Adam Torres and Sara Sabin discuss building teams.
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Show Notes:
What does it take to build highly effective teams? In this episode, Adam Torres and Sara Sabin, CEO at Sara Sabin Executive Coaching, explore leadership and building high performing teams.
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About Sara Sabin
Welcome to Sara Sabin’s world. She did everything you are supposed to do. She studied a law degree in two countries (King’s College London and the Sorbonne), trained in tax accounting at Mazars and worked with high net worth families at a multi-family office. But something was not right. The shine had well and truly been lost for her. The dissatisfied voice that she kept pushing down got louder and louder. She knew just changing companies wouldn’t cut it. Still, it took two years for her to prepare and make a big change. At the end of 2015, after 10 years, she left the corporate world for good to begin a new career journey as an entrepreneur. Her family was horrified, but she soldiered on.
Before she started my coaching business, she founded two start-ups. Let her be clear, being an entrepreneur is not easy. All those glamorous Hollywood movies? Forget about it. Entrepreneurship can be a journey through depression, anxiety, stress and emotional rollercoasters. Nothing will test your grit, patience and resilience quite like being an entrepreneur. And tested she most certainly was, but it doesn’t have to be like that!
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of mission matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today’s guest is Sarah Sabin and she is CEO over at Sarah Sabin executive coaching.
Sarah, welcome to the show. Hi Adam. It’s a pleasure to be here. All right, Sarah, so we have kinds of great things to talk about today. So we’re gonna talk about how to build optimal leadership teams. There’s lots of business owners, entrepreneurs, executives, leaders that watch this program and I, I know they’re excited to get your take on this as I am as well.
But to start this episode, we will start the way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters minute. So Sarah, we at Mission Matters, we amplify stories for entrepreneurs, business owners, and executives. That’s what we do. Sarah, what mission matters to you? So at Sarah Sobin Executive Coaching, we create exceptional leaders.
Who run thriving, profitable companies and create a really positive impact on their employees, their customers, and the world at large. It’s great. Love bringing mission based individuals on the line to share why they do what they do, how they’re doing, and really what we all learned from that. So we grow together.
So great, great stuff there. I guess just to get us kicked off here, how did you get obsessed with this concept of leadership and starting to, and developing leaders and like, where’d all that begin for you? So all of that began Well back in my corporate career. I was leading a team within a multi family office.
So we were Looking after the portfolios of high net worth individuals and families But where it really went to the next level was during my entrepreneurial journey. So I left the corporate world back in, I think it was the end of 2015 now, lose track of time. I’ve co founded one startup. I’ve founded another startup.
I was leading teams there and, you know, I’ve made a lot of mistakes around leadership myself. So, you know, Haven’t we all haven’t we all anyone that says they haven’t not being entirely honest. There you go. Go ahead. So I personally found it difficult to emotionally regulate at work. And I don’t mean that I was crying all the time while leading teams.
What I mean is That when I was triggered by a particular behavior Or someone not doing something in the right way or to a high enough level My default response would be anger Now that is ultimately destructive not constructive so to fast forward in my journey How I came to be doing what i’m doing today You When I walked away from my second startup, I actually discovered transformational coaching for myself.
And it was so life changing for me that I knew that I wanted to Build a business around doing that. And it became was that like a, was that like an epiphany? Like one of these moments, did it strike you? Was it a buildup? Like, how did that part happen? I was interested in like what that spark was. So essentially I was on a break at the time that I discovered transformational coaching.
So I said to myself, I’m not going to found anything else for a period of two months. This is going to be a reflective period for me. I’m quite honest. I did not know what I was going to do next, but I knew that what I would do next would be something that was purposeful and meaningful to me and having experienced transformational coaching for myself and.
Come across some truly exceptional coaches. It was literally a download. This is what I want to do. This is the work that I want to do. This is the business that I want to do. Being a pragmatic person, I went out to do proof of concept. So I wanted to answer three questions. Am I good at doing this? Do I love doing this?
Can I make money doing this? Because obviously it’s not a business if you’re not making money doing it. And I answered yes to those three questions relatively quickly. And then off I went because I take action and I just get on with things. That was actually Adam nearly five years ago now that occurred. And you know, my first year I was experimenting, seeing what type of people that I really loved to work with. And then I niched into executive coaching. So working with leaders of companies and their teams. What what drew you to pick that particular niche? Like what drew you to that piece? Because obviously you were you were exploring.
