Damon Lembi with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. The Learn-It-All Leader

Damon Lembi talks with Jason Barnard about the learn-it-all leader.

Damon Lembi is the host of The Learn-It-All Podcast and the CEO of Learnit. Damon Lembi and Jason Barnard discuss the essential traits of a learn-it-all leader: humility, curiosity, integrity, accountability, and courage.

Damon shares insights on how these traits help create a flexible, adaptive, and successful leadership approach. Damon and Jason explore the importance of continuous learning, delegation, and feedback in business growth, emphasizing the balance between learning and decisive action.

Damon also shares how leveraging tools like ChatGPT has helped streamline decision-making and improve company strategies. This is a must-watch episode on how continuous learning and decisive action build resilient organizations.

What you’ll learn from Damon Lembi

00:00 Damon Lembi and Jason Barnard
01:12 What Features Did Jason Barnard Emphasize on Damon Lembi’s Knowledge Panel?
02:36 What Search Engines Can You Use to Research Podcast Guests, Potential Partners, and Clients?
03:21 What is a Know-It-All Leader?
03:50 What are the Five Distinguishing Traits of a Learn-It-All Leader?
04:09 What is a Learn-It-All Leader?
04:23 What Did Jason Barnard Highlight About Himself in Damon Lembi’s Five Traits of a Learn-It-All Leader?
04:56 What Challenges Do Leaders Face When Learning to Delegate?
05:33 Why is it Important for Leaders to Give Their Team Autonomy?
05:48 Why Did Jason Barnard Mention That He Was a Bottleneck in the Delegation Process to His Team?
06:23 Why is it Important for Leaders to Know How to Receive Feedback?
07:25 What Would a Leader Feel When a Team Member Thinks They Are Not Tough Enough?
08:25 Why is Curiosity an Essential Trait for Learn-It-All Leaders?
08:54 Why is Humility Important for Learn-It-All Leaders When Working With Their Team?
09:18 What Do Leaders Need to Do to Avoid Losing Great Talent and Allow Their Team to Grow?
09:40 Why is Courage Important for Learn-It-All Leaders?
10:08 Why Do Some Leaders Resist Challenges Once They Feel They’ve “Made It”?
10:27 Why Do Learn-It-All Leaders Embrace Challenges and View Failure as Growth?
10:40 Why Do Learn-It-All Leaders Prioritize Integrity in Their Leadership Approach?
11:24 Why Do Great Leaders Take Accountability Rather Than Blame Their Team Members?
11:41 Why Should the Leader Take Full Responsibility for Solving a Problem in the Team?
13:00 When Should a Leader Help, and When Should They Let the Team Solve the Problem on Their Own?
14:34 How Can a Leader Share Their System Effectively While Encouraging Feedback and Improvement?
15:55 How Do Leaders Balance Continuous Learning With Decisive Action to Keep Moving Forward?
19:01 How Does Adopting a Learn-It-All Mindset Instead of a Know-It-All Attitude Impact Business Growth?
19:14 Why Do Companies Need Continuous Innovation?
19:25 Why Do Leaders Need Continuous Learning in the AI-Driven World?
19:38 Why Do Leaders Need Courage?
19:59 Why Do Leaders Fear Investing in Employees?
20:14 How Do Organizations Foster Employee Loyalty?

This episode was recorded live on video February 25th 2025

Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
https://a.co/d/0iX38kz
https://a.co/d/fnrNUB2
https://www.thelearnitallleader.com/podcast
Damon Lembi

Transcript from Damon Lembi with Jason Barnard on Fastlane Founders And Legacy. The Learn-It-All Leader

[00:00:00] Narrator: Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard. Each week, Jason sits down with successful entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives and get them to share how they mastered the delicate balance between rapid growth and enduring success in the business world. How can we quickly build a profitable business that stands the test of time and becomes our legacy, A legacy we’re proud of. Fastlane Founders and Legacy with Jason Barnard.

[00:00:31] Jason Barnard: Hi everybody and welcome to another Fastlane Founders and Legacy with me, Jason Barnard. And a quick hello and we’re good to go. Welcome to the show, Damon Lembi.

[00:00:43] Damon Lembi: Well, Jason, I’ve been on quite a few podcasts and I don’t think I’ve ever been serenaded before. So I love it.

