John SmallMtn

Welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Adapted Growth Show. My name is John Small Mountain Hill. I’m the founder of Adapted Growth, and today we have someone who I’m very excited to have on the show. We have Jesan Sorrells on the show.

Jesan and I go back—I don’t even remember how we met, but I’ve been on his show a couple of times, and he is one of the people who actually knows what they’re talking about in the leadership coaching, consulting, and development space. He is the host of the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, which is a very cool podcast if you’re into reading without having to reinvent the wheel for yourself. He’s also the founder of Leadership Toolbox, which helps people get to the places that they need to be in leadership. Dude, welcome to the show, man. I’m glad you’re here.

Jesan Sorrells

I am so excited that you’re putting together this show. I am so excited you’re doing this for your clients, your listeners, and your followers here at Adapted Growth. I’m very happy to join you on this journey today. So, yeah, let’s go ahead and get started. Let’s jump right in.

John SmallMtn

Awesome, man. All right, let me talk about it, right? Because the show is about making sure you have what is necessary in high-performance roles. Leadership is a high-performance role.

Now, you and I have talked about, off camera, the idea that there’s lots of room for bad leaders to hide. As a salesperson who has had to deal with leaders who don’t really understand the sales function, I felt that pain. I’m sure you’ve felt that pain as well. Let me start this show just talking about, at a core level, how does someone know if they’re really ready to step into that leadership lane?

Jesan Sorrells

That’s a great question to start with. Once again, thank you for having me on the show. I really do appreciate it.

How do you know you’re ready to step into a leadership role? The real problem or the real challenge that exists with leadership roles is twofold. I talk about this a little bit in my book, 12 Rules for Leaders: The Foundation of Intentional Leadership. Everyone knows what leadership is when it doesn’t show up. Most people don’t know what leadership is when it does show up.

This is why we have 400,000 books on leadership on Amazon.com. This is why we have another 100,000 published every year. This is why everyone from Ray Dalio to Chicken Soup for the Soul comments, bloviates, and talks about leadership. This is why I’m talking about leadership today—because while we know what leadership is not, we don’t know what leadership is. This is one of the fundamental building blocks into knowing when to step into leadership.

The second fundamental building block that we always talk about in leadership is: Are leaders born or are they made? Is there a certain set of skills you have to have, or is it just natural charisma? Now, there’s a bunch of leadership theories about this. I’m not going to bore your listeners with all that nonsense today. I don’t believe in theories; I believe in practice.

We have these two areas that are moving alongside each other: “I don’t know if I’m skilled enough or if I have to be charismatic,” and “I recognize leadership when it happens or when it doesn’t happen, but I don’t pay attention to it when it is happening because it’s just natural like air.” A person is moving along these two twin tracks, and guess where they wind up? At the clearing at the end of the path. All of a sudden they’re looking around, and now they’re the leader.

Everybody’s looking at them saying, “Hey, you made it down this track. You made it to the clearing at the end of the path. Congratulations, yay! Here’s your parting gift: You’re now a leader.” No one tells people when they’re walking down those tracks what the skill sets are to get down them. No one points out the things that they are learning along the way, like:

• Managing conflict
• Dealing with teams and dysfunction
• Navigating—a much-overused word in our time—trauma
• Getting people to high performance and vaunting them over the side to the next level
• Behaving with humility and stepping back to allow others to lead

No one points those areas out to folks when they’re on those two twin tracks, and they wind up accidentally in the clearing at the end of the path. All of my work is about teaching people how to not wind up there accidentally. One of the things that we talk about is the intentional application of effective leadership practices.

How does a person know that they’re ready? You don’t know, but you have to recognize where those two tracks are. Particularly in a sales role where it’s very easy to sit back in the tall grass and have a bunch of other people do stuff for you, then you wind up in this clearing and you have no clue how you got there.

John SmallMtn

Oh man. That’s one of the things that I’m so excited to talk about with you specifically, because what happens in sales is so common and consistent. What happens is there’s an opening, you take the top performer, and you ship them into the management role. Then people are confused and bewildered why production suffers, or why this person isn’t ready to coach, manage, or lead.

Then you see all the arguments on LinkedIn and social media like, “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” They don’t even know that they’re quoting a play. From your point of view in other areas of leadership, is it that consistent to just take the best person from a numbers perspective and put them into the leadership role? Is it that common outside of sales, or is this something that only happens in sales?

Jesan Sorrells

Tragically, this is a thing that happens almost everywhere, without fail. The person who doesn’t fall on their face the most often wins. Because they haven’t really conceptualized, analyzed, or critically thought about why they didn’t fall on their face—they just survived—the number one survivor winds up being the person who’s now the leader.

This is where you get not bad leadership, not good leadership, but mediocre leadership. I’ve written about this and pushed this idea for many years through blog posts, podcasts, videos, content, trainings, and consulting with organizations: Mediocre leadership is actually more toxic than bad leadership.

John SmallMtn

Why? Because it’s harder to see?

Jesan Sorrells

Because it’s harder to see—that’s number one. Number two, it allows people to pretend like production is really happening when in reality all these other things are going on.

John SmallMtn

Oh yeah, right. The vanity metrics versus the real metrics that move the business.

Jesan Sorrells

Bingo. In bad leadership, everybody goes, “Okay, bad leadership is clearly bad.” We can see this at a nation-state level. Everybody knows what the bad leadership nation-state examples are, so I’m not going to bring them up. But we can clearly see when a leader is oriented down those two twin tracks with intentionality and is going to wind up in a bad place. We can see bad leadership.

We can also see leadership that we identify as good. When that leader is on those two twin tracks going toward a place that everybody agrees is a good place to get to, boom, they’re there.

Mediocre leadership is the worst because there’s no direction, guidance, or goal at the end of those two twin tracks. There’s a lot of excuse-making and a lack of accountability about why that goal isn’t made. That’s toxic in our organizations and our cultures, starting in our families all the way up to the nation-state level.

John SmallMtn

If someone is in a leadership role, but they’re not holding it well and not doing a good job, what should they be looking for in themselves to indicate red flags?

It used to be that people got groomed for leadership. In big corporate organizations, there are still leadership development people on staff, and once you get the nod, you get groomed through a process. But in small business and entrepreneurship, it doesn’t go that way. That’s most of my clients—smart people who have figured something out, but some of them are just trying to figure it out as they go, which leads to some of that bad leadership. In my opinion, you don’t need to know every aspect of the business yourself, but if you don’t know it, you need to pay well enough to have someone who does. In sales, this means not just hiring a commission-only closer because they reached out saying they can take your calls, thinking that’s going to go swimmingly.