So again, I am someone that follows my intuition. And I’m happy to explain all the neuroscience But behind intuition, it’s not just a sort of we were a concept, but it was something that I felt pulled towards doing again. I experimented with that. Okay, let’s work with leaders and let’s see if this really appeals to me.
And it did. And the reason why it does is because I love working with high performers. Because they, you know, they don’t need me, right? Their life is not going to fall apart if I’m not in it, but they want to get better and better and better. They understand that their ability to up level is going to have an impact on how they lead other people, how successful their team is, how successful the company is.
As you were on this journey of obviously during this process, you’ve become a better leader yourself, like, especially now that you’re teaching, helping others do it. Like, is there anything that kind of surprised you? Like, along the way where you’re like, huh, and especially now that you’re looking back, you know, five years in, like, and I mean, specifically about the concept of leadership, not about your business.
I mean, like the concept of leadership. Is there anything that, that surprised you? Where do I start? Everything surprises me all the time. So, there’s a few things that I’ve noticed about people and their perceptions of leadership, right? So, People see leaders as being a certain way But if you talk to a group of people and i’ve literally asked hundreds of people this question What does leadership mean to you?
There you go You get similar themes but everyone has a slightly different answer to that question And I think we get fed, ideas and programming etc around what a leader is Supposed to be, but it’s essentially about you. Mm-Hmm. . Leveraging your strengths, your talents, and also being able to work together with other people in a team to meet a, an outcome objective, A North star, whatever you wanna call it.
Yeah. So if I was to boil it down into one sentence. Leaders lead people and vision because those two aspects are really important to leadership and go beyond just managing which is Kind of managing tasks and managing resources Let’s let’s stick on that team concept a little bit further and what it what it takes to either model behavior or like what it takes to build an effective team.
Let’s go further down that one. Okay, so i’m gonna keep it simple, but I don’t know if you’ve heard of the expression kiss. Come on kiss I’m all about the kiss I’m gonna do that. So number one You and I’m going to go through five points and these points are interlinked into each other. But point number one, diversity of skills, archetypes, and personalities.
So it’s ultimately unhelpful to have a group of people Where there’s groupthink. Everyone thinks in the same way because everyone’s from the same background, has the same personality, has the same archetype. What you want is challenge and different perspectives on the team. So, to go through some of the archetypes, and when I talk about archetypes, these are leadership.
Yeah, that exists or should exist within the team. You’ve got the visionary slash strategist person. You’ve got the executor slash processor. You’ve got the people person who is the coach that knows how to get the best out of other people. You’ve got the strong communicator and you’ve got the resilient one.
That’s like when everything hits the fan, they’re like, right, here’s what we’re going to do. I turn everything around. So problems exist where there’s too much of one or two particular archetypes, but it’s not like spread between all of them. So if you have a group of visionaries, right, everyone will sit around postulating about visions and ideas, but nothing will get done.
If you have visionaries and executors, but no one on the team can communicate very well, and no one is very good with other people, that’s a problem as well, because obviously, You need people that can communicate and convey your message and you need people that can set up the structures that enable high performance in teams, which is about creating a coaching culture.
Hmm. When you’re hiring people and when you’re assessing gaps, you need to be really intentional about what it is that you need on the team because you’re hiring people with different strengths, you’re filling any gaps that exist, and you know, you should know the purpose of everyone that sits on that leadership team.
And that is because A team is always going to be a strong team. It is always going to be stronger than an individual. So the, the sum of the parts. The strength of the whole should have no gaps in it. That makes sense. It does. And when somebody is planning for this, interested in this piece, like I guess the first thing is they have to kind of understand all these archetypes.
So they have to first understand how they all intertwine and they, they, they work together. Yeah. Well, yes, it starts with self awareness, right? So you, so you need to know what already exists so you can assess what’s missing. And I. I think it’s really important for everyone within the team to have awareness around collectively what their strengths are and where they sit within those archetypes.
Because we all tend to be stronger in one or two of them and not so strong in others of them. So like emotional intelligence in general, the very foundation of it is self awareness. But, you know, I think it’s also important to say, and this is kind of my second point here, that although you should have diversity so that you don’t have groupthink, you need a group of people that have the same value set and direction.
So the way I phrase it is you can disagree on the how, but not the what, right? So it needs to be aligned on the what. The what being the direction and these are our values. So for example, if one of the company values is integrity, but one of the people on the leadership team is, I do whatever, I don’t care if it’s ethical or unethical, I don’t care.
