Developing Human Capital Starts With Shift In Perspective - Robert Wagnon

Robert Wagnon is the founder, CEO, and Chairmen of Republic State Mortgage. Recently he’s become the scout master of a troupe of over seventy scouts and he’s found that watching the scouts go through their first leadership experiences has provided him a new lens through which to examine the role of leadership. In his Paper Napkin Wisdom, Robert shares an insight he feels it’s important that we as leaders keep in mind: “Most people are fighting a heroic battle we know nothing about.”

Check in with your team Robert says that we can sometimes get stuck on a bottom line goal, but it’s important to keep ourselves aware of our team members and check in with them. We need to seek to understand before we seek to be understood. There are a hundred books and a thousand lectures about getting the right people on the bus and putting them in the right seats, he says, but if we’ve done that then we have to be there to serve and support our teams. “Leadership is service to something other than yourself,” says Robert. He believes that if you’ve done your job as a leader to identify, recruit and retain remarkable people, it is then up to you to be there to support those people. We have to begin with the end goal in mind and operate on a life of significance. To do that, our first order of business is to check on those that we serve. If we remember that they are fighting a heroic battle in their minds and we make an effort to avoid contributing to the negative messages they’ve got, then we can serve them in the battle going on inside them. Robert makes parallels to our roles as leaders with that of a military leader. Like any good general, he says, our first mission is to care for our troupes. That is how we get to the goal we need. "To do material work," says Robert "we must be able to work through others," Checking on the goal itself first is a tactical mistake because the state of our team is vital in getting to that goal. We need to think of our life strategically.

"Missing a goal can be your failure, but it can't be people." We’re not perfect. There are times that we get caught up in our own battles and forget to be mindful of this but if we’ve done our job in recruiting remarkable people, we will find that we have teams with an enormous capacity for forgiveness, for change, and for accomplishing things. We need to remind ourselves to be guard our teams and to take care of them because that is vital to success. “Missing a goal can be your failure,” says Robert “but it can’t be people.” That’s not how you build a lasting model of growth. We can make mistakes and learn from them, but if your carnage is human capital, it just won’t work. Listen to my conversation with Robert here: