Lynn Hunsaker

061: Lynn Hunsaker: I will inconvenience myself to do that

Intro: Welcome to the Fast Leader Podcast, where we explore convenient yet effective shortcuts that will help you get ahead and move forward faster by becoming a better leader. And now here’s your host, customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligent practitioner, Jim Rembach.

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Jim Rembach:    Okay, Fast Leader Legion, today I’m excited because I have the opportunity to share with you somebody that I have known for a couple of years and we’ve had some really good conversations and being able to introduce her to you is something that does mean a lot to me. Lynn Hunsaker has one brother and three sisters and all of them were born in different states in the US. As a youngster Lynn lived in 11 states with most of them being west of the Mississippi River. Lynn even learn Dutch while living a year and a half in Belgium and the Netherlands as a church missionary volunteer. Lynn was always a shy kid even what her grandparents would come to visit. She was reserved in sharing her opinions but eventually noticed that others who spoke up got more perks, and her ideas were just as good. So, Lynn learn to build courage to speak up and found herself moving up quickly.

Within four years Lynn became head of corporate quality for Fortune 250 companies in Silicon Valley, the only woman and the youngest person in many of the executive meeting she attended. Lynn learned to stand her ground and to be assertive. Lynn’s roles over 11 years required her to engage in every line of business, accounting, and support function and making substantial improvements. With no direct authority over any of them she had to achieve goals to influence what help Lynn most was getting familiar with frameworks and techniques for change management, personality types, managing assumptions, and intended outcomes, situational leadership, organizational learning, internal communications and accountability. Lynn is also currently leading to sister companies, marketing, operations partners and clear action customer experience consulting. Both are focused on cross functional collaboration to get things right the first time for customer’s well-being and organic business grow.

Lynn is an active volunteer. She has served for 10 years on the Silicon Valley, American Marketing Association Board of Directors, six years on the Bay Area Association for psychological type Board of Directors, serves on the leadership Council for her church women’s organization and is the director of Earthquake Preparedness across eight congregations in Silicon Valley and is a frequent co-chair of committees for the Customer Experience Professionals Association. As a frequent columnist in customer experience publications and speaker at customer service events, Lynn hopes to change a lot of customer’s lives by perpetuating a holistic view of customer experience management especially across cross-functional engagements to prevent recurrence of issues and make businesses lovable with raving fans. Lynn Hunsaker, are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Lynn Hunsaker:    Bring it on Jim, I’m ready. 

Jim Rembach:    I’ve given our folks a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so tha we can get to know you even better? 

Lynn Hunsaker:    I’m really excited about spreading knowledge as far and wide as possible and I found that one of the best ways to do that is in group settings where people have a lot of interaction such as using social media and other community platforms and subscription opportunities, so in pursuing in both marketing operations partners and clear action we feel like this is the way to make new ideas go viral and accelerate adoption within companies as well. 

Jim Rembach:    You know Lynn for the longest time I consider you one of the leading technical experts in regards to some of the things that we’ve already talked about as far as the marketing operations piece the customer experience piece, the cross collaboration piece, I think you’re a machine in regards to the way that you produce so much of the material in regards to these particular areas of new businesses, both be B to B and B to C that—how do you do it? How do you actually do it? Do you have a bunch of minions that we don’t know about? Helping you produce all these?

Lynn Hunsaker:    I don’t know. I get ideas and I have tons of ideas that I haven’t yet executed on. I really enjoy seeing things from different perspectives as I talk to people and that’s usually my best spotter, seeing how other people are talking about things or how thing come across as I’m explaining something to them. That gives me ten new ideas for things I want to put out there and help people choose a better path. 

Jim Rembach:    You bring up an interesting point about the ten different things. And maybe it’s a gender thing and I’m just a guy and I’m automatically defective in that, guys just don’t multitask. We don’t have the connection between our two brain hemispheres that women have. And so, we have a little bit about, unless you try to do that, but for me I think about 10 different ideas when I see what people are talking about but I have difficulty just executing on one. Because for me for example, the whole writing thing just seems to take a long time. And people asked me to write all the time but heck I’d rather have a guest and do a podcast video. So, if you start thinking about those 10 ideas and being able to put them in textual form and you do that and it seems like so rapidly, what helps you execute and do it quickly to get all 10 things when I’m struggling with just one?