In sales, it’s harder to hide than in most other leadership roles, where you can formulate a report that validates your existence even if you aren’t doing the work. How does a leader know if they’re on that path to the clearing and it’s going to be troublesome when they get there? What should they be looking for?

Jesan Sorrells

The biggest thing you need to be looking for is a fundamental lack of self-awareness. If you’re going along and you think things are going swimmingly, there’s probably something you’re not paying attention to.

These things often happen in an intangible and subjective way, which again is why there are 400,000 books on leadership. If you take a sales team from Organization B and a sales team from Organization C, there are going to be different intangible clicks inside of those sales teams, even if they’re under the same umbrella of Corporation A. There are going to be fundamentally different teams or cliques because the subjective interactions between people inside of those teams are going to be different.

We don’t like to acknowledge that, particularly at a corporate level. We like to flatten everything out and make everything a base, middle-of-the-road experience for everyone. In a small- to medium-sized entity, or in an entrepreneurial or consultative role, one of the things we have to pay attention to is this idea that if things are going swimmingly, we’ve probably missed something. This requires an element of self-awareness.

I’ve worked with enough folks in management who have had those moments—whether in a team meeting, a one-on-one interaction, or on a phone call—where they felt subjectively that something was off the rails, but they ignored that feeling and put it to the side.

John SmallMtn

Yeah, absolutely. I call it the “pit of fire,” because it’s down in the belly. We’re both martial artists, and the pit of fire concept came from feeling that pressure on a test day. When you’ve tested multiple times in martial arts, you’re used to it. It’s an engine for you. Then you see a new guy doing his first test, and he’s so nervous. It’s like, “Cool, we all are, bro. This is a performance. Congratulations, it’s supposed to be uncomfortable.”

Jesan Sorrells

Or the trial guy who comes in because he “just sees red.” Recently, a trial guy came into the dojo where I train. He was a military guy with a wrestling background. In the martial art that I’m in, I’m a white belt—I’m a nobody. But I’ve been there at least two or three years now. He walked in like, “I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that.” I could see he was going to spaz. Spazzing is that fire-in-the-belly moment. He was spazzing, didn’t know what to do, and he never came back.

John SmallMtn

I’ve seen so many people come in feeling high and mighty, and then they’re just not prepared. It’s no one’s fault; it’s meant to be a culling. Most people don’t make it to black belt. You have a black belt in another art and started over, and I have a black belt in another art and started over as well. Talk about being able to empty the cup, show up, be the beginner, and not be the guy saying, “Well, in my old school…” We’ve seen those leaders and managers as well.

Going back to this: How do you know? It almost sounds like you need to keep your head on a swivel, which I appreciate. Blind spots are abundant, and you don’t even know how to look for them. I don’t know that there’s a better label than “blind spots,” because you don’t even know to look in that direction until you’re aware of it. How do people deal with that anxiety or that feeling that something is there when they aren’t sure how to get to it?

Jesan Sorrells

In order to deal with blind spots—and again, I coach people through this process, so I’m going to give a short two-minute idea, but trust me, the game is deep—you need to understand that we all have biases. This is a place where I agree fundamentally with the diversity, equity, and inclusion or social justice folks who train in those spaces: We all have biases, and we have to recognize that they exist. Where we part is what you do with those biases afterward and how you deal with them. But we do have to recognize that we have them.

Our biases influence where our blind spots are. Constantly questioning our own blind spots and questioning that quadrant of “unknown unknowns,” as Donald Rumsfeld said back in the day, is going to be very important. If we don’t have the courage to do that ourselves, here’s the piece that we often forget: We have to surround ourselves with people who we trust enough to call us out on our BS. That’s fundamentally it.

If you’re on a sales team, you’re the top performer, and no one can call you out because you produced 10% over month-after-month, I want you to listen to me very closely: Your stuff still stinks.

John SmallMtn

I rail against the whole rainmaker mentality of selling. In a small segment of businesses, sales is blueprinted and dialed in with touches, cadences, and sequences. But everywhere else, it’s still the rainmaker thing. It’s, “Hey, we’re coming up on the end of the month,” the lights come on, and roaches are scrambling to find something to do. You always hit the goal, but there’s always a sweat and a deadline crunch, as opposed to doing a little bit every day.

Jesan Sorrells

Rainmaking will not save you. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, infamously says that “sales cures all ills.” No, Mark, it doesn’t. Sales cures the ills of production and revenue, but there are more things operating in the organization than revenue and production. There are people, marketing, and operations. Because we have people operating underneath all of those processes, there are intangible, subjective interactions occurring that are not cured by sales revenues, top-line production, or bonuses and commissions in the C-suite.

That’s a more nuanced take, but we don’t live in a world of nuance anymore. I get where Mark gets to say those kinds of things, but fortunately, that’s why we have podcasts. It plays really well on social media.

John SmallMtn

Yeah, it plays really well on social media. That’s why this show is an hour, so we aren’t throwing around social media headlines that are boiled down past the point of being usable just to get good mileage.

Jesan Sorrells

Do we want to be feeding people milk or meat? What do we want to get out of the experience? This goes back to where our biases and blind spots are, not only as leaders, but as sales performers.

The things a high-performing sales professional should pursue are the things they are uncomfortable with in order to become a better leader. If you’re uncomfortable dealing with an HR process, lean into that. Find somebody you trust who can help you lean into that. To get out of the clouds and into the dirt: Find somebody you trust who can guide you through that process. Spend a day working in operations. Spend a day working in marketing. Spend a day working next to someone in the C-suite who just wants to talk and go to meetings all day.

The areas where you feel uncomfortable should be the areas you move toward. Normally I don’t say “should”—I say “I recommend” or “I suggest”—but I believe this so strongly that I’m willing to put a “should” behind it. High-performing, cohesive teams can cover for each other when one person fails; someone else can step up. If this were a podcast focused on HR or operations professionals, I would say the exact same thing.

John SmallMtn

I was a sales guy who didn’t really appreciate sales or marketing until I moved into small business. There was no marketing or brand name driving things forward, and that’s when I realized, “Maybe there is something to this marketing thing,” and had to spend time figuring it out.

The awareness track is where it all starts. I spent about 10 years in sales not being super coachable or open until I did the awareness track with my coach, which exposed all my blind spots.