[00:00:50] Jason Barnard: Super. And I’m going to love the topic today. The Learn-It-All versus the know-it-all leader. Helping people to lead better, delegate better, manage better. Hugely interesting topics for entrepreneurs, business leaders, and even kind of different people in management. I’ve learned a lot from a guy called Mads Singers and I think I’m about to learn a lot more from you. But before we get into that really quickly, I always show the Brand SERP or ChatGPT results people today. I chose to show the Brand SERP and what I found interesting here, I’ve marked in three green arrows is number one, you’ve written books.

So Google’s using the Google Books description and that description is almost impossible to get rid of. So once you’ve written a book, you’re stuck with the Google Books description that you submit. Number two, you put a great piece of information in there, which is 1.8 million professionals. So when you’re writing your description for your book, always put some really cool information. Hopefully that won’t go out of date. And the subtitle there on the left is Author. And I find that it’s really nice. But then once again, Google Books is dominating.

Instead of saying you’re an entrepreneur and a CEO, it’s saying you’re an author. How do you feel about that? Do you feel author is accurate or would you rather be entrepreneur?

[00:02:05] Damon Lembi: I’d rather be an entrepreneur or CEO than author. And I hope the 1.8 does go out of a date because it keeps going up.

[00:02:14] Jason Barnard: Very good point. Yeah, we do find a lot of our clients come to us and say, well, I’m tagged as an author or somebody was an SEO professional, I’d much rather be seen as an entrepreneur. And we can switch that for them. That’s part of what we do at Kalicube. But you said you actually use Google and ChatGPT to research guests for your podcast. You also use it to research potential partners and clients.

[00:02:36] Damon Lembi: A hundred percent. I use Google, ChatGPT and like I mentioned to you before, Perplexity, to go through and research potential guests, partners, and even YouTube, to be honest, you know, to go through. Because, I mean, I think YouTube is a great search engine as well when you want to find out information or watch short clips on people.

[00:02:56] Jason Barnard: Yeah, I think kind of a lot of us forget that we research people on Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, maybe even Alexa and Siri, and we don’t realize that other people are doing it to us. So I didn’t realize you’d been researching me yesterday and you know way too much about me already. It’s scary. But let’s talk about delegation. Describe to me the Learn-It-All versus the know-it-all to kick off so we know the difference.

[00:03:20] Damon Lembi: Okay, so let’s start off with the know-it-all. Okay, so the know-it-all we all come across. These people, they have all the answers. They’re stuck in their ways. They’re. It’s my way or the highway, especially, you know, for a leader or a coach or whatever. And they’re just not open to being adaptable and hearing diverse opinions. And on the flip side of that, what I talk about in my book, The Learn-It-All Leader, is a learn-it-all mentality.

And there’s really five traits, I believe, that make a great leader when it comes to becoming a learn-it-all. And those five traits are humility, curiosity, integrity. You think you don’t have to tell people to lead with integrity, but you really do. Accountability and courage. You know, courage to get out of your comfort zone and have. And make tough decisions. So really a learn-it-all is somebody who’s open, adaptable, and humble enough to say, look, I don’t have all the answers, so I’m going to surround myself with people I can tap into who can help me get to where I want to go.

[00:04:24] Jason Barnard: Right. And is that something you can learn? Because that list of five, I can see myself in most of them. But I have always had the tendency of thinking I know how to do things better than other people. And it’s something I’ve had to let go of. I’ve learned. Can you learn the whole lot?

[00:04:40] Damon Lembi: Yeah. Well, first of all, I think nobody’s 100% learn-it-all. And I don’t think anybody’s 100% know it all. I think it kind of ebbs and flows. And like, for instance, as a parent, when it comes to bedtime for the kids, I’m a know it all. There’s no that. That’s just way it’s going to be. And.

But from a work perspective, I think that you mentioned delegation earlier. I’ve become a lot better at that over the years. You know, running my business, learning. I have about 100 employees. But for a long time, all the decisions had to come through me. Right. Like, I wanted to be involved in everything. And even though I had a great team, I didn’t trust people enough, really, I guess.

And I thought I had all the answers. And it took me a while to realize, Hey, if you really want to scale and grow, if you’re a know it all as a leader, then, Jason, you’re just a bottleneck. You’re the bottleneck for everybody around you and can’t get things done. So you have to be able to give people the autonomy and the space to. To take on tasks and responsibilities and just, you know, if there’s failure, hey, great, let’s. Let’s just learn from those mistakes, move on and get better next time.