Lynn Hunsaker:    I don’t really know. I know that in 2009 there was a downturn and I made some goals that were pretty ambitious for getting my ideas out there because you wanted to accelerate business as quickly as possible and that economic downturn. I hired some people to show me how to do the webcasting and podcasting and blogging and I think practice makes perfect. I was very productive that year but it was very difficult because it was my first time trying those kinds of things. And now, I think that repurposing content is such a big deal, you create something in writing or on the podcast then you can switch it over to the other mode, take snippets of different things and repurpose them. Sometimes it looks like there’s a heck of a lot more new stuff when it’s actually breathing new life into things that were existing and just rearranging them for a new mode.

Jim Rembach:    And I think that’s a really important point, thanks for sharing that, is that we have to think a little bit big picture and holistically when it comes to anything that we develop these days. Because having access to it to be able to have multiple and different audiences connect with it that means we have to put in different types of medium, so that’s a great thought. Now you and have also had a lot of discussions, your parents were missionaries and so that was part of the moving around in different places and you have a strong faith and so I know that also being an author, a speaker that there’s a lot of things that you look for in inspiration because we talk about those. You and I had the opportunity to trap a bunch of quotes and inspire us on several occasions but is there one or two that you can share with the audience that helps and give you that extra drive and push?

 Lynn Hunsaker:   Well, certainly where much is given much is required, I’ve always felt lucky in life and that I needed to give to the world. One of the big quotes that made a huge difference in my career was from our chairman at Applied Materials, which is the semiconductor equipment company, our chairman was James Morgan and he used to say, “Good news is no news, no news is bad news and bad news is good news.” Which I think gives everyone pause to try to interpret what that means. 

What it meant for me and as I used it as a voice of the customer manager and customer experience improvement director and then later as a head of corporate quality there was, Gee whiz, we already know we’re pretty good so good news is no news, we do get a lot accolades but we’re pretty sharp people and were very proud of that. So, no news is bad news because there are people who aren’t informing us of what’s going on in their minds they’re going to be voting with their dollars and will be left in the cold. And finally bad news is good news means let’s welcome early warning signals, let’s welcome a constructive feedback and take it as such and humble ourselves to be appreciative for those early warning signals so that we can make sure we’re always on the trajectory that we can think we’re on. And I found that to be powerful in many dimensions in my life. I still remind myself of it even just yesterday as I was receiving feedback from one of my colleagues.

Jim Rembach:    Thanks for sharing that. One thing that kind of stood out to me that I had to correct myself with is that when I heard you say that I’m like, “When do you celebrate?” We needed some of that as far as the motivation piece is concerned. So, I think though when I look at it again there’s humility in that. 

Lynn Hunsaker:    Yes we do celebrate the good news but that’s given that’s why it’s no news, doesn’t mean no celebrating.

 Jim Rembach:    Got it. We definitely have to celebrate. So, I know you had mentioned to me a couple of other quotes that are important to you.

Lynn Hunsaker:    I had this quote when I was a young girl, I think I must have been about nine or ten and that was on an index card at one of the classes I attended and I put it on my bulletin board and I just love it. It’s kind of weird because when you’re thinking of the language here and my age it resonated with me and I left it on my bulletin board for, I don’t know five or six years, and I think it was by Ralph Waldo Emerson, “That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do not that the nature of the thing has changed but our ability to do has increased.” And I think that it goes back to my initial story about learning how to repurpose material and a very prolific, you persist in doing it now it becomes second nature and sweep it out.

Jim Rembach:    That’s very true. I can definitely see how that has influenced you even from a long time ago until today, thanks for sharing that again. Gosh, I know there’s—even you and I, we have this conversations about our own humps that we were trying to get over and hopefully we’ve helped each other accomplish that. As far as sharing one of those humps with an audience can you tell us a time by which you’ve had to get over it and it really set you on a better course of direction?

