Energizing Each Other To Own Their Work With Julia Fabris McBride

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I had the pleasure of interviewing Julia Fabris McBride, author of When Everyone Leads. She helps us redefine leadership and apply the concepts she teaches in her books to our work so that we can become better leaders and grow our book of business, relationships, and selves.

Mo prompted Julia by asking her to share a transformational story she has to share:

Julia responded:

“My favorite transformational story, and it’s a quick snapshot, is that when we worked with a big manufacturing company, one of their biggest issues was silos, particularly silos between the engineering and manufacturing buildings.

They knew that in order to stay competitive and reach the kinds of goals they had, they needed to break down those silos. You cannot direct or legislate breaking down silos. It really takes everybody saying, “What’s my part of this mess, and what bigger things can I do?”

After working with them over the course of a year. They came to us, and said, “You know what, we are meeting in the middle now.” They have a huge campus. A mile across. Engineering on one side and manufacturing on the other. They were literally going to meet in the middle.

Before, it was a game of push-pull, who was going to who. It wasn’t dictated. It happened through a small series of people owning the work.”

Mo responded:

“I love it. To your point in the book, too, the biggest problems are the ones that require multiple people, multiple disciplines, multiple geographies, and multiple perspectives, and you can tell, through that story, that all of that happened on the back end. Results were better because of what happened on that back end with everybody working together.”

Julia responded:

“You know, Mo, you mentioned your team. I think one of the things that’s really important that we talk about in the book is the idea that, particularly for people in authority positions, you can make leadership less risky for others.

So, in other words, you can go about leadership as an activity, and the idea that you encourage people to ask curious questions, and that you encourage people to make interpretations about their own part of the mess, but also what’s going on in the system that’s maybe getting in the way of achieving our big goals.

You can encourage people to experiment. If some of those experiments fail, you actually hold them up as shiny examples or what it looks like and the kind of risks that are necessary to actually see and solve these big challenges”

Dive deeper into the conversation with Julia Fabris McBride, here.

It’s so important for people to understand that leadership is not a position; it’s an activity, and it’s available to anyone. In order to grow an organization, the people have to grow. Becoming a leader and taking ownership of your work is the best way to grow.

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Thanks for reading!

-Mo