#39 Leadership Insights from my Conversation with Paul Thornton

From Being Liked to Being Respected: Five Leadership Takeaways from Paul Thornton

Host Mark Cundiff shares leadership insights from his conversation with Paul Thornton (Episode 38, “From Being Liked to Being Respected”), drawing on Thornton’s 35+ years as a teacher, coach, and leadership expert. The episode emphasizes that leadership is not about being liked but about credibility, consistency, and accountability that build trust. 

Thornton’s practical framework highlights three adaptable leadership styles—directing, discussing, and delegating—and emphasizes choosing the right approach for the situation without micromanaging or causing analysis paralysis. 

Cundiff outlines five takeaways: 

1. Trust is built through consistent follow-through
2. Leaders must shift from people-pleasing to principled standards
3. Strong leaders flex between directing, discussing, and delegating. 
4. Asking and listening develop thinkers, while telling creates dependence. 
5. Effective delegation requires clear expectations, defined outcomes, and strategic check-ins, illustrated by lessons from “The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey.”

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LeaderNotes is a quick-hit companion to each episode of The Learning to Lead Show. In just 5–10 minutes, Mark Cundiff recaps the top leadership insights, frameworks, and action steps from each interview, designed for busy, growth-minded leaders who want to review and apply the episode’s biggest takeaways on the go. It’s like the highlight reel + playbook—all in one.