Lynn Hunsaker:    Well, sure. There’ve been many times when I’ve been puzzled by what’s going on with the group that I’m leading or group that I’m participating in. I think one of the most definitive humps that I achieved was just to begin to view things from the other person’s perspective. For example, when I went to Holland and Belgium I had only learned a little bit of Dutch in a language school and you don’t really learn that much from even high school classes when you’re learning a foreign language, the best thing to do is to be immersed. So, I was immersed and sitting there with people speaking Dutch. I didn’t understand everything they were saying but I mimic what they were staying in their mouth inside my own mouth. And I found myself bunging myself sitting in their shoes and check that further with other things and other scenarios later in life, in my school, in my work imagining myself sitting where the other person’s sitting. 

And I think that that probably was more emphasized for me because of the nature of the work that I was doing, which is customer satisfaction work, you’re trying to understand what’s going on in the customer’s mind and then trying to help your executives and fellow employees to adopt what was going on in the customer’s mind and make use of it. So you have to, also in my role, I had to step in to the shoes of the people around me, my executives and fellow employees, and see things from their perspective and then connect the dots. So, that’s been reiterated over and over again and I’ve taken it to the point where, if I imagine that I need to have physical proximity or make myself available to meet them where they are, I will inconvenience myself to do that because I know that it’s in the best interest of us both. And I need to make sure that I’m seeing it from the other person’s perspective and treating it like that way in order to get the progress that I want. 

Jim Rembach:    Thanks for sharing that. There’s a couple of things that stood out to me when you’re referring to that and one being is that, that doesn’t happen quickly. Even learning a new language, they say it’s easy when we were a young child and we can pick it up, but you’re a teen at that time I think as you’re referencing it, it was a little bit harder to learn the language as we get older. But what you did was totally engulf yourself with it and took the time and the effort in order to be able to get to the point to where I think in a year and a half you were pretty fluent with Dutch.

Lynn Hunsaker:    That’s right. I was able to get 16 credits of A grade just by taking one medieval literature course in Dutch, that was the only one they offered it was just horrible like, “Why are we learning this kind of Dutch language, nobody speaks this way anymore? But we had a Dutch guy who was teaching it and that’s what he thought was really great for college course and then the rest was through testing. And so I do still think in Dutch occasionally especially my most personal thoughts and I like to use it whenever I can.

Jim Rembach:    Well, and so for me, I think that is just a great really connection also too Fast Leader show because oftentimes people think, “Hey, Fast, how can I get there quick?” Well, how you get there quick is by doing it the right way and not by taking shortcuts.

Lynn Hunsaker:    That’s right, you think it’s right the first time. 

Jim Rembach:    There you go. And so the beauty, and why we love for folks like you to share your stories, is that we can learn from that and that’s the power of stories it’s experience that we can borrow somebody else’s experience, so thanks for sharing that experience. If you start thinking—gosh, we talked about so many things that you have on your plate, but if there was one thing that’s really giving you a lot of energy and a goal that you have, what would be?

Lynn Hunsaker:    I have a lot of passion when I see a path toward a ‘to be picture’. Something that would be so awesome compared to the way things are right now. And I can automatically create this path toward it. I often use some kind of research in creating path and I like to get a lot of inputs from other people. But vision at the end state is something that I maintain a lot of continuity for as well as the path to get there, so that’s one thing that people working with me are well-informed to know that if they want me to deviate from the path they need to give me reasons. I don’t just ads I don’t just jump off from that. I have a lot of energy for this earthquake preparedness committee that I’m leading. I have a lot of energy for everything that I’m doing and I think that half of it is just having the vision. And then of course as a leader the other half is making sure there’s a shared vision and I think that that is something that we take for granted quite a lot. I liken it to—if you’re going on a trip with somebody and you haven’t figured out you both want to spend your time this way or that way, you quickly learn that you don’t have a shared vision. In organizations we often assumed that there’s a shared vision and checking for understanding I think is the biggest skill that has affected me in my adult life because it wasn’t something that was kind of part and parcel of my childhood it just didn’t check for understanding you took things at face value and you fell in line with things. So realizing that people may not be falling in line or that I might not even be falling in line or maybe the line that we’re following may not be the best line. So, I’m always checking my own assumptions and checking my assumptions about others, understanding what’s driving others assumptions can help me maintain my passion as well. I think that part of passion is the persistence, there’s a persistence element to it. If you let go of a passion readily then it wasn’t really a passion.