The thing you’re saying that I think most people miss is this concept of accountability. It’s an uncomfortable label that lots of people turn away from, but good accountability is incredible. Good accountability isn’t someone who busts your chops when you miss a goal; it’s someone who calls you on your crap before you miss the goal. They are so connected to you, your goals, and your work that they can see those blind spots before you do. When they call them out, you hear it instead of getting defensive.

Good accountability paired with awareness is the path most people need to be on, but most people think they don’t need accountability. I talk to people all the time who say, “John, I could make cold calls if I really needed to.” Pretend like you need to! Let me see you pretend like you need to, and then let’s talk about what’s actually happening. Then it’s just endless procrastination, and they can’t see that it’s a blind spot until I practically beat them over the head with it.

Jesan Sorrells

In general, in sales or any other area of the enterprise, people are going to do what they are most comfortable with, but they are also going to do what the organization permits.

John SmallMtn

For sure, absolutely. Are we going to talk about leaders versus managers now? Let’s talk about it.

Jesan Sorrells

Now we can talk about leaders versus managers. A manager fundamentally can engage in the aspects and behaviors of leadership. Managers do this all the time. When a person is creating or putting together a team, that process walks the line between management and leadership. Many people default to the management side because it’s easy.

It’s easy to manage a team versus lead them. At the nuts-and-bolts level, managing a team looks like having a meeting, assigning accountabilities, making sure people follow up on those accountabilities, and making sure emails, chat messages, and Slack updates happen in the order they’re supposed to happen. At the end of the day, at 5:00, 6:00, or 7:00, you wipe the digital sweat off your brow, say you put in a good day, get your check, and go home.

I’m not minimizing that. We’ve had management in human history going all the way back to the Egyptians when they put up the pyramids. You can’t tell me there weren’t managers for those stones—of course there were. Give me a break. Everybody knows what management is, but management is not leadership. Leadership is fundamentally something different on the other side of the line.

John SmallMtn

I try to keep things out of a black-and-white state, although I love black-and-white states—it’s part of my personality. Is it okay for a manager to say, “You know what, I don’t need to be a leader”?

Jesan Sorrells

Yes, it’s fine. That is how most of the big 20th-century organizations we look back on with rose-colored glasses ran—from Owens Corning and IBM to Ford and Chevy. Those were management-driven organizations, not leadership-driven organizations. Much of the 20th century and the Industrial Revolution ran on that management model.

The IBM manager came in with the white shirt, black tie, perfect haircut, and horn-rimmed glasses to manage you into producing the next computer in Endicott, New York. There is nothing wrong with management; I have no opposition to it. In fact, there are some people who probably need to be managers rather than leaders. It’s fine.

John SmallMtn

What is the distinction indicating you need leadership versus “management is fine”? What is the difference in environment that would necessitate a move toward leadership versus staffing a bunch of managers?

Jesan Sorrells

Look at your org chart—that’s the simple answer. As your org chart scales to infinity, you’re fundamentally going to need managers rather than leaders, and you’re going to need more managers.

Now, the folks listening to this podcast may not be in a place of scale. If you’re in a small organization or running an organization of 100 people, you’ll probably have two to five manager types and one to three leaders. You could take those manager types—and again, nothing wrong with management—who are interested in moving a process forward inch-by-inch and try to mold them into leaders, but this requires a different way of thinking about their role. This ties into accountability.

I’m a big fan of two books:

1. The Oz Principle, which is about accountability and how it scales across an organization.
2. Extreme Ownership.

You have to have both books together; I don’t think you can have one without the other. Paired together, both books solve for the accountability and scale problem.

The problem of scale with accountability is that as an organization gets larger, no one takes accountability because they can hide. When you’re small, everyone has to take accountability—that’s the idea of extreme ownership, because there is nowhere to hide. As our economy shifted away from the vast majority of management roles being filled by 20th-century legacy organizations, we shifted toward smaller teams doing larger, more meaningful work, which means leadership actually matters more.

You can watch this in the uptick of books on leadership. As our economy shifted in the ’70s and ’80s, the number of published leadership books ticked up, while management books went down. Things are shifting in our economy. While human beings tend not to view these things at a macro level, at a micro level you can see it in your individual organizations and cultures. If I’m on a small team in an organization of 100 people, I’d better take accountability for everything in my sphere of influence, which is quite a lot.

John SmallMtn

Yeah, that’s the Traction stuff, right?

Jesan Sorrells

That’s right—Gino Wickman’s book, Traction. I know people who swear by Traction; there are great tools inside that book.

Even if you don’t use that, just looking around and asking, “What are the areas I’m not taking accountability in?” will shift you from a management mindset to a leadership-focused mindset. Just asking yourself that one question, checking your biases, and having trusted people around you will do it.

Then you can take the management idea of systems, processes, and checking boxes, break down the steps you need to take to mend those ignored areas, and walk through them step-by-step. Now you’re subtly shifting back into management. You’re walking back and forth across that line. That’s a very practical, tactical, and intentional way to do it.

John SmallMtn

Yeah, interesting. Okay, so I need to think through that answer, but let’s talk a little bit more about the self-awareness thing.

I’m a huge fan of DISC, obviously. We had a podcast about it—85 episodes and everything. I’m a DISC facilitator; I use it in all my hiring and in working with teams because it’s blunt enough that you can use it in a sales conversation. I think all of those assessment tools have greatness in their ability to open you up to start looking for things and get started on the path.

Jesan Sorrells

Right. So, I am also a DISC-certified facilitator; I got that certification many years ago.

I wander back and forth on DISC. I think DISC is good in certain situations, but I also think some teams can invest too much in it, just like any other psychosocial or psychocultural measurement tool. Some of the science underneath DISC—I won’t say it’s questionable, I wouldn’t go that far—can definitely go either way.

I’m a big fan of Jungian archetypes. As I’ve gone through facilitating DISC and looking into the psychological research under it, I’ve become a lot more of a fan of the Big Five personality traits. They are more Jungian in their focus and directly relate to observable behaviors. That’s not a nitpick; that’s just a path I’ve gone down myself.

DISC is perfectly serviceable because a lot of people don’t want to get that deep into it, and teams don’t have the time to get that deep into it. As a consultant and trainer in this space, I have time to go down those rabbit holes. That’s part of the job.

John SmallMtn

Same, yeah, that’s part of the job. To be worth your salt talking about these things, you kind of need to know the differences, in my opinion. Otherwise, you just end up becoming the hostile apostle and drinking way too much of the Kool-Aid.

Jesan Sorrells

Exactly. That’s right.