[00:05:48] Jason Barnard: Right? You mentioned bottleneck, and that’s something that struck me when I started to try to let go. And I mentioned to you earlier on, intellectually, I could understand that I had to let go and give work over to other people, not check everything they do and trust them. But emotionally, I found that very difficult. And then one day, somebody on my team, Jean Marie, said to me, Jason, you’re a bottleneck. I can’t get my work through because you keep wanting to check it. We have to find a solution to you being the bottleneck, which we did. And it was really interesting that she had the courage to say that.

[00:06:22] Damon Lembi: I was just going to tell you that. I said that shows that she has a trust in you, that she feels like she could come and speak honestly with you and give you feedback and not be reprimanded for it. So that’s great that you have people like that working for you. And I think that that is so important when it comes to giving and receiving feedback. Great leaders know how to receive feedback in a way that they don’t get defensive, and people feel open to sharing their thoughts with them. And I love the fact that she called you out as a bottleneck because it’s something that I think a lot of business leaders struggle with.

[00:06:57] Jason Barnard: Yeah. Would I add another example of somebody else on the team, Mary Ann, who called me out for not being tough enough? She said, you’re too nice. You keep saying to everybody, it’s okay, it’s fine. It doesn’t matter. You made a mistake. We can figure out about it. And obviously you don’t get on somebody’s case about the mistake they’ve made. But certainly saying, okay, that happened, not good.

What do we do to fix it Is much better than, let’s not worry about it at all.

[00:07:21] Damon Lembi: How did it make you feel when she said she didn’t think you were tough enough?

[00:07:26] Jason Barnard: It made me feel like I wasn’t doing my job, actually. And it made me laugh because she’s such a lovely person and she said in a very kind way. But when somebody on your team asks you to be tougher with the team, I found that funny and strange.

[00:07:43] Damon Lembi: Yeah. I mean, I’ve actually experienced that too in the past where people have told me, Hey, I don’t think you’re tough enough. And inside I get a little defensive. But I try not to show it. Right. Because I want to share, like, look at these tough calls or these decisions that I have made in the past. But no, I think it’s always good information to get any data you can get and feedback as how, as far as people proceed, perceive you to be is important. And it goes back to that learn-it-all mentality.

Because whether or not you want to act on it, at least you have this information that you can do something with.

[00:08:17] Jason Barnard: Right? For me, learn-it-all was just curiosity, but you’ve actually got five. But curiosity was one of them, wasn’t it?

[00:08:25] Damon Lembi: I think that great leaders, great coaches, great parents, it’s all about curiosity. I think curiosity is a thread that weaves through everything. You know, being curious. Like, how can we do something different and better? And especially these days with. With AI, I look at it now and saying, look, instead of, how can we do this better at work, how can we do this better leveraging AI, is there a way that we can get curious and do it? And as far as the other four, yeah. I mean, humility is super important. Like, like we mentioned, you know, you. You can’t have all the answers.

And I think your team respects you. If you say, look, I don’t have all the answers, but I’ve got this great team around me. Tap into them. Because, Jason, think about it. If you hire these people to come work for you, right? And they’re talented people, why do you want to put them in a box and just say and do command and control? If you want them to stay, grow and your company to get better, you got to give them the autonomy, invest in learning with them, and allow them to make mistakes. Otherwise you’re not going to grow and you’re going to lose great talent.

[00:09:31] Jason Barnard: Right, so can we name the five again? Because I can remember curiosity and humility.

[00:09:37] Damon Lembi: And then there’s integrity. Yeah, so let’s go with courage. So what I mean by courage is having the courage to get out of your comfort zone. A lot of times, know it alls. And I was just talking to a friend yesterday who’s a senior leader at Amazon, and he said it’s interesting that you see some of these senior leaders and they, you know, they feel like they’ve made it and they don’t want to be challenged and they don’t want to try to do things differently because they don’t want to, you know, made to be look bad, you know, if something goes wrong or they don’t have all the answers and they feel like, you know, I’ve already made it. So this is the way it’s going to be. Where I think learn it all leaders look at it like, okay, I want you to challenge me and I’m going to have the courage to try something and if I fail, hey, so what, you know, it’s not the end of the day.

