The Selfless CMO: Embracing Servant Leadership

Revenue Rehab

This week our host Brandi Starr is joined by Kurt Uhlir, Chief Marketing Officer at Ethereal Innovations.

Kurt is a sought-after marketing leader that's been called "king of scaling". He has built and run growth for early-stage companies as well as those over $500M in annual revenue and assembled teams across six continents.

In the past few years, he's been an executive with a public company and coached dozens of mid-market companies, in addition to giving numerous keynotes and podcast guest appearances about growing companies of all sizes with high-achieving servant leadership and modern marketing.

In this episode of Revenue Rehab, Brandi and Kurt will tackle exploring how marketing leaders can adopt servant leadership to enhance team performance, foster innovation, and drive meaningful customer engagement.

Bullet Points of Key Topics + Chapter Markers:

Topic #1 Defining Leadership Styles [05:02] “There are only two styles of leadership,” Kurt explains, “there's an authoritative leadership style, which at the end of the day says, ‘Hey, do what I say exactly how I say to do it, or there's the door, you're fired’. And then there's a servant leadership approach, which is a very different approach that says, ‘Hey, I've hired you for a business reason to help the company hit business outcomes. And my job then is not to tell you exactly what to do…it's to serve you to help you better accomplish the outcomes the company has hired you to do.”

Topic #2 Assessing Your Leadership Approach [13:35] “I think that part of that is a self-assessment,” Kurt says, “taking 15 to 20 minutes, once a once a week.”. The reality, he says, is that “the vast majority of executives I’ve worked with, they don't think that they're an authoritative boss.” He continues “and if you talk to their team, they're like, ‘she is so nice’. But if you underlie this nice personality, they're still the authoritative boss, they just don't realize it. They think because they're nice and they ask how the weekend went, that they're not an authoritative boss. That's not what servant leadership is, servant leadership is coming in every day and saying, ‘hey, I want to see you to be successful in your job. How can I make that better?’”

Topic #3 Reflecting on Decisions [28:34] Kurt encourages listeners to consider including a decision self-assessment habit to help them to lean into developing service style leadership. He suggests identifying three potential mistakes or missteps taken in the past, recognizing that wrong decisions often feel right until proven otherwise by resulting data. Additionally, he suggests that team participation in this exercise can foster open communication and potential blind spots.

So, What's the One Thing You Can Do Today?

Kurt’s ‘One Thing’ is to evaluate where you are in your leadership style. Take a vacation, Kurt quips, and that will reveal the answer to the question “are you a servant leader, or are you an authoritative leader? What do you think would happen to your team, if you just didn't show up to work for the next four weeks? If you're not confident that you're sure that the people reporting to you could make enough decisions to keep things at least pretty much status…you're an authoritative leader.”

Buzzword Banishment:

Kurt’s Buzzword to Banish is ‘AI’. “I'm actually really sick of hearing artificial intelligence or AI right now, especially from people that have no idea what it actually means.”

Links:

Get in touch with Kurt Uhlir:

• LinkedIn
• Kurt Uhlir
• Twitter
• Instagram
• YouTube
• Pinterest
• TikTok
• Amazon

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