In my facilitation and coaching processes, I’ve used DISC and I’ve used the True Colors Communication Inventory, which was developed by Don Lowry back in the 1970s. That’s a nice, lightweight communication inventory. It’s not as deep as DISC, and the science underneath it isn’t nearly as deep. You can just throw it at people and they feel happy and great about it.

John SmallMtn

Yeah, they feel great about it. It’s not really challenging or forcing introspective reflection. It’s just, “I’m a blue, okay, great.”

Jesan Sorrells

Right: “I’m an orange!” Now I can open the door to some other things with you because you’ve given me permission to open the door on some of your other blind spots.

I’m not a big fan of Myers-Briggs (MBTI) for a whole variety of reasons. I think it’s overused.

John SmallMtn

The cult-like nature of that whole community is a little rough. Have you read the book? Because I know a whole lot of very loud people who love Myers-Briggs, and then someone told me I should read that book. I’m blanking on the name of the book, but I listened to it and was like, “This is astounding.” The fanaticism of that woman was a little bit crazy.

Jesan Sorrells

The Personality Brokers. What it did was explain why I would see Star Wars MBTI charts floating around online. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I was seeing that, and then I read The Personality Brokers and it clicked in my head. Got it. Now we’re done.

I very rarely facilitate MBTI. I’ll do it if clients ask for it, but I very rarely facilitate it. For me, the highest-order assessment is the CliftonStrengths assessment put together by Gallup.

They have StrengthsQuest, which is their higher-education version, and StrengthsFinder, which is their more business- and corporate-oriented version. It’s the same research from Gallup underneath both.

The insight Donald Clifton had in the 1960s and ’70s—and was able to use Gallup to prove—was this: People grow in particular strengths (things they do well) over the course of time. Because Gallup is a polling organization, they started talking to people between the ages of 14 and 99, and they began to really measure that thesis. They’ve measured and updated that thesis consistently over the course of almost 60 years. The dataset is just robust.

John SmallMtn

It’s huge. Sample size matters in anything. If you collect enough data, you can’t argue with it anymore. But if your sample size is garbage, you’re going to draw whatever conspiracy theorist ideas you have from data points collected over a frighteningly small sample size.

Jesan Sorrells

Yes. The Gallup Organization’s dataset size is not just the United States—it’s global. For me, that’s the top of the mountain. That’s really good.

John SmallMtn

Oh, that’s huge. I didn’t know that.

I’ve done StrengthsFinder, and I think it’s helpful for uncovering your own blind spots and biases. But I don’t know anyone who would be able to label and type someone else’s strengths just in a conversation. It feels like it’s only really useful for the self, or if everyone on the team is using it.

As a sales guy, the thing about DISC that I like so much is that it helps me have the conversation the way the other person wants to have it. As a revenue professional, if you’re talking at them versus talking to them—like if you’re a high-D type who just wants to win, and you aren’t paying attention to the fact that an S-type wants everyone on their team to get along—you’re just burning bridges, leads, and relationships.

DISC is helpful to salespeople for starting on a path of self-awareness, but also for improving their conversations drastically because you can map to the other person. My one bone to pick with both the Enneagram and StrengthsFinder is that they don’t seem like tools you can use proactively when dealing with other people. They feel like something you go on a solo quest to figure out.

Jesan Sorrells

I would actually agree with that. The way I’ve seen StrengthsFinder leveraged on teams is very much an internally focused “How do we put our strengths together so the puzzle makes sense on this team?” idea.

It is not externally focused. In fact, one of the explicit things StrengthsFinder says is that it shouldn’t be used for labeling people external to yourself. I may spot or suspect that John has Ideation as one of his strengths based on external behaviors, but it’s incumbent on me not to label him that way or proceed that way unless I actually give him the assessment to see if I’m right or wrong.

DISC is a distinction with a difference: DISC is more externally focused than internally focused.

I’ll use my own DISC typing as an example. I’m a DI—a high D, with the I subservient there, followed by C, and S way down at the bottom. As I’ve gained more experience, I’ve had to learn where to put that D forward and where to bring it back.

John SmallMtn

That’s real awareness. I get pushback from people all the time: “John, I’m deeper than one personality assessment.” Well, of course you are!

I know some organizations that use DISC as a black-and-white hiring assessment, especially for salespeople. If you don’t come across as a DI, you don’t get an interview, which I think is stupid. The way we use it is to ask: “Are you coachable? Are you aware that some of this stuff is going to be hard for you?” If you’re aware, we can plot a path of performance and development so it becomes easy for you and you can do it without sweating it. But you have to be willing to look at it honestly.

I did not do a good job of this initially. My coach showed me who I was and then told my business partner, “Maybe not John, because he’s a C-type,” since he had never coached a C-type to sales success before. My business partner had just finished reading Rocket Fuel and the whole idea of visionaries versus integrators. He had a moment of clarity that he was only hiring high-I types who were just like him. Every time it got stressful, everyone scrambled to create around the blockage as opposed to putting their head down, driving through, and getting it done. He decided to try to offset his differences.

Which brings me to this question: If you’re a leader—a leader, not a manager, to be specific—how important is it to go out and cultivate balance in your personality makeup versus just hiring people who are just like you because you know exactly how to motivate, coach, and talk to them?

Jesan Sorrells

If you are a leader and you are uncomfortable doing something, you have one of two options: You can either lean into that discomfort and solve the problem yourself to the depth of your talents and skills, or you can hire somebody else.

That comes down to scale, revenue, and resources. You can hire somebody else to cover the spot where you’re weak, except—here’s the catch—they will have their own weaknesses. Their weaknesses might be as strong as your greatest strengths, and you’re going to have to spend time working with them.

In your example of being hired as a C-type by a bunch of I-types, you have to commit to working with that person you hired to cover your weakness in order to build up their strengths. This is a massive two-step that many leaders fail at because it’s so hard. It requires not only the self-awareness you get from a personality exam—which is just the first of a thousand steps—but a deep dive into self-awareness work on yourself.

When I’m coaching and consulting with teams, I recommend that before you go out and hire somebody else, physician, heal thyself. Go to the ends of the earth to figure out what you don’t know. Coaching and consulting are cheap in comparison to hiring a person. Go get a coach, get a consultant, get some outside help, and start working on yourself to become a better leader.

Before you even get a coach or consultant, there are very simple things you can do. Taking DISC or another personality test is helpful, but the second thing most people forget is journaling. I’m a big fan of leaders journaling. I don’t care if you journal in a private blog, via a private or public podcast where you ask questions and admit what you don’t know, or in a notebook.

