Modern Day Leadership: Tips for Successful Leadership in the Board Room, at the Kitchen Table and in Life

By Michael G. Salicco

Leadership today requires intentionality, authenticity and continuous evolution. The hyper-connected world poses significant challenges to achieving and building a handcrafted career in leadership while balancing life. This book by Mike Salicco blends personal life stories and best practices to improve and restore balance in all facets of your life by connecting the readers more closely to themselves first. Bringing back into focus your 'why' and acting with a discipline and intentionality to invest in yourself, create your reputation and selectively choose the key people in your life to occupy a seat in your segments of significance. The contents of this book offers tips to help you reconnect or discover your core motivation and align your entire life to your purpose. What do you want to be know for? Can you definitively articulate why people want you to be their leader? All of these questions will have answers. The answers demand you play a role in informing the response as opposed to allowing perception to be created. Everything needs to be deliberately constructed to support your purpose. This book is an invaluable resource for anyone that wants to gain control over their career, their life and their purpose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Release date: Oct 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781977220370

Michael G. Salicco

Michael Salicco is a veteran executive who has focused his career on leadership, with the belief that mastery in leadership and a commitment to become the person others want as their leader are valuable business assets. He has worked in a high-level leadership capacity for some of the largest public and private companies in America. Mr. Salicco and his wife, Lisa, reside in North Carolina with their five sons.

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Modern Day Leadership

Tips for Successful Leadership in the Board Room, at the Kitchen Table and in Life

All Rights Reserved.

Copyright © 2019 Michael G. Salicco

v6.0

The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not represent the opinions or thoughts of the publisher. The author has represented and warranted full ownership and/or legal right to publish all the materials in this book.

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Introduction

Modern-Day Leadership

In today’s world of technological advancement, we likely don’t make it through the day without discussing change. Yet when it comes to leadership, I meet countless executives that haven’t evolved their style.

This book will examine how we pay homage to the tried and true yet have a forward-thinking approach to being successful in leadership today. Some are widely known tactics that were once seated in the back row. Today they are front-row worthy and indispensable to success for anyone leading others.

Leadership is multifaceted and stretches from the boardroom to the client’s office to your team and to your kitchen table.

To move forward, you need to know where you have been. Can you pinpoint the moments in your career that caused you to fall in love with letting go of controlling your own destiny and allowing your success to come through the success of others? Knowing our why and being completely committed to this reality are musts. For me, it happened early. I was an early-twenties guy who was working right out of high school to pay for continuing education.

I have always lived by the principle that if you cannot out-think someone, you can outwork them. And if you cannot outwork them, you can out-think them. It is a bit of a game, and there is always a way to win a game if you are willing to find the way.

I started as a loan collector for a bank, chasing delinquent auto accounts. I also started learning more and more about myself and who I would be as a professional. My brother Chris secured me the interview that led to the job, and I remember on day one being surrounded by coworkers twice my age, some more, but clearly nobody else around that was as green as I was. Picture a call-center-type environment with folks yelling and screaming at customers or leaving a loud and sometimes aggressive phone message on their machine. Being green did have some advantages. I was not a screamer, so I took a different approach. I didn’t believe I would personally call someone back who left that type of message, so I decided to level with the customer. This was as simple as leaving messages with a polite tone and asking that they return my call to work something out. When finally connecting, I built rapport by treating them as a person and cautioning that at some point someone would come looking for their car, so avoiding the situation will not make it go away.

As it turned out, this was very effective, and in six short months, my brother and I were the top two collectors in the company – using our alias names, of course. Shortly thereafter, we were both promoted to credit analysts. This was fascinating to me. I would now work school around my job and leave the office thinking these people were crazy! I remember pondering one day, I approved $500,000 in loans today, and I am not sure I completely know what I am doing yet.

