The Rooftop Podcast

These last six months have been unprecedented, but the churn in the next six months is going to pose more challenges to us than at any other point in our history as human beings. Regardless of your discipline, regardless of your party, regardless of what you believe, we're going to face more challenges and more obstacles than ever. The churn is a combination of distraction, disengagement, and dist...

I still remember the day that Wes and I made the decision to pivot. It was right after the pandemic had begun. The first speaking event that I was supposed to do was canceled, and Wes and I were already talking about what was coming. Wow. We didn't waste any time. We looked at the arena, we retuned ourselves, and we said, you know what? The in-person engagements are probably going the way of the d...

How in the world are we going to maintain a face-to-face interaction and rapport with prospects and then bring them over to our side to inspire them to buy from us, when there's all this social distancing and we're wearing PPE. We've normally never done remote sales. We didn't really do any remote sales in the beginning of the pandemic because we kept waiting for everything to open up. Well now it...

One of the things that I believe in, is the mindset that the relationship is the asset. I teach this to the Green Beret students at Fort Bragg when I teach in the school-house, and I teach it at Fortune 100 Commercial Banks, that “relationships are the asset”. Relationships are your greatest off-book asset, according to David Nour in his book, Relationship Economics. I learned at a very early age...

Have you noticed how hard it is to connect with other people during these uncertain times? Sometimes, it feels like the gaps are as wide as the Grand Canyon doesn’t it? The most relevant leaders in these times of social challenge are the ones who can bridge gaps when times are hard. Green Berets learned how to do this since the early 1950’s using old-school interpersonal skills like narrative and...

People are going to have to get furloughed. People are going to get laid off. People are going to get fired. You're going to have to tell vendors that you don't use their services anymore. It's not easy. Because we're meaning seeking, emotional social story animals, we thrive on connection. Our relationship portfolio is our greatest asset. It's our best book of business, especially in a crisis. So...

What's the value of a handshake? That's the question that's been on my mind for several days. Now, when this COVID pandemic kicked off, I started talking to leaders about my concerns around social distancing. I felt like we had misnamed it, it should have been physical distancing. The reason is that humans are meaning seeking, emotional, social, story animals. We thrive in times of chaos by our ab...

One of the biggest questions that we're going to have to ask ourselves, is how do I help my teammates get back into the arena? And what does that look like when they do it? I coach a lot of very high-level executives who cannot wait to get back into the office, but guess what? It's a 50/50 split on their leadership team about being ready to get back into the office. How do we lead our people in su...

The question I'm asking is this, after these last nine to ten weeks of the pandemic and the social distancing, how do you feel about human connection right now? Have you asked yourself that open-ended question? How do you feel about it? How do you feel about it as an individual who's going to encounter humans on the street? How do you feel about it in your business, like with clients and prospects...

Everybody has challenges that have come out of this new time horizon. Even if you think you don't, when you have eight to nine weeks of mandated social distancing and isolation, it's going to have an effect on us as humans, right? So, the larger question though is how do I, “Get Back in the Game”? How do you get back in the game? Join me by the fire pit and let’s talk about what we can do to, “Get...

In Special Forces, Special Operations, we have these things called imperatives. These are the guidelines that move us through complexity, crisis, ambiguity. A lot of the same things that you're facing. The number one Special Ops imperative that we live by, is understand your operational environment. In other words, pay attention to your arena, right? Wherever it is that you work, and you play, you...

We all face crisis as leaders, as organizational leaders, certainly. We live in a dangerous world. We may think we're super sophisticated and we've got everything going on, but as we're seeing today with the coronavirus, with 9/11, with natural disasters, active shooters, there are a range of things where life happens while we're making other plans. So how do we lead through those moments, and can...

We need leaders who can lead through fear because the reality is, fear is a normal human function. It kept us alive for hundreds of thousands of years. It is a fight, flight, or freeze thing. It is a primal reality. Fear motivates us. Fear drives us. But in many ways in today's world, fear can be a great inhibitor to us meeting our goals. If we allow fear to dominate us, it can have a prolific eff...