Go buy a journal and call it My Leadership Journal. Three times a week—Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—take five minutes in your office to write about what you did successfully that day as a leader. If you do that every three days for 90 days, you’re going to start growing in self-awareness as a leader.

John SmallMtn

I’m so glad you talked about journaling. You can’t claim you’re on a path of self-awareness if you aren’t reflecting on your actions, your thoughts, where you got in your own way, and where you did well.

My coach was adamant: “John, you should be journaling.” I thought, “Nah, I’m good, I don’t need it. I just need more doors to knock on.” Eventually, I started to journal, and it became its own developmental practice. Being able to haul thoughts out of your head and look at them is the most important part.

Journaling changed for me when I heard someone compare it to computers: A Mac and a PC have the exact same core components, but how it’s wired through the coding and commands it tells itself creates the difference. If you’re in a performance role and you aren’t looking at your actions, how you spend your time, and how you view yourself performing those actions, you’re looking at the world through a peephole.

Jesan Sorrells

Let’s break this down into something even more practical for folks. If you’re in a performance role, you probably get up in the morning, afternoon, or evening and go to the gym.

John SmallMtn

Every high-performing salesperson I know has a mastery habit that is quite often the gym, martial arts, hiking, or running. Every high performer I’ve met in sales has some sort of meditative mechanism they use. In sales, people say, “You aren’t scared of the phone after you’ve been lifting heavy iron.” Doing hard things makes you excited to go do more hard things.

Jesan Sorrells

Inside every one of those high performers—my intuition tells me this, though I have no data for it—almost every single one tracks their performance in those activities.

John SmallMtn

That’s the removal of the blind spot.

When I started my business, it was just to give people a CRM so they couldn’t lie to themselves anymore. It wasn’t to be a coach or trainer; I just wanted to give people a mechanism that allowed them to find a path of improvement as opposed to saying, “They didn’t know what they wanted,” or “Screw that guy,” and all the other things we tell ourselves in sales that reinforce the sales stigma.

Journaling was my path through that. If you aren’t looking for that stuff, it’s super easy to become jaded. In leadership, I know people who say, “If your people don’t want it bad enough, you’ve just got to fire them and bring on new people.” How are we not going to have the same result? I’d love to know why people think salting the fields and starting over isn’t going to lead to the same recurring issues.

Jesan Sorrells

Everywhere you go, the problem is you. That’s what I tell folks who want to salt the fields. You aren’t firing yourself. You’re still in charge, so until you fire yourself, salting the field and burning everything down does nothing.

We have to live in the reality we’re in, not the reality we want. The reality right now is that the “IBM man” with the black tie, white shirt, and perfect haircut isn’t coming back. The social and cultural changes in the people we are hiring have to push us to be better leaders. You can’t just fire everybody and rehire the kinds of people you want from the 1950s or 1970s. You have to hire people from 2024, 2025, or 2026, adapt to them, and lead them in this time.

John SmallMtn

A thousand percent. It’s astounding to me. People are going back to offices, and executives at the top of the totem pole say, “We aren’t as productive when we aren’t in the office, but I’m not coming to the office—that’s for you guys.” Whenever I see someone like Malcolm Gladwell say, “We should all be back in the office,” I think, “Where is your office, buddy? Are you going to one?”

Those are the red flags I hear in my work: “Why don’t my people want it bad enough?” or “It’s just easier if I do it myself.” Those are major problems.

Jesan Sorrells

Leaders figure out fundamentally what their people need and move heaven and earth to make sure they have it.

The best leaders and managers I’ve ever worked with or coached understood that after self-awareness, looking at biases, and accepting feedback on blind spots, one of the biggest things they had to do was move roadblocks out of the way so their people could perform.

If you’re a high-performing sales professional who is really good at removing your own roadblocks, congratulations—you’ve won a quarter of the battle. Now you have to go out and win the other three-quarters of the battle for everyone else so they can be high performers, too.

High performers realize that they are indispensable. Seth Godin talks about this: Indispensable doesn’t mean unfirable or irreplaceable; it means it’s a real hassle to replace you, so the organization doesn’t want to. How do you make yourself indispensable as a sales professional? By removing barriers for other people so they can succeed and, in many cases, outproduce you. Your juniors should be outproducing you so they can move on and become seniors somewhere else.

John SmallMtn

Everyone says, “We have a culture of coachability,” but at the same time they’re watching who is going to be at the top of the leaderboard. You aren’t creating a culture of coachability where top performers are excited to share what’s working when glory only goes to the top person.

I want to jump into the tactile details. In sales, there are non-negotiables—chores like chopping wood and carrying water—that you can do no matter how crazy the situation is to find your path to success. As a leader, what are those core fundamentals and basic chores for new leaders to really get them to a place of mastery?

Jesan Sorrells

At a very tactile level, the basic chores include listening to your people. If you’ve been promoted into a leadership position, you have to understand that the position itself doesn’t mean anything—a title is just a title. What matters to the people around you is whether this person who has been promoted is actually going to come down and listen to them.

The best leaders do “listening tours” after they get promoted, shut up, take the advice, and go back to apply it.

John SmallMtn

A listening tour? I’ve never heard of this before.

Jesan Sorrells

A listening tour, yeah. Corporate executives in the C-suite talk about doing this, though they often do it badly. Ray Dalio talks about it a bit in his book, Principles.

John SmallMtn

Such a great book, man. Have you done that assessment? It’s a 100-question assessment that is absolutely free.

The book is so good on owning yourself, being self-aware, and doing the work. I imagine Ray Dalio was a neurotic head case when he first launched that business, and I’m sure he’s still rigid and hard to work with. But that book was so helpful to me because it showed me ways of leaning into how you need to do things for yourself without becoming a tyrannical idiot.

Jesan Sorrells

On my podcast, I was challenged by one of my guests to bring that book onto the show. I have a lot of dynamics around Principles and Dalio that have to do with who I am as a person, but it may be one of the books we bring to the podcast next year to do a deep dive. Maybe I’ll have you come on with that host and chop up the cheddar on that a bit.

The big thing is a listening tour: going around, listening, and applying what you’re hearing to the particulars of a situation. That’s a practical, tactical thing you can do as a new leader.

Another practical, tactical thing—which is always challenging for new leaders—is to go to those above you and start leading them.

John SmallMtn

Leading up the chain of command. Jocko Willink talks about that all the time in Extreme Ownership. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.

