The Doctor of Digital™ GMick Smith, PhD
Sep 3, 2026 · 42 min · 13 segments
Bill Lennan 🏆 I Help Leaders Improve Their Team’s Performance by 40 Percent within 24 weeks. Trainer, speaker, author. Talking With Strangers: A simple system to transform the socially anxious…
Bill LennanGuest
Mick SmithHost
What did your experience or experiences teach you about your own leadership that you hadn't understood before or earlier?

So one of the things was I assumed everybody knew what I knew, right? When I started off, I didn't think that my knowledge set, my experience set, my belief set, the skills that I had was different than anybody else because I didn't really have a way to compare and contrast.

One of my core beliefs is that my job is to make my team, first of all, as happy and second of all, as productive as possible.

And the guy that gave me my first promotion to run a team reiterated that to me, like explicitly said that out loud, right? So I was like, oh, not only is my hypothesis reasonable, but now I've got this directive from my boss.

What I've learned since then is that Almost nobody says that to a team leader, a team manager.

And I've interviewed now close to 100 executives who mostly think that the team lead's job is to make the people more effective, but they'll admit they almost never say it out loud.

But when I talk with team leads, they almost never understand that because no one's ever said it to them deliberately.

People don't talk about that in MBA programs, right? And so it's this hidden thing, right? That people just don't know about.

And so I got this, I had this mental model, right? Oh, I need to figure out how to have my people be happy.

Kind of the next layer on the belief structure is this is going to be emotionally challenging.

There's going to be stuff that I'm going to have to do to help my people out that is going to be scary.

Like I can't stop because I'm afraid because my job is taking care of my people.

And so as an example, when I started leading teams, I had really bad social anxiety.

And and I recognized, oh, this is going to have a. really negative impact on my ability to communicate with my team, I need to solve this problem.

And so I started working on how do I approach reversing my own social anxiety? And I ended up building myself a system that allowed me to get rid of my social anxiety, to become really good at persuading executives.

What did your experience or experiences teach you about your own leadership that you hadn't understood before or earlier?

So one of the things was I assumed everybody knew what I knew, right? When I started off, I didn't think that my knowledge set, my experience set, my belief set, the skills that I had was different than anybody else because I didn't really have a way to compare and contrast.

One of my core beliefs is that my job is to make my team, first of all, as happy and second of all, as productive as possible.

And the guy that gave me my first promotion to run a team reiterated that to me, like explicitly said that out loud, right? So I was like, oh, not only is my hypothesis reasonable, but now I've got this directive from my boss.

What I've learned since then is that Almost nobody says that to a team leader, a team manager.

And I've interviewed now close to 100 executives who mostly think that the team lead's job is to make the people more effective, but they'll admit they almost never say it out loud.

But when I talk with team leads, they almost never understand that because no one's ever said it to them deliberately.

People don't talk about that in MBA programs, right? And so it's this hidden thing, right? That people just don't know about.

And so I got this, I had this mental model, right? Oh, I need to figure out how to have my people be happy.

Kind of the next layer on the belief structure is this is going to be emotionally challenging.

There's going to be stuff that I'm going to have to do to help my people out that is going to be scary.

Like I can't stop because I'm afraid because my job is taking care of my people.

And so as an example, when I started leading teams, I had really bad social anxiety.

And and I recognized, oh, this is going to have a. really negative impact on my ability to communicate with my team, I need to solve this problem.

And so I started working on how do I approach reversing my own social anxiety? And I ended up building myself a system that allowed me to get rid of my social anxiety, to become really good at persuading executives.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.