Leadership Lessons from a Record-Breaking Month! (Challenge #79)

Confession time--I’ve been hitting reload a lot on my podcast host’s website this morning. Right when I got up, after my workout, before I logged in at the office, and during my coffee break. Then…it happened. With 14 hours to spare, July 2023 became the first 1000 download month of the Kind Leadership Challenge. This is by far the best performing podcast not related to a 60s boy band that I’ve ever been involved with, and I want to share the kind leadership lessons I learned along the way.

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Welcome to the Kind Leadership Challenge, where every Monday morning I teach you to heal your school or library in the next ten minutes! I’m Dr. Sarah Clark, founder of the Kind Leadership Guild, where I use my PhD in Higher ed leadership and nearly 2 decades of experience in academic libraries to advise educational and library leaders who want to build a better world without burning out. 

Kind leaders make the tough decisions without becoming jerks. We create effective systems that help us get the job done with less money and effort. And we’ve learned that once we stop controlling and start collaborating, any vision becomes possible. To be clear, Kind Leadership’s pretty simple, but it’s rarely easy. So if you’re up for a challenge, stick around to learn how to create a legacy that will strengthen your community long after you’re gone.

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So after doing a little happy dance, I began to ponder. How did the Kind Leadership Challenge grow from a best-kept-secret to a less-best-kept secret, and were there any takeaways for my listeners? I mean, I suspect most of you don’t have podcasts, but most of you probably are working toward ambitious long term goals that seem a bit intimidating, if not impossible. Then it struck me that the process I used to grow the kind leadership actually followed the three skills of kind leadership—growing humanely, managing effectively, and creating collaboratively.

Growing humanely, as regular listeners know, is the skill of connecting with yourself and your core values, so you can decide on goals that will get you closer to your vision of a better world. And if I may speak frankly, it’s surprisingly hard to stay connected to your own voice and values as a podcaster! As I started thinking about launching the kind leadership challenge, I kept running into expert after expert, each with a different tip or tactic for growing your podcast. So I listened and researched, and asked myself how I felt about the whole thing. At which point I decided to ignore about 80% of that advice. One of the core values I gained from the experiences described in episode zero that inspired the kind leadership guild, and by extension the kind leadership challenge, was that I WOULD NEVER LET MYSELF BURN OUT AGAIN. 

So I needed to design a podcast that would be sustainable with my work, my trial-and-mostly-error attempts to build a part-time coaching business, and the rest of my life. But another value I’d learned from those days, as well as similar struggles in my life, is that connection with others is how we heal—as people, as organizations, and as communities.  So, I decided on my goal. My podcast would share the lessons I’ve learned from theories, research and most importantly the daily practice of leadership, so that other leaders can make batter choices with both the confidence gained from my experience and the comfort they’re not alone in their struggles. And I would do it in a way that also allowed me to build a better world without burning out.

OK, so the kind leadership skill of growing humanely helped me decide what to do. But how would I actually do it? that’s where the skill of managing effectively would come in. So that meant using the knowledge I’d gathered and the resources at my disposal to create a show and a marketing plan that would empower me to find the maximum number of kind leaders with the minimum amount of time. I picked a few new ideas from podcast thinkers, but I mostly drew on the almost-a-decade I’d spent as a podcaster, and the even longer time I’d spent doing library instruction and reference. I knew well what kinds of podcast formats were fast to record and edit, and which were time sucks. I knew that my years of teaching and public speaking had made me a pretty good solo podcaster, especially if I had an outline, or even better for SEO, a script. As for resources, I have a lot less time than your average 20-something hustle-hard wannabe influencer. But I did have a little seed money that I could strategically throw at a bit of training in marketing, as well as few time-saving apps and services like a social media scheduler, and later a podcast editing service. So by understanding what I had and didn’t have, I was able to create a plan that would make it more likely that the kind leadership challenge would achieve the goals I had decided.

Of course, the kind leadership challenge can only empower leaders to build a better world if those leaders listen to it, learn from it, implement it, and tell their colleagues! And that leads us into the third kind leadership skill of creating collaboratively, That requires building a culture among your team that fosters your goals, recruiting stakeholders to help you scale your impact, and working together to enlarge your goals and plans into a collective vision for the change your community wishes to see your library or school make in the world. Now, as a solo podcaster, I don’t lead a team. But I did have some prior clients from some small group programs I ran during the early part of the pandemic. They, as well as volunteers from the kind leadership challenge Facebook group, became my beta listeners and gave me feedback to refine the show. Then I launched the podcast, and set out to spread the word. 
 
 I had a decent following on Facebook, but it wasn’t really growing. Then, with the advice of a fellow leadership blogger, I tried LinkedIn, with much more success in finding new followers. My downloads grew slowly but mostly-surely, which inspired me to keep putting out shows and refine my work, which led to more listeners, and the virtuous cycle continued. I began to learn what topics you care about and which episodes make you hit skip. I asked questions on the socials and you answered. I played with polls, experimented with livestreams, tried a few different coaching formats, and kept refining the vision for the kind leadership challenge and king leadership guild with your feedback. And as reassuring as my download record this month has been, I feel like I’m on the verge of understanding how I can best build a community of practice where we can all teach each other how to build the schools and libraries our broken world needs.  And that’s how a tiny little show about the seemingly oxymoronic concept of kind leadership broke a podcast record I never really expected to hit. Give it a shot with your next project—you might be surprised too.      

Now, here’s your challenge for this week, as I challenge myself to get a little more assertive about asking for help to grow this movement. If you have ever found an episode of this show useful, and especially if you’re one of the many people who has been binging my entire back catalog lately, tell a friend and send them a link to the show.—kindleadershipchallenge.com/79, or another favorite episode. And if you want them to get a truly warm welcome, either message me on LinkedIn or email me at sarah@kindleadershipguild.com to tell me who you told, so I can welcome them aboard. It took me 78 episodes to get to 1000 downloads in a month, and I’d like my first 2000 download month to come a lot faster. That’s not because of ego (or at least mostly not because of ego), but because that download stat is a hard figure that proves that you find kind leadership as useful as I hoped you would. My hope is that these ten minute weekly lessons gives you new skills and mindsets around your leadership practice so that you can more efficiently and effectively fulfill your vision for yourself, your organization, and the world around you. And if they do, the best thing you can do to build a better world is to share it with a colleague.

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Thanks as always for listening to the kind leadership challenge, and for growing humanely, managing effectively, and creating collaboratively in your own organization. Never doubt that day by day, you’re building a better world, even if you can't see it yet. So until next time, stay kind now.