Summary: Dr. David Smith, the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/How-Successful-Teams-Work-High-Performance-ebook/dp/B07K428Z8J/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">How Successful Teams Work</a>, earned his PhD in organizational leadership and developed his own leadership program. In this episode, we talk about how in a lot of business settings, many managers and their employees sort of ignore the fact that one on one is where leadership magic really happens.<br> David is going to break down the science of effective leadership and how to build these great relationships that produce incredible results for your team. Whether you’re a team leader looking for better results or you’re a team member who is hoping to improve your work life, this is the episode for you.<br> <br> <br> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/How-Successful-Teams-Work-High-Performance-ebook/dp/B07K428Z8J/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"></a>Get David’s new book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/How-Successful-Teams-Work-High-Performance-ebook/dp/B07K428Z8J/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">How Successful Teams Work</a> on Amazon.<br> Find out more at <a href="http://LMXPro.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">LMXPro.com</a>.<br> <br> <br> David Smith: I’m 61 years old, got my PhD three years ago, started my PhD studies about eight years ago, which leads to our financial crisis. A large insurance company I was working for had major problems and management shifts all over the place, and I started thinking about my managers over my career. I had like three managers within six months, and all three were very different.<br> My position in the company is very low on the totem pole, highly compensated but in sales, you get highly compensated with no managerial authority whatsoever. With the financial crisis, it turns out I had a little more time on my hands, so I started taking my PhD classes for the heck of it.<br> I started thinking about why are my bosses different? I looked back 32 years previously and they were all different. It had actually make me think about leaving my company, and so forth. That’s really the essence of it, is curiosity into the science behind that leadership. What was the difference? Why were people different?<br> I didn’t have the academic background to understand it.<br> I certainly am smart enough to figure out they were different and how they were different, but why? What was the difference in them that affected the difference in me and affected my job performance?<br> <br> Charlie Hoehn: What did you find? What was the secret to their successful team work creating abilities?<br> David Smith: That is a great question. It actually took about probably four years into my studies, and this was graduate school where you don’t have – as a distance learning, North Central University out of San Diego, which is not distance to me but still, I didn’t meet in classes and didn’t have professors. We had mentors that were PhDs.<br> I just basically did a lot of reading. You read all the curvy books, the academic books, the textbooks, papers, and you write papers. So you read and write, and it was about four years of this back and forth of reading information, learning information, distilling it that I finally came across this academic theory called leader-member exchange.<br> It’s been around a long time, and it’s been studied by social scientists quite a lot.<br> It just said, “here is what you’ve been looking for. Now, you need to study it in depth and understand it.” That’s where I got to after about four years of my studies.<br> The Leader-Member Exchange<br> Charlie Hoehn: Tell me about leader-member exchange. I feel like I might be able to guess the definition but then again, I’ve never heard this phrase. So break it down for me.<br> David Smith: That’s the challenge. Actually, it’s an incredibly important point to understand that it is called leader-member exchange ...