Yeah, it’s going to be tricky. So you want a group of people that like, right. Okay. I agree with direction. I agree with these values. You can disagree on the how, and that’s why you have people with different skillsets because you have different takes on way to get to the what, right? So you hire experts that know the how that will help you to get there.
Hmm. So the third thing I want to bring up as well is. And again, this comes into self awareness. You need to understand your own communications style. Style. And it’s been a long day eating my words at this point. So you need to understand your own communication style, but also other people on the team’s communication styles as well.
So you need to understand how each person likes to be communicated with. Because if you don’t understand yourself and you don’t understand the other people on the team, that’s where miscommunications happen. And as everyone listening, I mean, I don’t think it will be a surprise for me to say effective communication is hugely important in team dynamics. So when you know more about how you will function and operate, you can play to that because that creates an environment of trust because You’re receiving messages in a way that you get right rather than someone talking at you and it completely going over your head so it creates trust and it creates more open communication and when you have that linked into my point number four you are more able to encourage challenge within the team constructive challenge and having tough conversations constructively And as a sideline to this point, literally, I cannot reiterate enough the destructive nature of either avoiding tough conversations or having them in a really adversarial, aggressive way.
I’ve literally seen it nearly lead to the bankruptcy of a company. Because the leadership team couldn’t communicate with each other without it descending into some kind of altercation. That’s a tough environment for everyone. Like, that’s not, you know. Yeah, I mean, and You know, when it gets to that stage, yeah, basically everyone starts acting selfishly, right?
They, they start acting in their own interest, not in the company. You’re defensive. It’s natural. We’re humans, right? You’re defensive. If you feel you’re being attacked at some point, you got to go on the defense, right? Yeah, exactly. And it doesn’t necessarily lead to moving forward. It leads to bankruptcy.
Exactly what you just said or potential. Yeah. Like it’s does not lead to moving forward. That’s the key point because everyone’s in this hyper emotional state. And a hyper emotional state is not conducive to rational problem solving or solution focused conversations. So in order to have these kind of conversations constructively, You need to have that effective communication in place and you need to have that environment of trust and then the last point I want to make today, which is around each person taking responsibility for modeling behaviors so, An analogy I like to use is for example, you’re a smoker and you say to your kids Hey, you shouldn’t smoke.
It’s really bad for your health, but your kid is like, well, you’re smoking. So it can’t be that bad. And that’s the classic do as I say, not as I do. Now as a leader, if you’re telling other people what they should do. You need to model that behavior. Otherwise you’re sending out a conflicting message and that conflicting message ultimately boils down to actually this behavior is okay because the guy at the top is doing it, which is obviously not the kind of thing that you want to promulgate.
Throughout an organization, if you’re trying to encourage positive behaviors and you know, a story I’d like to share around that is around, this was a few years ago. Now I was having a conversation with a managing partner of a big accounting firm. And he was talking about one of the really high earning partners.
Within the organization. Now, obviously that partner was making the firm a lot of money. However, he was very toxic in a work environment to his team, to those around him, so he was creating a lot of problems. Now they decided to get him coaching. He didn’t change his behaviors and they actually ended up firing him.
Wow. Now, the reason behind that is because if you allow. toxic behavior that is counter to the values to go unchecked. A, you de legitimize the values and B, you say to people, this behavior is okay, as long as you’re making a lot of money. Yeah. So it’s really important. Again, this is an example of modeling behaviors.
Because your modeling behavior of we stick to our values, we stick to the kind of principles that we’ve set for ourselves as a, as a firm. Hmm. And so as you’re working with leaders on this and, and they’re going through and they’re going through your process, I mean, one of the main things that I feel that why somebody goes through this wanting to become better leader as well as to achieve more.
Like, how does this. Work into achievement and to like, into like leading high performing teams. Like give us a little bit more on that. Well, essentially, you know, there’s two parts to being a leader. Leaders have functions, right? If you’re a COO, you’re responsible for operations. If you’re a CTO, you’re, you’re responsible for technology, et cetera, et cetera.
But essentially what you’re really responsible for is. people. And that can sometimes be the element that’s missing or, and I will preface this with some people really have a natural talent for it. So I’ve had clients that intuitively. understand how to get the best out of people, but still you can always develop that further.