Over time, I became really good at building relationships with auto dealers over the phone. Sure, there were technical aspects of the job, like reading a credit report, calculating debt to income and payment to income ratios, etc., but at the core, this was a relationship job. I transferred schools and took a job with a new automotive finance company simultaneously to pay for the education and moved from New Jersey to Massachusetts. At twenty-three years old, after remaining in credit for a few years with this company, I wanted to take the next step and get into sales. I wanted to use those relationship-building skills outside and continue to grow myself by testing if I could be as successful in person as I was at the desk and over the phone.

My direct supervisor was open; however, the vice president of sales did not think I was ready, even after I sold him the foam cup at the interview table, which was clearly one of his favorite role-plays. I was persistent, and finally they relented out of necessity because a territory was failing miserably.

I was living close to the office on the North Shore in Massachusetts, but the territory was half of the state of Connecticut. The incumbent salesperson had the entire state, and through division, this was a way to ease me into the role and start to diagnose what was dragging the performance down. I relocated a few hours south, just outside of Hartford, and accepted the role even though they were clear that there would be no guarantee I could come back into the office in my previous role if this didn’t work out. Challenge accepted, I thought – put the outwork them theory to the test.

First month was okay, a lot of meet-and-greets and familiarization with working remotely. Second month, third month and fourth month, I was Sales Person of the Month for the Northeast Region and then inherited the entire state as my territory. I still have the now older and dated plaques on my wall in my home office. Only drawback, I didn’t love what I was doing. Success happened because I wasn’t the hard-closing, typical salesman of that time. I wasn’t selling at all in reality, I was building relationships like I did while inside working the credit desk, treating people with respect like I had done while in collections and believed that what I was offering my clients could truly help. Put simply, I earned their trust!

Right before my twenty-fifth birthday, I was promoted to sales manager. This was part one of my leadership why story. I immediately took to aiding others in their quest to be successful, and unlike direct selling, I loved helping them succeed, truly!

This too had its challenges. I was younger than the people who were reporting to me, but I knew that just meant I had to be creative in my approach to earn their trust, being they all had more work experience than I did. What I had, though, was fresh perspective. That is one of the premises of this book, always adjusting your perspective.

There are many other parts to my story that I will interject in the chapters that follow along with tips you can leverage to refine your leadership style or use to embark on your leadership journey.

My hope is that my stories and leadership lessons can aid in altering a current leader’s style for the better, help someone avoid a mistake that I may have already made or serve as a foundation for a new leader.

Acknowledgments

The exercise of writing a book certainly brings you back to moments in time and refocuses your attention to all of the people who had a profound influence on your life.

None more so than my immediate family. Work itself is not something that you do, at least not initially, because you love it – the underlying reason is to provide for the ones you love. At times, it is easy to hide behind that, throwing yourself headfirst into your work. Finding balance among it all is not easy but is a fight worth engaging in.

Along the way, you realize just how much everyone sacrifices with you. My loving wife, Lisa, and the heavy burden she carried managing the schedules of our five sons, John, Joseph, James, Mark and Timothy, while I traveled and built a career that I truly love because it was dedicated to leading others and positively impacting their lives. She has always been my rock, my best friend and the person I would be lost without. The simplicity of our relationship in terms of thinking the same, wanting the same and making decisions together has always kept me consciously aware of how fortunate I am to have found you. I love you all more than I can ever express in words.

My sons, in hopes that I set an example of providing but also the importance of loving your family, making sure you are present, seeing all the baseball games, slowing down and enjoying time with them. If I failed at everything else but raised good young men and succeeded at being the husband and father I aspired to be, then everything else is bonus. You guys make me proud every day – please do not ever forget that.

To my parents, George and Jane, and siblings, Chris and Greg, I never underestimated the importance of the very first people who taught me about who I wanted to be. Thank you, all, for leading by example.

To the countless people who inspired me to continually seek to be better than I was yesterday, whether that was through positive leadership role models or the folks I observed who were the opposite of that. I learned much from all and made my own decisions on which side I wanted to be on.

To David Pyle, for being the leader for me that I hope I was for others. In its simplest form, leadership is prioritizing others, genuinely caring about them and the business, understanding it is not about you, all things that make you who you are – thank