IAM1852 – Leadership Coach Increases Value Generating Capabilities

In this episode of the IAMCEO Podcast, the focus is on Edoardo Binda Zane, a leadership coach and communication trainer. Edoardo helps leaders and teams develop the necessary skills and tools to excel in dynamic and changing markets by increasing their value-generating capabilities.

Throughout his career, Edoardo has worked on and led numerous 7-figure projects. He now combines that experience with various other areas of expertise to enhance teams' and individuals' skills.

In the interview, Edoardo shares the following insights:

Transcription:

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Edoardo Binda Zane Teaser 00:00

I think the biggest lesson that I will give myself, literally slap myself across the face is nobody cares about you. You, Eduardo from five years ago, have your little story, all the stuff that you built in your head about improv and your story, what you've done, but nobody cares.

Intro 00:21

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs and founders, without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you are in search of.

This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:48

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know that we hit 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we're repurposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics, or as I like to call them, business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners, or what I like to call the CB nation architects who are looking to level up their organizations.

This month, we are focused on leadership management and coaching. When we think of leadership management and coaching, we often think of doing all of the other things, but often it's the person that's able to build up their team, that's able to cultivate a creative and innovative culture so that people can excel and actually be their own leaders. So that's why this month we're focusing on those three big topics because they make a huge impact on the organizations that we're a part of.

Now you'll hear some of those topics this month, of course, some really great perspectives on how people are even defining leadership, which I think is extremely exciting. So sit back and enjoy this special episode of the I AM CEO podcast.

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today, I have Edoardo Binda Zane of EBZ Coaching. Eduardo, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Edoardo Binda Zane 02:10

Thank you very much, man. I'm happy to be here.

Gresham Harkless 02:13

No problem. Super excited to have you on as well. Before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Eduardo, so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing.

Eduardo is a leadership coach and communication trainer. He provides leaders and teams with skills and tools to help them thrive in dynamic and changing markets and to increase their capability of generating value.

Throughout his career, he has been working in and heading seven-figure projects. He now combines that experience with other areas of work to develop skills and teams and individuals.

Eduardo, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Edoardo Binda Zane 02:45

I'm excited to speak to your community.

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Gresham Harkless 02:47

Awesome. Let's do it. So to kick everything off, I wanted to hear a little bit more on how you got started. Could you take us through what I call your CEO story and what let you get started with all the awesome things you're working on?

Edoardo Binda Zane 02:56

It starts in a very uninteresting way, as in I've done the most classical one, two-step as in business school and becoming a consultant. And it's interesting that seven years in, I was actually a public consultant working on renewable energy policy. So, take very complex projects, very big ones, we're talking millions. I was responsible for a bunch of people, 16 countries, all of that. Despite that is what I wanted to do, despite the fact that I had studied my whole life to get to the point, I hated it. I really deeply hated the routine of my job and not seeing an impact.

That's the thing that killed me, was not seeing an impact and realizing that I was not me as a person anymore. I was speaking to a computer the whole time, and I just couldn't do it. That's when things started to change because literally out of the blue, I started going I need to do something else, I'm not happy with this. Let's just start a hobby. And that hobby was improv comedy, which is a lot bigger in the States than is in Europe. Even though Berlin has quite an amazing community.

I started to notice that all the training that I had just goofing around on stage, simplifying, of course, was helping me out a lot, making me better in a different way than other consultants that were working with me. Take negotiation, riffing off something that someone else had said, take speaking in public, take understanding better what the other person had to say. That was the kind of seed of whatever I did. After I would say a couple of years, three years, I decided to quit my job and started what I do right now. It started off badly as in, I had all this kind of dream in my head in terms of I'm going to now teach improv comedy to companies and they're going to pay money for it.

Then of course you realize fairly fast that whatever little story you have in your head, if it's not coherent with who is in front of you and improv in a company is really not a thing. There is no communication. So, I failed pretty bad. What I started to do was still keeping a bit of that seed of improv, like in practice, but putting up a lot more knowledge, study, working towards it. Now, let's just say I'm working around three areas, which is my experience as a consultant and my studies, Improv is still a big part of it. And to that, I've added a huge amount of studies. I read academic papers like there's no tomorrow.

I love communication, and positive psychology. I love knowing what I can do to trigger something in a leader. To make the person communicate better, help others grow and so on. I hope I answered your question. I know I tend to spin out of topic when I start talking about this story.

Gresham Harkless 05:57

I love it. No, I absolutely love it. So, you spun into really phenomenal things and it reminds me, I think I read something along the lines of like improv and how much is one of those, I don't know if you call it soft skills, so to speak, but it provides you that opportunity to really use things in so many different ways.

And a lot of great things sometimes don't come from us having these grand ideas, but us pursuing certain interests, certain things that we think are fascinating and then just snowballing from there. It sounds like you have that exact same experience.

Edoardo Binda Zane 06:25

Yeah. Something like that. It starts with an idea and then as long as you keep yourself loosely attached to that, as long as you're not dogmatic about it, that's what I'm trying to say. If you allow yourself to evolve, to go somewhere else, then of course the idea evolves.

It changes into something else and it can turn into something beautiful or it can turn into nothing. But at least, it's nothing fairly fast.

Gresham Harkless 06:51

Yeah, exactly. All right. We hope so. So that helps out a ton. I know you had started touching on a little bit on how you serve the clients that you work with.

Could you go a little bit more into that and how and what you do as a coach and a trainer to help serve your clients?

Edoardo Binda Zane 07:05

Pre-COVID or after COVID? Let's just say by looking at what my core is, I think I truly deeply believe that the core of leading, of working together, of enabling better teamwork is being able to communicate. So that's where I hit on the most. If I want to sell it to a company, I put it as team building, as leadership coaching, as training the whole leadership team, you name it. But I hammer on communicating because you and I, and everyone on earth, don't take it personally, we assume that we know how to communicate since simply because we've been talking to each other our whole life.

