employees, I think this episode probably resonated very strongly with you.

I came from a trade association called the Carolina Loggers Association, leading that organization and that industry cannot find the labor they need. In fact, Garrett is keynoting their annual meeting this spring in 2023. So, let me know your feedback on this.

This is an important subject cuz the, the issue of not having enough people in the workforce is gonna only continue to get worse. So, this mentorship thing, I think he's, he's tapped a nerve clearly and I hope that, I hope this episode was helpful to you and I'd love to hear your feedback and I thank you again of course for being here and being part of the close the deal.com podcast and do me the favor. 

[00:29:00] You know what it is by now. I hope. And if it's the first time you're here in this show, do me a favor and make this a great day for yourself.

Be intentional about that, and be very, very intentional about that. Make it a great day.