Introduction
Brian Washburn: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Train Like You Listen, a podcast about all things learning and development in bite-sized chunks. I’m Brian Washburn, I’m the co-founder and CEO of Endurance Learning, and we are an instructional design shop that can help you put together all kinds of training programs from classroom to instructor-led to elearning.
But enough about me. I’m joined today by The HR Lady®, Wendy Sellers, who has a podcast called The HR Lady® and who’s also written a book entitled, Suck It up, Buttercup. Be a Better Leader— I’m sorry. Suck It up, Buttercup. Be a Leader People Will Follow. Welcome, Wendy. Nice to have you.
Wendy Sellers: It does mean be a better leader too.
Brian Washburn: I apologize for fumbling over that.
Listen to the full episode or watch on YouTube.
Wendy Sellers: That’s okay.
Wendy Sellers’ 6-Word Biography
Brian Washburn: And you know, for this podcast, we try to keep it relatively short and to the point and to that end, we ask our guests to come with a six-word autobiography. And so if you had to put your whole life’s work into six words, what would that be?
Wendy Sellers: I am a no-nonsense HR expert.
Brian Washburn: That works, especially with the contraction. So I like it. You fit it in there.
Wendy Sellers: First of all, thanks for letting me look at that ahead of time ’cause I was like, “Six words? Whoa. Okay.” But that was a good exercise to think about.
Brian Washburn: Yeah. You know, people can go on and on, but if you, if you try to really boil it down to just the basics, um, it takes a little work, but then you can really kind of get the essence of that message out there.
Being Better Leaders Isn’t About the Title
Brian Washburn: A while back you published a book called Suck It up, Buttercup, Be a Leader People Will Follow. Can you tell us a little bit more about who the Buttercup is that you’re referring to and what should they be sucking up?
Wendy Sellers: Yeah, so absolutely. I think most people when they say, suck it up buttercup, they’re aiming it at the person who’s complaining about something or asking for help or saying, I can’t do this. But I actually aimed it at more at managers and so-called leaders to say, you know. Suck it up buttercup yourself. Why don’t you be a leader people will follow and then they don’t have to suck it up?
So there’s so many, you know, HR people, managers, leaders, I’ll talk about that in a moment. My idea of leadership that they think just the title is going to get people to follow them. And it’s like, no, they might pretend they’re following you, but that doesn’t mean they actually trust you, and that doesn’t mean they’re doing what they say they’re gonna do or that they’re going to, you know, follow you to the edge of the cliff because you’re not really their leader. You’re just on the org chart above them.
Brian Washburn: So, this idea of leaders, it’s a really interesting concept because that word can be really loaded. It can, it can mean lots of different things to lots of different people. And I, you know, there’s, there’s certainly leadership development programs, but for when I’m working with individual contributors a lot of times, this idea of leader is synonymous with positional authority.
And that doesn’t have to be the case, but–
Wendy Sellers: Right.
Brian Washburn: And it’s easy for us to say that, right? It’s easy for us to sit here and say, no, no, no, leadership is really the ability for people to mobilize resources in order to achieve goals. So whether that’s getting people on board, whatever it might be, it’s easy for us to say that.
But what. advice might you have that can, uh, for people who are direct reports, so that they can actually maybe manage up a little bit and help their managers be better leaders?
Advice for Managing Up and Leading from Any Role
Wendy Sellers: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for asking that. I literally just got off a webinar right before this, and then I was in an all-day training yesterday and talking about the concept of leadership, and I’m like, listen, leadership is not a title. Some companies wrongly do that. Like, oh, this is the leadership title or like, layer of the org chart, and all the employees just laugh at it.
I know I did when I was in that position, and so that’s why I made it part of my world’s work to say, you know, anybody can be a leader. I don’t care what your title is, where you’re at in the org chart. Lead from where you’re at. And of course, you are gonna have to manage up to because wrong, right, or indifferent, many people are put into leadership, slash, you know, management titles. Because they’ve been there longer, so whatever it might be, they have some relationship and all the employees are rolling their eyes going, yeah, there’s no way. They’re not a director, they’re not a manager. They’re certainly not a leader, but you can be a project leader.