We could learn from it and get better. When it comes to integrity, at the end of the day, it’s just do what you say you’re going to do. Don’t over promise and under produce. And then obviously, you know, don’t do anything that’s going to put your team in a compromising position. I think is super important. And then the final one is accountability and, and not, you know, Right. And the accountability piece is, you know, I’ve, I’ve played, I used to be a baseball player and I’ve had some great coaches and I’ve had some poor coaches.

And one coach I vividly remember when things weren’t going well, he pushed it off on his team. You know, like this guy struck out. This guy didn’t pitch a good game, but if things were going well, he took all the credit. That doesn’t make you feel good as a team. So I think great leaders need to take accountability and have their people’s backs. If something goes wrong, you need to say, hey, we’re going to fix this. And this one’s on me since I’m the leader.

[00:11:30] Jason Barnard: Right. Okay. So is it always on me because I’m the leader or can it be on somebody else and I’m simply helping them to solve a problem or an issue?

[00:11:39] Damon Lembi: Well, I’m curious to see what you think about this. But, but for me, I think it’s always on the leader. Now and not necessarily that I have to go in, roll up my sleeves and do the work, but I need to make sure that my people have the time, resources and tools to do the work. And also I need to realize. So for example, we spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on a new LMS system and I wasn’t leading the project, but I was obviously part of it. But six months into it, or maybe even nine months into it, I realized that this just wasn’t going to work. And so we ended up pulling the plug on it, even with sunken cost, you know, the sunken costs on it. And I just kind of stepped up and said, hey look, you know, I, I, we should have made a better decision. And quite frankly I had the wrong person leading the project and that person ended up getting terminated, you know, partially because of that.

But I think it’s on the leader to, you know, to take ownership of it. What do you think?

[00:12:34] Jason Barnard: The way you describe it there, I agree with you, but I, I’ve been trying to understand to what extent I can say to my team, look, you got this wrong. What can we do to solve it and to what extent I should help and to what extent I should just say no, okay, now go away and come back in a week’s time when you solve the problem.

[00:13:00] Damon Lembi: Well, I think it depends on what the problem is. I mean, there’s certain levels of things that you can’t delegate or shouldn’t delegate if it’s in your expertise. But I think great leaders are also great coaches and you know, you don’t jump in and just give them the answers to questions. You know, if you want people to learn and develop, you got to have, it’s hard, you know, especially for new managers, you got to have the patience to ask open ended questions and really probe them into coming up with the answers themselves. But by no means should you not be very direct and say, and not say this isn’t going well, you know, this, this is not working. I mean, that’s fine, you know, I mean to, to especially behind closed doors with your team. I’m just saying, you know, out in front of everybody else, you got to take ownership of it. But you know, it’s like, hey, this isn’t working.

Let’s talk through what we could have done differently and share with me what you think we could do next time and get them to extract that information from them because that will help them learn and grow Yeah, I like what.

[00:14:04] Jason Barnard: We could have done differently, which means going through the whole process and seeing kind of where it went wrong. And I mean, one thing I struggle with all the time is I think it’s a know it all issue is I’ve done a lot of stuff over the last 25 years online. I’ve done all the algorithms, I’ve built platforms, I built Kalicube Pro, I’ve published a podcast. I kind of think, well, I know how to do this, and I’m very tempted to give them my system. Is that always a mistake or can it help?

[00:14:34] Damon Lembi: I don’t think it’s always a mistake, you know, and I think it’s a, it’s a really, really a good benchmark to start with or a foundation to start with. I think what you need to be able to do is to be able to allow people to challenge your assumptions, you know, and say, hey, give me some pushback. If you think there’s better ways to do this, let me know. I also think, which is pretty cool, is you could use ChatGPT to challenge your assumptions as well. Quick little story. I redid our comp plans for our sales team and instead of running it by a CRO somewhere, I just put it in ChatGPT and I said, be a Senior Chief Revenue Officer and challenge me by asking me three questions one at a time about this comp plan on how we can make it better. Long story short, they simplified it.

They made it more focused on the attitudes and behaviors I wanted our team to do. And it was, it was brilliant. But if I was a know it all and thought I had all the answers, then I would just probably keep it the same.

[00:15:38] Jason Barnard: Now, kind of looking at this, you’re saying, well, we’ve got to be continually learning, all of us in the team. So myself, the management level below me and the level below them. How do you manage to balance that continuous learning and decisive action, actually doing things, actually moving things forwards in big steps?

