 I hope you're having a great day. Today, I want to talk about leadership development and the real challenge that's happening that's costing companies huge amounts of money every year and profits and all of their key metrics and being competitive. And it doesn't matter whether you are a one-person shop or a Fortune 100 company, a lot of the same challenges are facing either one at the other end of the spectrum. And there's a huge report that came out called the Global Leadership Forecast. It talked to 25,000 execs and it talked to also 2,500 HR leaders. And it was asking them questions on the state of leadership. You know, and some of the data that came out of it is that organizations believe only 14% of them that they have enough capabilities and leadership to take to the company to the next level. Only 14% of them have enough bench strength to survive people leaving, meaning turnover issues and having people step up. And four out of every 10 technology leaders are failing. They're the worst overall and 32% of them have never even done a performance review. So you can see those numbers are pretty bad. And I think the challenge is not necessarily that people aren't spending money on training, it's are not understanding what to train and how people work in order to deliver the training. Because they're spending over $50 billion a year and it's clearly not working. In fact, the numbers this year are worse than they've ever been before and spends keep going up. And the issue comes down to is your level of self-awareness is never greater than your social awareness. And most people's self-awareness is very low. They believe it's not, but it really is. And the problem is, is that people get judged on performance. Well, performance doesn't mean you're aware of anything. It means you're just getting things done. And eventually, no matter what kind of performer you are, you'll hit a ceiling because you'll just run out of runway. Because brute strength and doing things your way and not being socially aware and caring about other people is going to eventually get to the point where you will not be able to get the results you've been getting before. And an easy example is that I was working with the CEO not long ago. He said, why the leadership problem? My team's not performing. They're not getting things done. They're not collaborating and communicating. And I take that with a grain of salt because usually, again, self-awareness is very low. So they're unable to really see what's actually going on. And they never really had the conversations and dug into them or people on the other side are not giving them honest, real feedback. So I sat down with half of the exact team for five minutes or less. I asked them some questions and basically found out that they don't believe that the CEO is listening. Now, if I just went back and went to the CEO and said, hey, you're not listening and they're saying that. So the problem is in a leadership issue is a listening problem. That person would most likely get defensive. They would say, well, they don't get it. They're not figuring out what needs to get done. They have their own challenges and issues. And there would be a thousand reasons why they'd be pushing off blame and get very defensive on it. So that's not what I did. What I did is help them see the patterns that are going on and connect it with the behavior and show them the payoff in order to change. And in order to do that, you've got to get into self-awareness, right? The problem is when you deal with external realities, there are always 5,000 issues that come up and people can give excuses, blame other people. But when they see a pattern that's occurring over a longer period of time and you can identify it, it becomes much more difficult to do that. So I started to ask questions, found out that the CEO was one of six kids. Well, the payoff growing up was talking over other people, got you attention and got you heard, right? This happened in several other instances as well as I went through past behavior and experiences and what all went on. So then I sat down and it's easier to make a really good argument on change. I said, look, it's not that you're broken, it's that you've got a payoff in the past that if you didn't listen, you got results. Now that pattern is no longer serving you and you either change or your productivity, efficiency, all your numbers are gonna go down. And in fact, if you look at it, you probably lost either 10 to 20% off of all your key metrics over the last couple of years because of your inability to listen and how it makes people feel and their levels of engagement, right? So I said, you have a choice now. This is what your leaders are saying, this is what you've been doing. The future is not looking good unless you make some changes and start listening and doing some other activities and actions was much easier to convince someone to do that, showing them the patterns and everything else because it's hard to argue with that. It's hard to argue with taking a look of a lifetime because then it's pattern recognition, it's not something or someone that's broken and the changes are really small. Things like last to speak at a team meeting, right? And there's a lot of other things that you can do along with that that can make substantial changes in the process as well. But it starts with your self-awareness and then goes to social awareness. And when you start the other way around, it's very difficult to move people and most training programs are set up teaching you external skill sets but they ignore your blind spots, your patterns and unconscious things that are going on and therefore they may work on some small level to push you farther. They're incremental, they're not exponential and that's the results that get you massive lift along the way. It's pointing this stuff out and then going through it. It's the same thing with 360 degree reviews. I see them all the time put on by corn, fairy, everyone else. People do very little with them. In fact, most of the people get them and they're stuffed in a corner and they never even do anything with them because I read them and see them because they can't make the linkages of what's going on and they're just telling people external actions to take