If you’re a project manager or you’re a project employee, you could be a team leader. You could just be a peer-to-peer leader where people come to you and you’re like, “Hey, I come to you with all my problems. Could you help solve them?” That’s leadership. Leadership is helping other people succeed regardless of if you are succeeding or not. And so I firmly believe anybody can be a leader. You do not have to have a title to be a leader. And I do want people that are listening to, again, really think about the fact that if you are, um, if you have leadership written on your org chart, You might wanna double check that. ’cause some of your employees, um, especially if they’re listening to this podcast, they’re laughing at you.
How to Be Heard Without Burning Bridges
Brian Washburn: Yeah, so, so let’s stick with this for just a second because I wanna talk about this. You know, I’ve been in sessions around organizational culture. We’ve talked about leadership. Oh, you know, this organization really values the idea that everybody can be a leader. And people will say, that’s, I love that sentiment yet my leader really, um, really kind of flaunts their title, right? So my leader says, “I’m the decision maker.” And while they pay lip service to the idea that everybody contributes, it’s really, “I don’t feel like I’m heard.” What can somebody do to approach a positional– a person in a position of authority in a way that’s not gonna jeopardize their job in order to say, look, I’d like to contribute. I don’t feel like I’m being heard.
Wendy Sellers: Yeah. So, you know, first of all, just going back to the concept of leadership, it’s not for the weak, right? Leadership is not for the weak, and I write about that in Suck It up, Buttercup. Be a Leader People Will Follow. It’s my first chapter actually, jumping right into it, if you. You know, people say you’re a natural-born leader.
Like, okay, that’s personality styles. Everybody said I was a natural-born leader. What they really meant was, you’re bossy. That doesn’t mean that I deserve to be the leader because I’m bossy. And I had to learn like, oh yeah, I’m bossy and people do what I want them to do. I learned the hard way, they might do what I want them to do, but that doesn’t mean that they want to do it and that they wanna work for me.
So a lot of egg on my face where I finally say, okay, let’s ask people what they want. And there’s a lot of managing up in that where you have to choose your words wisely. And you know, maybe not call your manager idiot or something like that and say, Hey, I have a problem I wanna talk to you about. Or I see a problem and I have a proposed solution, are you interested in talking to me? So regardless of what your role is, people want solutions. They don’t want it shoved down their throat. They want solutions. And most people, whether they’re managers or not, they wanna be involved in that solution.
Now, side note, some people wanna take credit for it. If you’re managing up and you know that, you know they’re gonna take credit for it. you have to suck it up and say, who cares? Let them take credit for it. It’s gonna change my team. My team all knows that we were all involved in this and that I got the solution pushed through, even though we’re not getting credit for it. That’s a different conversation that you may need to take to the higher ups and HR to say, Hey, here’s all my documents and conversations with my managers. We actually made this decision and made these changes. Not him or her or them. But regardless,.it took me a long time to realize who gets, who cares, who gets the credit. But most people do want the credit if they’ve done something major and they do deserve it. And so there’s a lot of sucking it up going on in life.
Brian Washburn: Yeah. And. That. I mean, I love that you kind of framed it in terms of sucking it up kind of goes both ways. Right. And one of the things that my manager would remind me when I would get frustrated with my colleagues or other people, he would say, “Brian, you know, you’re right, but are you being effective?”
And I think that is one of those other things that, you know, in terms of if you want to be a leader, even if you don’t have the position of authority, that phrase is really important to keep in mind too.
Now, you have kind of promoted one of my favorite concepts that gets promoted about your book is that it’s not just something that you sit there and you read and think, oh yeah, okay, that makes sense. But you actually have an acting lesson in your book. Can you tell us a little bit more about, you know, kind of this practical activity that’s in there?