We've talked about things that are too daunting. Overwhelming. We've talked about the “Imposter Syndrome”, talked about being “Too Busy” and now we're talking about, “No One Wants to Hear This”. That's another form of self-sabotage. It's the first cousin of Imposter Syndrome, right? “It's not good enough. What I have to say is just not something that people want to hear”. It’s something that we ne...

The “rat race”, the operational tempo that will dominate you, own you if you're not careful. It can make it very difficult to do what Rooftop Leaders are supposed to do, which is to play a bigger game. To serve a purpose bigger than yourself and to have an impact that leaves tracks. We sometimes let the rat race dominate us, consume all we do and create the state of, “Too Busy”. I can't tell you h...

Who are you not to do it? What happens if you don't write your book? What happens if you don't put your music out there? Your art, your movie, your ideas. Who are you not to share the lessons you have learned? Who are you not to do that thing that you know must be done? These are the questions you should be asking. Imposter Syndrome. Join me by the fire-pit and let’s discuss how to crush, “Imposte...

Welcome to 2020! This year I am going to talk about pain points that leaders just like you who are playing a bigger game, who want to do something bigger than themselves, who are creating movements, who value connection and impact are coping with every day. We're going to talk about the pain points that you face, whether you're a fortune 500 CEO or leader of a nonprofit. We're going to talk about...

We all have to manage different kinds of rooms don't we? Some of us find ourselves on the stage. Some of us are in board rooms or meeting rooms. Some of us are asking donors to invest in our nonprofit to make a difference in the community or in the world. Some of us are asking our employees to follow us on a vision that they can't quite see yet. What seems to be consistent in the rooms that we hav...

One of the challenges that we face today as rooftop leaders, whether we own our own business, or maybe we work in a corporation or a midsize company as leaders and we do sales or we're relationship managers, how do we keep our clients, our investors, loyal for the long haul? Well, there's a science to that. There's a process that I call putting the "Relationship Before the Transaction”. It's...

When you think about a tough negotiation or a tough client, the first thing is you've got to make a human connection. If you just roll in with the agenda, if you just roll in with the transaction, if you're just rolling with the PowerPoint or the spreadsheets, the odds are they're going to dismiss you, especially in this skeptical, trust depleted environment. I will tell you that relational giftin...

"Scott, I totally get the need to own the room, but what if people don't pay attention to me? What if people look at me like I don't have the rank or title necessary to put out the kind of ideas and innovation that I think I have to offer? What then? What do I do if people don't pay attention?" I think that's a great question to ask. Whether you're a young person or an underrepresented s...

We always talk about what it takes to be the most relevant, relatable and resonant person in the room. Why? So that you can move people to take action in this trust depleted, disconnected time and it's all based around human connection. Owning the room is a skill, not just an instinct. A very common question I get and just got the other day is, “what do I do to close the trust gaps that exist betw...

A lot of leaders ask me, “Scott, how do I even start when trying to own the room?”. With the stakes for owning a room even higher in these trust depleted times, what I always ask is, “what are your goals?”. Goals are paramount to any negotiation, your goals are important but even more than that, are you working to keep the goals of your client or co-worker or team in mind? Have you done the work t...

What I mean by own the room is to be the most relevant, the most relatable, and the most resonant person in that room. This requires a lot of narrative, a lot of storytelling, a lot of active listening and other skillsets. Some of us, in fact, all of us do these things instinctively at times because we're social creatures, but in today's high stakes, low trust environment, we need to do them more...

One of the questions I get a lot from business leaders when I travel around the country working with them is, “how do I overcome the anxiety that goes along with a sales presentation?”. You would be surprised at how many people actually deal with this issue. It’s that anxiety that can grab you before you're getting on stage or before getting on a sales call, before getting in front of investors or...