[00:15:55] Damon Lembi: That’s a great question, because one of the things I always want to clarify is when I say learn-it-all leader, it doesn’t mean that all you do is just learn all the time, right? There’s a guy came on my show, David Katz was awesome and he had a line and he said that learning without doing is treason. So you need to find ways to put the learning into action to execute. Because at the end of the day, if you’re not getting results, you’re either going to go out of business or you might lose your job. So I think it’s a combination of like, if you’re reading a book, how are you going to apply this to the work you’re doing? You know, if you make mistakes, how are you going to reverse this and execute and take care of your customers? So it’s important to have a learning mentality. It’s also important as a business leader and an individual contributor to know that you have to get results and execute.

[00:16:49] Jason Barnard: Yeah, yeah. And sometimes, I mean, people on the team find it difficult to execute, to actually do the thing because once you do it, you’ve committed yourself to whatever, whatever it is you decided. And that’s kind of scary. That takes courage. Once again, courage keeps coming back. And in fact, the team motto is smart, courageous and fun. If you want to work at Kalicube, smart courageous and fun and you can get on the bus. And something happened to me the other day in a team meet where we have an all hands meeting and everybody tells everybody else what they’re doing, the problems we’ve been having, the challenges they’ve overcome.

And I used to take notes and make a comment on absolutely everybody. And then a few weeks ago I realized that I didn’t have comments to make about a lot of the people because I don’t really know what they do anymore. I figure that’s a good sign.

[00:17:38] Damon Lembi: Yeah, I think it’s a good sign. I mean, I don’t think that you should be the CEO who sits in a 50th floor office and not be involved at all. I think that that’s not the way to go about it. I mean, I think you need to be accessible to your team and a resource when they need your help. But I think similar to you, I mean, I don’t even pay attention to the day to day operations of what we have going on anymore. I don’t even know what classes we’re running on a regular basis. I know from a macro level what’s popular, who our top customers are and I’m always there to give advice or help. But I feel like my life’s become better and been able to really focus more on big picture goals when I’m not deep into the weeds.

And my team loves it. My team loves it, by the way.

[00:18:30] Jason Barnard: Yeah, no, I’m not there yet and I’m sure my team will watch this and think, I can’t wait for Jason to get to that stage, which is delightful. Another the question is, with business growth, I find my attitude, I think it’s closer to learn-it-all than know-it-all. But initially, four years ago, when I started building the team was very much know-it-all. And what I can see is that growth is encouraged by a learn-it-all approach. I mean, is that fair to say? I would imagine, yes.

[00:19:01] Damon Lembi: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I mean, and I think what you mean by, do you mean company growth or individual team members growth?

[00:19:08] Jason Barnard: Well, I was actually talking about company growth, but you can go for both if you want.

[00:19:12] Damon Lembi: Yeah, well, absolutely. I mean, if you, if you, if your company doesn’t grow, it’s going to die. You know, if you, if you stay stagnant, you’re going to get leapfrogged by somebody else. You know, in our industry, of course, I mean, there’s a lot of things coming around, AI and coaching and everything. So in a learning world, we always need to figure out how to stay ahead of the curb in one way or the other. So we need to grow. And again, it comes back to that word, courage.

You got to have the courage to try and do things differently. And when it comes to individuals, I mean, it’s funny, I have conversations with leaders who still say, well, what if we invest in people and they go through your classes and they end up leaving? I mean, there’s that old saying, right? Like, you know, what, what happens if we invest in them and they leave? And you could also say, what happens if you don’t and they stay? Right? You know, So I think again, great organizations, I like to call them learning organizations, give people the opportunity for growth. Doesn’t always have to be formal training. It could be pure peer, peer mentorship. It can be taking on projects that are outside of their core strengths and giving them opportunities to learn and grow is critical. And I found over the years, people stay a lot longer and are more committed to your company’s mission and purpose.

[00:20:39] Jason Barnard: Absolutely brilliant. Which is a brilliant way to end the conversation because your business is growing, everybody’s learning, everybody’s happy, everybody’s staying on the bus. That’s what we want at Kalicube, and I think that’s what we all want with our companies. Thank you so much, Damon. That was absolutely brilliant. You get the outro song, a quick goodbye to end the show. Thank you, Damon.

[00:21:01] Damon Lembi: Thank you. It was great.

[00:21:03] Jason Barnard: Brilliant.

[00:21:03] Narrator: Your corporate and personal brands are what Google and AI say they are. We can give you back control. Kalicube.