An Acting Lesson in Empathy and Leadership
Wendy Sellers: Yeah, so I’m really big on understanding like personalities, uh, personality types, personality, you know, styles. And so in a lot of my in-person training, which I just did one yesterday in Orlando, I do training and I get people to stand up and say, okay, where are all you personalities, because most companies can’t afford like an official like personality assessment.
I myself use DiSC, which is a derivative of Myers-Briggs. So I like to get people involved because if you’re doing something, you’re gonna remember it. And so the acting lesson that I have in my– it’s the last chapter of my book. It’s really about, you know, adding a 15 minute daily recurring appointment with yourself or with somebody else, 15 to 20 minutes, you know, for maybe 20 work days.
Because if we do something, if we wanna change something, we wanna learn something, we wanna learn a new personality style, which is what my acting lesson is. I say you have to. You’re a different personality style. That whole empathy thing put yourself into a different personality style for 15 minutes a day.
But it has to be over a long period of time. ’cause if you only do it once, it goes in one ear and out the other and you don’t, you don’t do it. Kind of like teaching your kids how to do their homework or laundry or something like that. Like it’s something that is practiced over and over and over again, and then it becomes norm, right?
Brian Washburn: Yeah.
Wendy Sellers: That’s what my acting lesson is, is about wearing a new personality style, which is virtually impossible. Because we’re always gonna revert back to our own. But I’m like, just do it for 15 minutes a day. Now, I would encourage you, if you’re a manager or a leader, whatever you wanna call that, you know, find out who is on your team. And what their styles are. Even if you do an, an unofficial assessment, which you can do by reading one of my books. One I talk about personality styles. The other one I talk about personality traits like extrovert, introvert, but you know, find out where are the people on my team, even if it’s at a high level, and then let me pretend I’m them for 15 minutes a day and go, oh, now I know what it feels like to deal with me or. Something like that, you know, works at home too, folks.
Brian Washburn: That idea of just kind of flipping, you know, putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes. So it’s so powerful and I think that a lot of people think it makes sense in concept, but actually practicing that can be such a powerful like, experience and really open your eyes
Wendy Sellers: In my in-person training, I actually write out scripts and give it to people. And I’m like, I don’t care what personality you are, here’s your script and you have to pretend to be this person. And then they have to role play in front of everybody, and they’re pretty funny scripts. So it gets, it gets hilarious and you know, you get people knocked off a little bit.
You’re like, oh, that wasn’t very comfortable. I’m like, now you know how your employees feel.
Why HR Needs L&D and Vice Versa
Brian Washburn: Yeah. Yes, exactly. Now you know, and now you can kind of feel it too in kind of a light way. I love that. I have you here and we’ve been talking about kind of leadership development and certainly your expertise is in the area of HR, and I’ve always found it fascinating that HR and L&D– sometimes L&D is embedded within HR, but the two worlds don’t often mix. And so, I’m wondering if you have some thoughts from where you, ’cause our audience is a lot of learning and development professionals. So I love the fact that we have somebody who is really well known in the HR field. So what might L&D and HR do in an organization to better align and work better and more effectively together?
Wendy Sellers: Well, the number one thing is, you know, I do management training pretty much all day, every day, and I’ve put my HR experience into there because 9 out of 10 times when my phone’s ringing, now as an HR consultant or back then as an HR, you know, executive or director or manager, it’s usually like behavior that we’re dealing with. HR, though, was started with law. It’s compliance. But now it’s changed into employee relations and that means you need to give them learning & development opportunities. You need to teach people new skills. Sure, you’ve hired the best of the best on their resume. They have all the knowledge, skills, and ability that you need, but then they have to interact with another human, and that alone is gonna throw them completely off their game.
You know, I would say ask your people what their challenges are and then create learning & development opportunities for that. You know, I literally just did that yesterday in a live training with people that I really didn’t know. I was there at an association. There was probably like 20 people and 8 companies, and I’m like, what’s your biggest challenge?