But once you start going deeper into it, once you start thinking about, okay, what does it mean to listen? How much energy do I need to put into this? What does the other person mean? How can I take the other person's perspective? It's a lot of work. So that's where I hit on the most. In terms of what my training looks like, it's either me in a group and all sitting in a room together or standing and doing exercises. That did happen a lot before COVID. Now it's not really happening, let's just put it this way. Otherwise, I do a lot of one-to-one coaching that of course takes different forms, a different structure. It's less practical.

The third way I like to work is via online courses or basically putting knowledge in a medium and selling that medium. So I've just written a book on Emotional Intelligence. I've just released a course on emotional intelligence for leaders. So that's also a way that is more accessible for people to get in touch with me. So it's these three, it's either one-to-one, virtual or in-person, group workshops, mainly work better when it's personal virtual. I still have some trouble with that or putting what I know in a medium that people can just get and see if they want to know more.

Gresham Harkless 09:18

Let me ask you this. Would you consider that to be like your secret sauce is your ability to be able to really not just communicate with people, but train people to be able to see that. Do you feel like that's what sets you apart and makes you unique?

Edoardo Binda Zane 09:31

Yeah possibly. My secret sauce is my combination of, what I said before my experience, my Improv training and my research. But now that you say it, yeah, it does make a lot of sense. Because one of the things that I noticed is whenever people step into a room with me whenever I start talking, maybe they consider me a bit clownish, this kind of hamstrung cocaine going around the room and saying things.

And then it happened to me with. I'm not going to say the name of the company, but a big important company was training a lot of their leaders. And one of them, after the workshop was over, came over and said, I was extremely skeptic at the beginning with this tone, like full of gravitas of almost menacing, but yeah. I noticed that when people step into a room with me and do one workshop, whether it's a free one or one that they've been invited to by a friend, you name it, they tend to understand more and want to know more about it. So, yeah, I'll take that as my secret sauce.

Gresham Harkless 10:41

I'm actually going to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So, it could be like an app, a book or a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient. But you mentioned that speech.

Would you consider that to be the hack is to really understand that speech and really be able to execute on that if you're kind of humanizing, the workplace to some degree. That's what it sounds like. Do you consider that to be a hack?

Edoardo Binda Zane 11:04

Yeah. For me, honestly, I wouldn't say that's a hack because it's not something that you can do quickly and directly. I'll give you a hack later on. It's actually one of my favorite ones. But I do consider this to be for me foundational. I do believe that is something that everybody should see it. It takes 40 minutes. You have 40 minutes to spare at some point throughout over the span of three days. Look up John Cleese's creativity in management and just enjoy it. Look at all the points that he can connect.

He's one of my personal heroes professionally and not. But you asked me for a hack. So for me, a hack is something extremely quick, applicable and direct. And since I just went down the rabbit hole on emotional intelligence and leadership, I'm going to give you this one. Most of us consider how happy we feel to be a result of, let's say our conditions or let's say genetics, 50% and whatever is happening around us for the other 50%. And that's a fair assessment, except that it's wrong. They've done tests about it. They put numbers on it.

So how happy you and I feel right now depends 50% by your genetics. So you don't have any control on it. 10% is our context, but 40% is fully under your control. So you have direct control over 40% of your happiness. The hack to boost that 40% when you're feeling down, when you're feeling deprived of energy, when you cannot focus because of a negative event that happened in your life. The wonderful hack is to take a piece of paper and a pen and write down 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 things you are thankful for. As superficial and or as deep as you want.

Gresham Harkless 12:58

I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client, or if you hop to do a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

Edoardo Binda Zane 13:09

So time machine, I'll take the time machine as fan of Doctor Who also like the TARDIS, but I think the biggest lesson that I will give myself literally slap myself across the face is nobody cares about you.

You Edoardo from five years ago, have your little story, all the stuff that you built in your head about Improv and your story, what you've done, but nobody cares. Nobody wants to listen to that. They only want to listen to what you can do for them.

Gresham Harkless 13:42

Nice. I appreciate that. And so now I want to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote and quote CEOs on the show.

So Edoardo, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Edoardo Binda Zane 13:54

For me, being a CEO means having the enjoyment and the impact of the full weight of being responsible for yourself.

Gresham Harkless 14:04

Edoardo, I truly appreciate that definition and I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know.

And of course, how best they can get out of you, find out about your course and all the awesome things that you're working on as well.

Edoardo Binda Zane 14:20

All right. Thank you very much. Anything, I'm always open to get in touch with anyone who's got a question. The best way to contact me is via my website, ebz-coaching.com or via LinkedIn. Pretty sure there was only one person in the world with my name.

And you mentioned my course, thank you very much. I just launched it. It's called Emotional Intelligence for Leaders. I would actually like to extend a discount code for anyone who will be interested of your listeners to take the course. I'll pass it on to you.

You can link it below the episode, and if that's something they're interested in, it's something that I'd be happy to give, or if they prefer to read us, to have a book, Emotional Intelligence for leaders with somehow the same content or along the same lines, but of course it depends on what you want to take out of it.

Gresham Harkless 15:09

Yeah, absolutely. We'll definitely, as you said Edoardo have the links and information for the book, your website and all, and then the course as well too, along with that discount code.

So I appreciate you for making that available and thank you so much for giving us so much wisdom and information about how we can improve and be better leaders and communicate a lot better and in so many different aspects, in our life and our business. So appreciate you, my friend, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Outro 15:33

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by CB Nation in Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Get your driven CEO gear at ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harless, Jr. Thank you for listening.

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