Transcript from Lead With Impact: Episode 1.

I spent the last 10 years teaching corporate America leadership and teamwork. Now I’ve left my nine to five job to help as many people as possible become leaders in their work and personal lives. Some say that leaders are born, but I say they’re built. This podcast is the beginning of my mission to create change on a massive scale. Join me and follow along as we explore leadership, teamwork, and growth together. My name is Brian Rollo, and this is Lead With Impact.

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Lead With Impact. My name is Brian Rollo and I am so excited to have you here on the very first episode of this podcast. So, for our first episode, I wanted to tell you a little bit about who I am, why we’re doing this podcast called Lead With Impact, and what the goal is.

Really the intention of this podcast is to help people with leadership in the workplace. Leadership to help people gain respect, gain, influence, to be able to produce results through leadership. To lead teams to produce more and more.

And not only the end results of production, but making the workplace a better experience for everybody involved in it. Both for you and the people on your team. When you put solid leadership principles into practice, good things happen, both for you and the people that are with you. Because they become engaged and it becomes a win win. And when you follow that formula, results show, production starts to go up, sales go up, everything goes up. Attrition goes down, everybody becomes happier when you follow the principles of leadership and teamwork.

The problem is, these things have become over complicated. There’s so much different advice. It can become difficult to know what to implement, and it can become a bit overwhelming. And no matter how many books you read, sometimes it is hard to apply that to real life situations. So I’m going to tell you a little bit about my life story and we can talk about some of the situations I’ve been through and why I think this podcast can be really beneficial for you. If you are interested at all in building your leadership skills, we can grow together on this journey. So that’s my goal.

Let me tell you a little bit about myself and how I got to this point in time. So I grew up the oldest of three children in a little suburb, not too too far outside of New York City in upstate New York. So not quite in the city, but enough to be there once in a while. But really more of a suburban white picket fence neighborhood that many of us probably are familiar with.

That was my upbringing and, you know, I never really knew exactly what I wanted to be. It was always sort of up in the air. And even when it became time for me to land my first real job and to sort of get serious about this, I still didn’t know.

Through some stroke of good fortune, I had a friend who worked in the financial services industry. She was a teller there. Now, to me at this point, I thought being a teller at a bank was probably the coolest thing you could ever dream for. And so she recommended me to get a job there.

Now I didn’t get the job as a teller. I got a job doing some data entry and I was thrilled to have it. It was my first time really working in a real job, where you put on work clothes. And I just thought it was the coolest thing ever for a little while.

And then I realized that if I was going to advance and have a real career, I needed to explore ways to grow myself. So my journey took me from that initial part time job to a full time job at this bank. And I became, of all things a repo man. That was a position that was a promotion for me. So I became the repo man for the bank.

Now as you can imagine, that was an interesting job. It was certainly a lesson in knowing how to deal with people, but it was a challenge too, as you can imagine. I think by the time I was done, I did over 500 repossessions. And you probably can imagine that sometimes you don’t feel real good about doing what you have to do.

That job is necessary, and the people that do it know work hard and are honest people, but it wasn’t the right thing for me. Even though I did it for a number of years, it really started to weigh on me. And it was difficult because you see people in difficult conditions and sometimes you have to do things that really are heartbreaking to both of you. So that was tough for me and I knew it wasn’t going to be my future forever. On top of that, the job (I gotta be honest) did not pay all that well.

So I was trying to support myself at this point in time and I can literally remember having an apartment that was on the second floor. And the good thing was that it was above a first loor apartment and I had another apartment above me on the third floor, and I figured out that in the winter I could actually turn my heat almost all of the way off because I could get the heat from the apartments above and below me.

So I spent probably a couple of winters in upstate New York (it gets cold) with the heat almost turned off. I shivered a lot so that I could pay the bills and afford to keep paying my rent. And if you came to my apartment at that point in time, you basically had to wear your winter coat the whole time. It was a tough situation.

So I was having some difficulty in that way, along with the job itself. People threatened me. I got threatened with a gun, I got threatened with a knife. I would look out my window at night in the cold apartment and wonder what other people were doing to advance in their careers. And the funny thing about this was that people on the outside would think of me as a banker and say “He works at the bank, he’s doing great”.

A lot of people working at the bank do great, but I wasn’t at that point in time. And they would call me a banker, but in truth, I was, I was a banker in the same way that the custodian was a banker. And I have nothing against custodians. It’s an honest job and some of the greatest people I knew there were the custodians. But the fact that they worked at a bank didn’t make them a banker. And that’s sort of the way I felt.

I worked so, so hard. But I did not get a lot of respect even though I worked super hard at my job and tried to do the best. So internally I was wandering. I was freaking out about what was going to happen because I could not see myself doing this for my whole life.

But the longer I stayed in it, the more I became experienced in it. And I didn’t know what my future was. I was just sort of hoping things would work out, which is not a great long term strategy. At the same time I tried to look competent and I tried my best to be professional.

And so I started applying for management jobs. And really to my surprise, I got accepted into a management position on the retail side of the company. It was a little unusual. On paper I didn’t have the qualifications, but I guess they must have seen a spark in me. And that helped a little bit with money, helped a little bit with respect, and really, I started to feel like I was making progress. But that didn’t last forever.