And I already knew what the answer was because it’s 2025 and it’s attracting and retaining employees. I’m like, alright, well then let’s talk about, you know, we’re not here to talk about recruiting. I’ll give you some tips. You can, you know. I watch some of my LMS, it’s my itself over there on recruiting.
But let’s talk about retaining employees. We already got them. We’ve already trained them. We already, you know, we like them and we want them to stay long-term. It’s up to the managers to retain them, and that means that the managers need to be taught on the basics of HR law, what they can and cannot say, and then just employee engagement principles as a whole. Budgets. You know, what is our company culture. I am huge on company values and making sure that you put those company values into every single thing that you do. As a manager, as a leader, as HR, because again, most people are calling me ’cause somebody’s acting a fool.
Not because they’re not; they’re not doing their job. That’s usually easy to figure out, oh, they’re not doing the task they were supposed to. We’re gonna, you know, put them on. We’re gonna give them feedback, put them on an improvement plan, and or remove them. When people are acting a fool and not being respectful, they usually go, what do we do? Remember those company values that are over there that are usually just on the marketing page for sales purposes? No. Why don’t we put them on the HR page and in the company policies and in the job descriptions, and why don’t we teach everybody what that means and let them know we’re serious. You have to be respectful here.
Brian Washburn: Yeah, it’s, so what I’m hearing is almost HR is basically the subject matter expert of the organization and the learning and development folks can help maybe bring that message in a learning sense, to the organization and, you know, the best organization’s function when those two sets are kind of working in collaboration with one another.
How L&D Teams Can Identify Real Employee Training Needs
Wendy Sellers: Yeah. And then on top of that, you know, HR or if you don’t have HR, it might be an ops person or–
Brian Washburn: Mm-hmm.
Wendy Sellers: …the managers. They’re gonna be the ones to be able to tell you, “Here are the challenges I have with my employees.” You could look at, you know, feedback forms. You could look at performance improvement plans, which half the time do not improve performance ’cause people are just trying to get them out the door. That’s a whole other conversation.
But, you know, you can ask HR or HR-ish. But ask the managers. You know, if you don’t have the actual documents as the manager, what are your problems? Why are you struggling with retaining employees? Or why are people leaving? Or why are you making people leave? And then you could say, alright, now let’s put learning & development into that aspect so that we can attract employees and then immediately start training them the way we want them to behave and act in our organization.
But then on top of that, if they need a little bit more, you know, improvement on their knowledge, skills, and abilities for the core of the job. So that’s how they can work together. You have to communicate. I love committees. I love committees or task force, whatever you wanna call them, saying, “let’s get more minds in there.” And for whatever reason we think, you know, HR or managers or directors have all the answers. Usually the employees have the answers.
Why don’t we ask their opinion? It could be a survey, but then maybe after the survey you say, okay, now we’re gonna have a focus group. Somebody that’s been been here 20 years, two months., two years a manager, you know, non-manager, let’s have a focus group, and then let’s actually listen to our employees who are willing to be on this focus group because they wanna help the company improve.
And then you transfer that into learning & development.
Brian Washburn: You know, Wendy, I could nerd out with you for hours about this stuff. Unfortunately, people aren’t gonna listen to us just nerding out over this stuff for hours and I know that you have other things that you need to do with your day. Thank you so much for joining us. Before we go, what is the best way for people to find you?
Wendy Sellers: So I’m a LinkedIn junkie. You could find me on LinkedIn all day every day. Maybe not all day, but a lot. Wendy Sellers, The HR Lady®, or you can go to my website, thehrlady.com.
Brian Washburn: Perfect. Thank you so much, Wendy, for giving us some time sharing some of your pearls of wisdom. from the HR perspective and certainly from leadership development. Suck It up, Buttercup is a perfect title for a book. Thank you everyone else for listening. If you found this helpful, please share a link to it on LinkedIn.
I’m a LinkedIn junkie as well, and if you ever want to nerd out over anything that is training related, let’s grab virtual coffee. And until next time, happy training everyone.