Jim Rembach:    You mentioned something about the passion for this earthquake preparedness? What has given you passion about earthquake preparedness?

Lynn Hunsaker:    When I first got that assignment I didn’t really know much about, and I thought, “Well, let me take a class from the Red Cross, let me take a class from my city and see more about what there is. I’ll tell you the first day that I took that class, I came home from it, it was around 9:00 o’clock and I smelled some smoke in my neighborhood and I thought—wow, what’s going on, I can’t see any fire trucks or whatever. But I turned on the news, which I liked to turn on the news at night, and lo and behold the San Bruno gas explosion had happened and I don’t know if the smoke was coming from that, but this was a huge issue with dozens of homes and fatalities just south of San Francisco where a gas pipe a burst in the neighborhood that evening, and that really drove a home of the importance of what I was embarking on.

And as took the classes I learn so much about how people’s lives were at stake and how there was also real tender element about those kinds of situations where the human interaction is so important. So since then I’ve had meetings with my neighbors, a couple of years in a row where they come over and we talked about how we’re going to help each other thinking about who’s going to do this, who’s going to do that now so that if I’m out of town and we can take care of each other. So, there’s a lot to it like that, I think the human element and human to human stuff is a huge part of what turns people on and turns me on in particular and drives that passion.

Jim Rembach:    And the Fast Leader Legion wishes you the very best. Now, before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor.

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Alright, here we go Fast Leader Legion it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay, Lynn, the Hump Day Hoedown is the part of our show where you give us good insights fast. So, I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Lynn Hunsaker, are you ready to hoedown?

Jim Rembach:    You bet, bring it on. 

Jim Rembach:    Alright. So do you think is holding you back from being an even better leader today?

Lynn Hunsaker:    Probably bootstrapping things. So a matter of resourcing. 

Jim Rembach:    What is the best leadership advice you have ever received?

Lynn Hunsaker:    Well I read the book called that Zapp! The Lightning of Empowerment and it was incredibly impactful and helping me to see what empowerment actually is. When you delegate the people help them see the intended outcome that you have and then let go let them be free.

Jim Rembach:    What is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success? 

Lynn Hunsaker:    Doing the whole job. Taking a look at the big picture and making sure that all the pieces fit together.

Jim Rembach:    What  do you feel is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life?

Lynn Hunsaker:    Techniques that I learned in change management classes. I can’t underscore enough how important it is for anybody who wants to make an impact in an organization to take a formal change management classes, not about coping it’s about and being strategic in making change happen. 

Jim Rembach:    What one book would you recommend to our listeners, they could be from any genre? 

Lynn Hunsaker:    Well, I think that Zapp! The Lightning and Empowerment might be a good one. It’s a pretty quick read. It’s entertaining and you can certainly finish it on a trip from San Francisco to LA. 

Jim Rembach:    Okay Fast Leader listeners, you can find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going to fastleader.net/Lynn Hunsaker. Okay, Lynn this is my last Hump Day Hoedown question: Imagine you were given the opportunity to go back to the age of 25 and you’ve been given the opportunity to take the knowledge and skills that you have now back with you but you can’t take everything you could only choose one, so what one skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

Lynn Hunsaker:    I learned about intended outcome in an executive leadership course I took in my 30’s and I wish I would’ve known about intended outcomes management much earlier. It’s the idea of looking at the end point what are you trying to achieve and then allowing a lot more flexibility in terms of getting there but in every interaction preparing for it. What is the other person going to be expecting? What am I expecting to happen? And how does this contribute toward that intended outcome? So usually an intended outcome is something that takes several steps or several interactions to get toward, you might not even as a state out right but being clear about it in your own mind from the beginning that will keep you on course.

Jim Rembach:    Lynn, it was an honor to spend time with you today. Can you please share with the Fast Leader Legion how they can connect with you?

Lynn Hunsaker:    Sure. I’m on LinkedIn, LynnHunsaker. I’ve got Twitter @clearaction and my website is clearactioncx.com

Jim Rembach:    Lynn Hunsaker, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom, the Fast Leader legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump. 

Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader Show today. For recaps, links from every show, special offers and access to download and subscribe, if you haven’t already, head on over the www.fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster.

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