Part of the job was to lead people. But to be honest, I received a lot of training about how to do the tasks, how to make loans, how to take deposits, how to open accounts, all the procedural parts of the job. People taught me that really well, but I did not get a lot of training on how to lead people, and how to motivate people. It was almost almost like that was left to trial and error and sort of figuring out what works as it happens. And that’s what I did. The problem with that approach to leadership is that your errors hurt people. They hurt you, they hurt the people that you work with, and they hurt the people that you supervise.

I started to feel the impact of that. I can remember to this day a couple of different incidents where I really had to have difficult conversations with people. And either I wouldn’t do it because I was too afraid, or I did it all wrong. I can remember I had to have a tough conversation with this one young lady and she walked away in tears. And I knew that I had handled that situation incorrectly.

I knew whatever tactic I took in that meeting was wrong, because it did not affect her behavior in the future. All it really did was upset her and disconnect her from the company, and from me as a manager. So I was trying to figure out: just because I was a manager, was I also a leader?

I had the title, but was I really a leader? And at that point I wasn’t, I have to be honest. Even to the point where I’d feel a little bit of imposter syndrome. People would be looking for me to guide them. People would be looking for me to set the way. And I would think internally, you know… me? You expect me to do that? I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to give you what you’re looking for from me.

People really were looking for something that I could not deliver. And that was brutal. Just brutal. To sort of feel like you’re letting people down. And the results of your team start to show that you are not doing a very good job being a leader. So I really knew at this point I had to figure things out.

I had to figure out on my own how to lead people. So I read every book I could, a million of them. I took as many courses as I could. And I really sort of had this moment of clarity, which I can remember to this day. I was reading a book about how to give people recognition. And that was tough for me. Even the simplest thing, like saying “you did a good job” to somebody. That was tough for me.

Again, I had the a bit of the imposter syndrome. “Who am I to tell them that?”

And I can remember the first day reading about this in a book and going to apply it. I saw someone do a good job and I told them in the most awkward way possible, “Hey, nice job doing that”. It was a struggle for me to be able to say it, but I remember their eyes lighting up. And I realized hey, there’s some power in this. This person actually takes what I say seriously and this is a tool I have to learn how to use a little bit better.

It was then that I started to realize that leadership was a skill . It wasn’t a gift, it wasn’t something innate that people are born with. It was a skill you could learn. And I came to see the more that I exercised proper leadership and learned how to accomplish things, the more respect I gained in the company, the more influence I had in the company. So I kept reading my books, I kept taking my courses and I started to make some progress. I even got promoted to another position, overseeing a large section on the retail side of the company, managing hundreds of employees.

But I ran into another wall, another difficulty. I came to see that when you manage a lot of people, no book can really prepare you. Because life isn’t like a book.

You’re going to have real people with real life situations and real life challenges, and you need to be able to find a way to help them through that, at least as far as their work situation is involved. So to be able to manage through that and be able to adapt to the different types of circumstances that you are going to see. It took years and years of trial and error. Again without a lot of formal training other than what I was getting on my own. And dealing with hundreds of employees to see what worked and what didn’t work.

And I can remember the turn from situations where I was having difficult meetings with employees and they were walking away in tears, to having those same meetings with people walking away from those meetings understanding the point. And having even the most difficult of conversations with people and feeling like we were on the same team and shooting for the same results.

When you start to have those types of conversations, when you start to get people on board, and people buy into the mission, and they buy into you as a leader, you’re going to start to see the results. You’re going to start to have black and white numbers that you can see on a balance sheet. And you can measure the respect and influence you get within your organization from having those leadership skills. And those skills can and will lead (if you’re good enough) to financial gain too. But for me that wasn’t really why I was doing it. Although I was happy to be able to heat my house!

Really the biggest reward was helping people. Helping those 40 hours a week (or however many hours they’re spending at work) become better. And having people feel good about their contributions in the workplace and where our team was going.

So I became a successful leader of a company with almost $3 billion in assets. I was voted the high performer of the company. I was promoted eventually to the Senior Training Manager. I worked with the C-Suite and 500 or so other employees. I developed a company Succession Planning Program, the company Career Development Program, and developed a Leadership Program that I put a lot of managers through. And I got to learn from that too – what works and what doesn’t work.

When you’re training a manager, what’s effective? And how can you boil all the lessons down in the most effective way so that people can walk away with actionable skills? Teaching them so that they can go back to the office the next day and put what they learned into practice. So that they can see a change in how their team responds to them and how it performs.

My biggest motivating factor was to help leaders, because I knew for every one of those leaders that I was helping, I was helping their team members too. So there’s a multiplier. Every time I helped one of them, I helped two, three, five, 10, 20 other people that I wasn’t seeing and it became extremely rewarding.

I did that for years. And recently I’ve taken the opportunity to go into business on my own. To walk away from my nine to five corporate job and to try to help people on a larger scale. That’s what this podcast is all about. To take what I’ve learned through trial and error, through reading, through application with hundreds of people, and be able to talk about that with you, and to share what I’ve learned with you. To talk to people who are great leaders in their own right and to bring what they know to you.

And to deliver content that you will enjoy listening to, but that you can also learn from and apply in the workplace, in the community, in the home. There are so many places where leadership is needed, and when you put the skills into practice, you’re going to see great results.

So that’s what this is all about. I am so glad you are here for the journey. I’m going to wrap this up now and thanks for listening to my story. I appreciate it. Hopefully you can relate to it. And I’d love to hear your stories too. If you want to reach me, you can get me at [email protected]. I would love to hear from you and I will see you soon. Have a great day.