I talk about this with salespeople all the time because I know salespeople on teams led by managers who have never done the work and are looking at data points that don’t matter because they’ve never been tested. It’s just busywork. You aren’t going to get them to change by being the guy who won’t do the work. You have to get in there, prove you did the work, show the work, do your outreach, make your touches, keep great notes, and own your follow-up without relying on hope in your pipeline. But that’s a lot to manage and stay on top of.

Jesan Sorrells

It is. You know, the great creator of the Abrams tank once had a quote that I used to have in my emails: “When you’re going to eat an elephant, you do it one bite at a time.”

John SmallMtn

One bite at a time, yeah, for sure. Just keep chewing.

Jesan Sorrells

Just keep chewing, right? I think that one of the other things you have to do there—and this is getting into planning—is make a plan for how you’re going to lead.

A lot of people fall into leadership unintentionally. One day they’ll be a high performer. Things are going great, they’re rocking and rolling, and they’re meeting their numbers, goals, and metrics. Everybody’s happy. Then someone comes and says, “Hey, we’re promoting you. Congratulations, you’ve done enough.” They wake up the next day with zero plan for what to do. Fundamentally, that is a failure of the leaders above them to actually prepare them.

Even when they are prepared—we see this in financial services organizations where they’ll put people on a leadership development path—they use a lot of bromides and generalized ideas. When you walk into a very specific situation with a very specific set of people and a specific team that you now have to lead, those bromides and general ideas don’t work. The failure of regular coaching to help that person from day one onward is very real.

So, assume coaching is not going to be there. Assume that on day one of moving from “I’m a high-performance sales stud” to “Now I’m a leader of all these other studs,” you need to be making an intentional plan for how you’re going to go on a listening tour, how you’re going to engage in journaling, and how you’re going to find somebody you trust to say, “You’re going to help me out. I’m going to come to you for confession, and by the way, you can say anything to me about where my blind spots are, and I will not respond with ego-driven defensiveness.”

These are practical, tactical steps you can take on day one. Then the hard part comes—putting in the discipline to do those things every single day. By the way, I should have gone to the gym this morning, so I’m feeling bad myself.

John SmallMtn

On the opposite side of this, because I like to look at both sides of these things, what is something you see leaders doing—especially new or young leaders—that is not serving them, is not putting them on a path to hitting their goals, is a time-waster, or is a vanity metric that isn’t actually helping them improve? What do you see most as a recurring issue with new people?

Jesan Sorrells

This is probably an issue that’s always been around; it just manifests in different spaces. What I’m seeing with new leaders is a mighty scramble on social media for a tip that will solve everything.

John SmallMtn

A silver bullet.

Jesan Sorrells

And what I will say sometimes to new and old leaders alike—and I want folks to take this away: We don’t live in the world of Harry Potter, and the silver bullet store is closed, if it was ever open in the first place.

There’s no magic showing up from a social media influencer, a popular author, or even a book. We’ve named multiple books today that you can read. In the video of this, you’ll see a row of books behind me. I’ve read a lot of business books and classical literature. I’m moving more into reading classical literature, or just literature in general, to figure out business and leadership principles because I think it’s a better tool than yet another business book. That’s just my mileage; your mileage will vary. But you should have mileage, and that mileage should come in the form of at least a bookshelf in your office with some books on it. Social media, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram Reels will not save you.

John SmallMtn

Whoa, whoa, hold on. That’s not two easy things that are the only two things I need to be a high-performing leader? You want me to go buy books? Come on, who has time for books, right?

Jesan Sorrells

If you have no time for books, here’s what I tell people in coaching situations: Just watch one less Netflix show.

John SmallMtn

You and I are obviously on the micro-habit train, but I can’t tell you how many people I talk to in leadership roles whose last read book was Harry Potter when it was new. What inputs are you ingesting, if any at all? Or are you just coming locked and loaded thinking your stuff doesn’t stink? Because it does—we’ve already talked about that. It always astounds me when I meet someone claiming to be a really high performer and there’s no path, no books, and no knowledge—just “try hard” and loud opinions.

Jesan Sorrells

We’ve all seen the high-performing salesperson on Instagram Reels standing next to a Lambo with a beautiful person, talking about how they made $250,000 before you clicked on Instagram, and if you just give them $599, they’ll tell you how to do the same thing. All of that is trash.

John SmallMtn

That’s the title of this episode: “All of That Is Trash.”

Jesan Sorrells

It’s just garbage content and garbage advertising. There’s no value in any of that.

Where the value is going to be is in the old things. Let me give you a perfect example: On my desk currently, there are three books out of the five I have in rotation that I’m reading right now for business, leadership, and the podcast:

1. The Power of the Powerless by Václav Havel
2. City of God by St. Augustine of Hippo
3. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

The other two books are Extreme Ownership—which I just used for a training—and Good to Great by Jim Collins.

Three of those five (60% of them) are not traditional business books with a tip or a trick in them. Normally I have six to seven books hanging out on my desk in various stages of completion. When I go to the sales, marketing, leadership, and business section in Barnes & Noble, I can pick up a book and tell in a heartbeat if it’s flat and full of garbage. Even if it’s written by a celebrity or has 250 pages of nonsense with one good tip, I’m not going to wade through 250 pages of nonsense to get there.

That’s what reading does for you as a sales professional: When you seek out a resource, you develop an intuition based on the reps you’ve put in with books on whether or not the advice is good. Then when you see an Instagram Reel with the oiled-up guy and the Lambo, or when the cryptocurrency people were doing that years ago, it slides off you like water off a duck’s back. You won’t be influenced by it. Instead, you’ll go toward deeper things, become a better leader to the people in your real life who actually matter, and do a lot less posturing on LinkedIn. We all need less of that.

John SmallMtn

All right, man. I respect your time and want to make sure we make the most of it. A couple more rapid-fire questions, and then I can let you go about your day.

Of all the books we’ve talked about, if you’re a new leader and you’re going to recommend one book—not for the sake of it being a silver bullet, but something that will cause curiosity and a shift to get people on the path they need to be on—what is that book?

Jesan Sorrells

If I were going to recommend one traditional business book, I would recommend Linchpin by Seth Godin. That book set me on the path of entrepreneurship, but it also set me on the path of changing my mindset about leadership, what leaders are capable of, and where society, culture, and ideas were going. It has been hugely influential at the root of what I have done over time. That would probably be the seed book in the non-fiction space.

In the fiction space, I’m going to make a recommendation: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. I’ve read this book almost once a year since I was eight years old, so it’s part of my DNA at this point.

John SmallMtn

I’ve read a couple of Godin books, and they’ve never really done anything for me. I haven’t read Linchpin, but I’ll check it out since you speak so highly of it. I haven’t read any Hemingway in probably 20 years, so it might be time for me to dig back into that.

Jesan Sorrells

You might want to dig back into Hemingway. It’s a book that is deceptively simple on the surface, but what it reveals about the interactions between people is hugely important for how leaders can lead teams, look for the emotional flavor occurring inside their teams, and monitor interactions over time. People are not always what they seem on the surface, and a good leader looks for the things that are unseen as well as the things that are obvious.

John SmallMtn

I love that. Because I am a data-driven person, I have a question I’ve been trying to workshop. I do think data tells a story, though you need to know which data points to look at. From a hard data perspective, if you’re on a leadership path, are there data points really worth zeroing in on and paying attention to as guiding metrics?

Jesan Sorrells

The number of write-ups you’ve had to give people for things that should almost be immaterial.

John SmallMtn

Having to coach people on things you don’t think you should have to coach them on?

Jesan Sorrells

Not only coaching them on things you don’t think you should have to, but now you’re in the formalized performance evaluation system. That paperwork is working its way through the system, which creates a data point tracked across time.

What happens with a lot of leaders—whether in sales, operations, marketing, or finance—is that once you enter the formalized system that creates data points, you default to that every single time because it’s “easier” to file paperwork than to deal with the human being. That’s a strong metric indicating a leadership failure somewhere in your approach, in the person’s approach, or in the relationship between you and that person.

Look, it may be that you have to fire them, but sometimes leaders in various roles tell me, “Jesan, I’ve done absolutely everything, and now we’re in this performance evaluation process and it’s a write-up.” I ask them, “Did you really do everything? I mean, everything?”

John SmallMtn

That’s the Jocko Willink line, right? In one episode he talks about how to know when it’s time to let someone go. He says it’s when you can honestly tell yourself that you have given this person every opportunity imaginable, you can’t think of anything else at all, and when you go to bed that night, you feel, “We did everything we could; it just wasn’t a fit.” That’s when it’s time to let them go.

Most people want to let people go—and I’ve been this guy because I’m a bit of a problem child and don’t have a problem asking hard questions—because sometimes it’s just convenient to get the guy asking hard questions out of there.

Jesan Sorrells

Not only is it convenient, but I go a step further than Jocko: Have you done all of the things that make you uncomfortable as a leader with that person?

John SmallMtn

I have a guy in my DMs right now who is a marketer with a commission-only salesperson, which creates its own problems. You aren’t paying for basic time, attention, and focus, so why expect a high performer to take your calls?

Anyway, the salesperson isn’t performing, and the marketer is frustrated, saying, “I’m just going to get rid of him and bring someone else in.” I asked, “Cool, what’s going to be different next time?” I told him, “This would be different if you had the basics of the skillset under your belt. You would be able to coach, teach, and help this person understand where things are, but because you don’t have it, they have to be the problem.”

Every founder I talk to says, “Well, I’ve closed deals.” Okay, great. There’s a difference between parachuting into a call to wrap up redlines or provide clarity, and being the person doing it day in and day out—doing the follow-up, qualifying, and closing. Dropping in and saying, “Look how great I am,” doesn’t set you up for sales success.

Jesan Sorrells

That’s Leonardo DiCaprio playing Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street as a sales fantasy, kid.

John SmallMtn

Yeah, 1,000%. Even Belfort says he doesn’t do it that way anymore.

Jesan Sorrells

It’s a sales fantasy, and so is Glengarry Glen Ross, by the way. I had to drop those two in on you.

John SmallMtn

1,000%. I love David Mamet; I think he’s one of the best conversational dialogue writers on the planet, along with Aaron Sorkin, but that movie isn’t doing my industry any favors at all—”Always be closing,” “Coffee’s for closers,” “You’re fired until you earn your spot back.”

We want people to be high performers and give back to others on the team so they aren’t individual black boxes of revenue, but then we talk to people this way.

A friend of mine who sells boxes is actually my accountability partner. We’ve been meeting every other Friday for years. He calls me on my crap, I call him on his, and we know each other’s goals. He’s a field rep on commission only. He had some ramp-up time, but it transitioned to commission only, so it’s his book of business. He’ll show up with an order, and people will say, “Oh, must have been on the golf course all day,” just because he wasn’t in the office.

It’s the absurdity of that statement, because if you’re a salesperson who is only in the office when you’re supposed to be out in the field courting relationships, guess what? You get fired. Everyone else who has a short leash and no chaos in their life because they aren’t in sales has a problem with it. It’s a weird, skewed view of sales compared to everything else.

There are lots of good reasons to hate salespeople, but largely it comes down to unclear goals and the pressure to always be on, hustling, and closing everything. Then when you close something, the delivery team hates you for it because it wasn’t aligned and was a bad fit. It’s a room full of mixed signals.

Jesan Sorrells

Yes. At a higher level—and I’ve done a lot of work in organizational management and behavior—that is an organizational cultural problem.

It comes back to the idea of where the buck stops: Does the buck stop at the senior VP’s office, the CEO, or the board? When I used to teach organizational behavior and management in colleges and universities, we would look at case studies. Some of the most notorious case studies we looked at were from Wells Fargo.

Maybe it’s because I’m a person with strong ethics and understand how human beings behave around sales when pushed by a culture to do a particular thing without questioning it, but at a certain point, someone in the organization has to stand athwart the culture and say, “Stop,” in order to get something to change.

I can imagine this is very challenging for sales folks, because saying “stop” means the gravy train stops. That directly impacts your pocket, your mortgage, and the size of your plates.

Because of recent political, cultural, and societal events we’ve lived through collectively, people hiring today are hiring people living in 2024, not 1974. The people living in 2024 have lived through these events and are understanding where the “no” is and where the line is. Organizational cultures are going to have to shift around where the buck stops. It’s slowly happening—never fast enough, but I’m seeing little green shoots popping up everywhere. Future leaders are going to be the ones who stand up and say, “No, the buck stops with me.” The people on the other side of that are going to be left behind.

John SmallMtn

To that end, the takeaway is that philosophically you need to make your own decision about where the buck stops within your role. But how do you get people to adjust that lane if they need to? Because if it’s a blind spot, you’re trying to own everything and they say, “Hey, stay in your lane.”

I talk a lot about selling in the right lane for you: If you’re a technical and strategic person, you need to sell something technical and strategic with a long sales cycle. Putting that person on a used car lot to push people into cars isn’t going to work, and the reverse doesn’t work either. How do people do a better job of navigating those lines the right way? Should that be collaborative as part of the grooming and onboarding process, or is it something you have to figure out on your own and live with whatever happens?