And those where that skill was underdeveloped, because it just hadn’t been worked on enough. Essentially, development is the constant thing. If you’re thinking about your area of specialty, let’s say, let’s go back to the CTO example. You’re going to keep up with the latest developments in the technology space.
Otherwise, at some point you’ll become irrelevant. So why wouldn’t that not apply to keeping up with the Latest trends in the leadership space as things become more volatile as things become more uncertain as the younger generations go through the workplace. Yeah. Essentially doing what you’ve always done.
Maybe it did work once, maybe it didn’t, but there could be new and better ways of doing things that you haven’t necessarily taken the time to reflect on or access. So, if you do that, the more you develop, the more likely you are to be successful in any area of life. And if you are stopping developing, you’re essentially stopping progress.
Yeah, I am as I’m as I’m sitting here thinking about like leadership and and like how people want to become like better leaders. I feel like even in the example you said, where maybe the gentleman wasn’t the best fit for the culture or otherwise. And you know, they ultimately had to let him go. I feel like people want to Like some maybe I’m wrong.
You tell me you’ve been doing this for, you know, many years and you’ve worked with many people. We all want to become better leaders, right? Like it’s no, not that anybody wants to do a bad job. It’s just sometimes we’re, we, we have to upscale. We have to get better. We have to look for new resources, new tools, new ways to think about leadership and then, and figure out how to make ourselves, it’s kind of like this internal struggle of what we do well complimented and get better at other parts as well.
Like, am I off on any of that? Like, people want to be good leaders, right? I’m actually going to start with that. Where am I off? I could be off. You tell me. I could be off. That’s just my, my thought process. But you’re in the trenches, so I don’t know. So, a lot of people want to want to. They want, oh, that’s good.
They want to want to. Okay, thank you. Go ahead, please. So, let me put that into an analogy. I love analogies, as you may have gathered. So let’s say you want to in inverted commas lose weight, right? But actually you’re not really doing anything to lose weight. Oh, that’s good McDonald’s and you’re not really moving you have a sedentary lifestyle and you’re eating a load of Bread like all the time, but you if someone said to you, do you want to lose weight?
You’d be like, well, of course I want to lose weight Right, so that’s the want to want to right because when you really want to you put in the work Yeah, you eat well You exercise, you, I don’t know, whatever, whatever. Do what you need to do. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that’s interesting. So it’s so it’s your actions, your actions are going to show, right?
Like what you’re doing. Exactly. And that’s what you’re doing. That comes actually back to modeling behaviors. It’s all very well to say you should do this, but actually we’re not actually doing the actions that demonstrate that it’s just a load of words. That’s great. Sarah this is, well, this has been a lot of fun.
I mean, I’ve learned a lot, learned a lot about your process and learned a lot about your thought process on, on, on leadership in general, what it takes to build highly effective and performing teams. I know there’s so much more you have to give and to offer. So first off, what’s next? I mean, what’s next for you?
What’s next for your company? Like, like what’s next? Well, actually I was saying, I was saying before this interview started that my next career move would be a singer, but that is a joke because I am terrible at singing. Okay. No. In all seriousness I intend to carry on doing what i’m doing.
Yeah, I love what i’m doing. I love working with leaders I love Guiding them through transformation and change and seeing the impact that has on their team their company their profitability so, my plans for the future are to Also personally develop myself and also grow my company as well It’s amazing.
It’s great. Well, and how do people, how do people connect with you? How do they follow up? How do they learn if they’re interested in following your journey or inquiring as well about executive coaching or otherwise, how do people connect? So I’m very active on LinkedIn under the name Sarah Caroline Sabin, and my website address is Sarah Sabin dot com.
Perfect. And for everybody watching, just so you know, we’ll put the links and all that good stuff in the show notes that you can just click on them and head right on over. And speaking of everybody watching or listening to this, if this is your first time with mission matters, this is a daily show each and every day.
We’re bringing you new entrepreneurs. New thought leaders, new messages, new missions. If that sounds interesting to you, definitely hit the subscribe or follow button, like make sure that you’re getting the notification so that you can get that reminder each and every day when we bring a new thought leader on for you.
And Sarah, thank you so much. This has been so much fun and I want. To become a better leader. You have been inspiring in this. And for those that are out there that want to want, I’m not even going to do how many wants that. Re listen to this and let’s all become better leaders. So thank you again, Sarah, for coming on.
This has been so much fun. Thank you for having me, Adam. It’s been a really wonderful to chat with you.