Contact Mark at: mark@markjcundiff.com

Transcript

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Hello, welcome to the Learning to Lead Show. I'm so glad that you joined us today. I'm your host, mark Cundiff. This is a place where our mission is to encourage, equip, and inspire leaders to take their leadership to the next level so that they can take their organization, their teams, their families, to the next level. Today, I want to give you some leadership insights from a conversation with Paul Thornton. That was episode 38. The title of the episode from being liked to being respected, the leadership shift that changes everything. That title came from Paul's journey of early in his career where he was wanting to be liked by his team members and by the people that were part of his organization. Had a shift when he realized that it was not about being liked, but by being respected for being a strong leader and taking the organization in the right direction. Paul joined me on to share powerful lessons from over 35 years of leadership experience as a teacher, coach and leadership expert in our conversation, Paul broke down a simple yet highly practical leadership framework. It comes in three different leading styles, as he calls it, directing, discussing, and delegating. He explains how great leaders adapt their styles based on the situation and the person involved. One of the central themes of the episodes was leadership is not about being like, it's about being consistent. Paul shares how credibility and consistency build trust while leaders struggle with accountability. And how leaders can move from trying to be liked to earning real respect. This episode is filled with practical insights. Leaders can apply immediately to improve themselves, improve their communication, build, trust, and develop stronger teams. Here are some of the key topics that we discussed, why credibility and consistency are the foundation of trust. The leadership shift from being liked to being respected. Next, we discussed the three essential leadership styles, directing, discussing, and delegating when directing is necessary and when it becomes micromanaging how great leaders use questions to develop thinking, the danger of overusing and analysis paralysis, what effective delegation really looks like and what it's not. Why leader struggle with accountability and clarity, common leadership, blind spots in communication and listening. And lastly, how to develop people into leaders, not just followers. If you have not listened to episode 38, I encourage you to go back and hear the full conversation. I'm gonna go over five key takeaways that I got out of that conversation in hopes that'll help you apply what we discussed on the show that day. Take away number one, trust is built through consistency. Not intention. Paul made it clear. Trust doesn't come from what you mean to do. It comes from what you consistently do. Credibility is built by these three activities. Your actions match your words. You enforce standards consistently. You follow through every time. When leaders are inconsistent, sometimes holding the line, sometimes letting things slide, trust erodes quickly. Leadership lesson, consistency is the foundation of credibility, and credibility is the foundation of trust. I have worked in my. Career. For some leaders that would overpromise and underdeliver, they would always tell you that they're going to get certain things done by a certain date and then they don't deliver, and then you follow up and then they still don't deliver. I had situations where. There was work that I was waiting on from certain leaders to get back to me that it would take over a year for them to actually respond and get back to me about the work that they were supposed to do to help move a project forward. So it's really frustrating for the team member when the leader is not doing what they say they're going to do. If your actions don't match your words, it's going to erode trust, and eventually the top players will go somewhere else where they can get that type of leadership. Number two, the shift from being liked to being respected. Many people fall into the category of having a personality, of being a people pleaser, and that's okay if sometimes that's just your personality, but you have to realize that and understand if you're in a leadership position, that you have to make sure that you shift from being liked. To being respected in order to be an effective leader. Early in his leadership journey, Paul admitted he struggled because he wanted to be liked. And don't we all, don't, we all want to be liked, but you have to be careful if you're in a leadership role of allowing that emotion, those feelings drive your actions and weaken your leadership. So this is what happened when he was. Seeking out being liked versus being respected. He avoided accountability. He didn't enforce standards. He stayed silent when he should have spoken up. Listen to those again. There are three things that characterize his leadership when he was trying to be liked versus being respected. He avoided accountability. He didn't enforce standards. He stayed silent when he should have spoken up. Does that apply to you? Are there ever times in your leadership journey that you do those types of things? So later he made a shift. He went from approval to principles. He went from comfort to accountability. So a leadership insight there for you is you can be liked and ineffective, but you cannot be respected and inconsistent. Number three, great leaders adapt. They direct, discuss and delegate. Paul simplifies leadership into three essential styles. Directing. This is when people need clarity and instruction. This means that they might need some teaching, some coaching. Some very specific direction, but you have to balance that direction without overmanaging micromanaging, as we would call it. Number two, discussing when people need to think and problem solve. This is where questions come into play, where you do a lot of asking of the right questions, of good questions, and then sitting back and listening, not answering your own questions, but listening for the answers and helping the team or the individual. Develop their own thoughts, develop their own systems for figuring out the problems. And number three, delegating. When people are ready to take ownership, this is when you're ready to hand off a portion of your responsibilities and give it to someone else. This is a place where a lot of people struggle. They don't do delegation very well. And I would encourage you go back to. Episode 38 and listen to the full discussion on that. 'cause we delve into how some leaders just dump things on people without training them, and then other leaders. Over delegate to their top performers because they know they're gonna deliver well, and so they ended up being overworked and frustrated while under delegating to some lower level performers. And they don't grow and develop. They just stay stuck because they're never given any additional responsibility. Never trained to handle that responsibility. The key is not choosing one style, it's choosing the right style for the situation. Here's the leadership lesson. There is no one best leadership style, only the best style for the moment that you're in. One of the things I would challenge you to do is think about what is your predominant leadership style, and then when should you adjust that leadership style for the situation that you're in, for the person that you're dealing with, for the type of organization that you have and what the goals. Objectives of that organization are and where you want to go with that organization. Number four, asking questions develops people faster than giving answers. That's key. If you wanna be a person who develops leaders, instead of just having a bunch of followers, listen to this. Again, asking questions develops people faster than giving answers. If you're always the source. Of the answers, then that's going to put a limitation on the growth of the organization, the effectiveness of the organization. But when your people can learn to find and discover the answers themselves, then they're gonna take the organization to another level because they're gonna multiply your effectiveness, multiply your work, if everybody relies on you for the answers, then you become the bottleneck. Here are some powerful questions to include. What steps are you going to take? What obstacles do you see? What did you learn from a similar situation? But the real skill isn't just asking great questions. It's listening. One of the things that many leaders do, especially maybe a type personalities or people that are drivers, a lot of times they'll jump in and answer the question for the individual, for the team member. Then that doesn't give them time to think it through. It doesn't give them time to process it and learn from the situation. Here's a key leadership insight. Leaders who ask and listen. Develop thinkers, leaders who tell, create dependence. Listen to that again. Leaders who ask and listen. Develop thinkers, leaders who tell, create dependence. So do you want your people to be dependent on you or do you want them to be thinkers and become leaders and drive your organization forward in a powerful way? Number five, delegation is not abandonment. It's ownership with support delegation is not abandonment. It's ownership with support. Many leaders misunderstand delegation. They either do one of these two things. They hold on to tightly micromanage or they let go. Two completely and abandoned. Do you follow one of those categories? Do you hold on because you like to have control? You're maybe a perfectionist. You don't think anybody else can do it as well as you, so you hold on too tightly and you micromanage the person, or do you let go too completely? You abandon the person. You don't give them support, you don't give them feedback. You don't use it as time for coaching and development. You just throw them the keys and say, go do it. And then sometimes they have a wreck, and then you're wondering why they had the wreck. It's because you didn't coach them through it. Give them feedback, give them milestones, give them goals to support them through the process. Great. Delegation includes these three things, clear expectations. Defined outcomes and strategic check-ins. I would say that when you do this, you need to make sure that along the way when you're delegating something, that you provide really good, timely feedback, both positive and what would be considered negative, a correction to try to help them improve if you're not giving clear expectations and following that up with good feedback. Toward meeting the defined outcomes, then you're gonna leave them on their own. And sometimes that's gonna work out and sometimes it's not. But there needs to be a communication circle there where they understand where they're going and how they're doing and where they need to go next. And then the strategic check-ins where you periodically say, Hey, how's it going? What are the issues you're facing? How are you handling those? If they bring up a problem you say. What is your solution for that? What have you tried, what have you done in the past? What resources have you consulted to try to figure that problem out? One of the great resources for me on this was. Ken Blanchard's, the one minute manager meets the monkey, and in that book it tells the story of a leader who has his people coming in, lined outside his office, and they come in with a briefcase and they use the illustration of they open the briefcase and all these monkeys jump out and jump on the leader's desk. And the monkeys represent the problems that the follower or the subordinate is bringing in to the leader to solve. What Ken shares with us in that book is that leaders who are not developing leaders just take on ownership of those monkeys and they try to become the problem solver. Instead of taking that situation, asking questions and giving those monkeys back to the people that brought them into the room in the first place and asking them to solve them, it uses an illustration in one picture where he's on a Saturday morning. Sitting in the office doing all the work to solve the monkey problems that were brought to him during the week while he looks out his window at the golf course across the street, where those who brought the monkeys to him are getting ready to tee off. And that's what happens if you do not do delegation, right? You allow their problems to become your problems, and they're off carefree. Not solving the problems that they should be solving. So think about that. That's a great book, a great resource for you to read. It's a great parable about how some leaders continually become the bottleneck of the organization because they are the source for solving all the problems in the organization. So the leadership lesson here is delegation is not about removing yourself, it's about positioning others to succeed. What you wanna do is become more like a conductor, helping. Them lead and grow and drive things in your organization. And get stronger and become someone who someday could replace you. So I want to thank you for joining us on The Learning Leading Show today. If you have not done so already, subscribe so that each episode comes into your podcast app as it is released. Also make sure and go give us a rating. Please, those help us spread the word about the learning, the lead show to others who have not encountered us yet. Please go out and share this with one or two friends, coworkers, team members this week so that we can continue to grow our audience and improve on how we get the word out. Now go out and learn, grow, and lead, and take your organization to the next level.