Jesan Sorrells

I think it’s part of the grooming and onboarding process. It happens unintentionally during grooming and onboarding anyway; we just aren’t intentional or vocal about it.

When you first get hired into a role, there are the first three months of forming. Forming happens over the first 90 to 180 days of getting into a new role. Forming is when new individuals are most malleable. That’s when challenges around psychological safety and engagement begin to pop up.

It is also during that time that culture begins to grow. What happens is the veteran people—who have already normed, stormed, and are now in a tranche where the dysfunction or function is considered normal—inculcate new people into that norm. This happens alongside the work being done, sales being closed, and processes being taught.

Organizations tend to focus a lot on the nuts-and-bolts stuff and very little on the cultural, emotional, and psychological stuff occurring for individuals. Organizations are beginning to move more in that direction—we see some of this with DEI and ESG. I think those are ham-fisted efforts because you need a scalpel, not a hammer, to get this stuff done. But it has to occur intentionally during onboarding, grooming, and forming when someone first comes in.

As a consultant and coach, I’m a big fan of front-loading the hard work, because if you don’t, you wind up having problems in the back. But we have to define clearly what the hard work is. If we aren’t defining what the hard work is, what exactly are we front-loading? Are we front-loading paperwork, getting processes filled out, looking good to peers, or fitting into the culture? If you’re a sales professional, should you go out for drinks to form better bonds with your team? Maybe, maybe not. What is the important thing we’re front-loading?

John SmallMtn

You mentioned some books, so I’m going to throw one your way. Annie Duke has two books that are both very good: Thinking in Bets, and another one about quitting called Quit.

In Quit, she talks about the idea that when building a business, there’s always stuff you can do to procrastinate. She uses the story of Slack—how the founder was trying to build a game, realized it was a dead end, and pivoted to Slack. She uses a metaphor about teaching walruses to juggle while also needing to build a platform so people can see them. Building a platform is way easier than teaching a walrus to juggle. If you aren’t leaning into the hard part and instead tasking everyone to build platforms, eventually the platforms will be built, but you won’t have anything to put on them. Hearing it discussed that way blew my mind.

Coming from a poker background, I didn’t lean into those books when they first hit the scene, but they are really solid books. The idea of doing easy work to avoid the hard work—and even being aware that you’re avoiding it—is key. Avoidance is super easy when it comes to the core work, like one-on-ones and building relationships. Before you try to do anything fancy, you’ve got to chop wood and do the bare-minimum chores to do the job.

Jesan Sorrells

One of the massive problems in sales—and throughout our current society and culture—is that we expect instant fixes. The fixes are beginning to occur, but we didn’t wind up here in 10 minutes, so we aren’t going to get out of here in 10 minutes.

What we’ve talked about today may sound like pulling a lever on a slot machine—you put in a quarter, pull the lever, and all of a sudden you’re a ten-thousand-aire. That’s just another variation of the silver bullet idea. None of the things we’ve talked about today are silver bullets. A fellow consultant told me an idea that I’ve kept with me the entire time I’ve been an entrepreneur: “It will take you 10 years to be an overnight success.” It just will.

We have built such instant-gratification dopamine structures into our society that we say “10 years to be an overnight success,” but when it comes to taking 10 years to teach a walrus to juggle before building a platform, we think, “I’d rather just go build a platform or stand next to the guy who taught the walrus to juggle.”

As an amateur historian, I know history doesn’t rhyme, but it does echo. There are echoes in our current time of everything that has gone on in the past; this is nothing new. We will have people willing to put in those 10 years, but the drop-off between Year 1 and Year 2, Year 2 and Year 3, and Year 3 and Year 4 is the refining process.

Seth Godin wrote a book about quitting called The Dip, which has similar ideas to Annie Duke’s book. You have to realize that in becoming a better sales leader, there are going to be dips between years, and you have no idea where those dips are going to be.

John SmallMtn

1,000%. That leads to a story I tell others about you. In our first conversation, we were sharing our backgrounds, and you talked about starting over in a new martial art. After that first session, you were smoked and covered in sweat, and someone came by and said, “Hey, it’s okay,” thinking you were on the ledge. Your response was, “Hey, I’m fine. I’m just trying to figure out if I’m going to commit 10 years to being good at this or not.”

I had the same thing when I started over in my first Jiu-Jitsu class. Everyone said, “Hey man, we know it’s tough,” and I was like, “Yeah, I’m trying to figure out if this is the path I want to be on.” I’m not scared of the work—it was five years between tests at the farthest end of my martial arts journey. I’m fine sucking for a very long time, but I loved how you talked about that: “Here’s 10 years if I want.” You were adult and seasoned enough to put that into a realistic hierarchy with everything else in your life as a parent and entrepreneur. Now there are stakes to the decision-making.

I tell everyone who gets weirded out when I talk about martial arts: “If you aren’t trying, you aren’t getting to greatness.”

Dude, this was amazing. Thank you so much. We went long, which I assumed would happen with us, but it was an amazing conversation with so much really cool stuff. Where should people go to connect with you if they want to learn more about what you’re doing?

Jesan Sorrells

Thank you for having me on, John. You’ve been on my show a couple of times, and I wanted to repay the favor. I love the format and what you’re doing here; this is going to be fabulous. This is the walrus-juggling part, and I don’t know how to juggle, so it’s going to take me 10 years to be good at it!

If people want to get hold of me or track me down, all they have to do is go to leadershiptoolbox.us. That is my website. If you try other websites associated with my name, you’ll probably get a 404 error because we’re collapsing all my websites down into one hub. That main Leadership Toolbox website is up, so check me out there.

If you want to listen to the podcast, check out the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast on all major podcast platforms, including YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. We do long-form conversations around books you may have fallen asleep reading in high school. If you’re a sales professional, you should probably be reading Sense and Sensibility, and you’re going to need a guide for that. I’m willing to be your Sherpa, as are my guest co-hosts. Leave a five-star review if you like the show.

Finally, if you’d like to pick up a book that condenses some of the things John and I have talked about today, check out my book, 12 Rules for Leaders: The Foundation of Intentional Leadership, co-written with Bradley Madigan. You can get that on Amazon or anywhere else you buy books—just type my name into the search bar.

John SmallMtn

Thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it.

Jesan Sorrells

Absolutely. Thank you for having me on, and keep going forward with what you’re doing here. You’re doing a great thing.

John SmallMtn

Thank you, man. I appreciate it. Cheers.