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Resilient Leadership: Thriving in the Face of Adversity

Harnessing Essential Habits to Overcome Challenges and Inspire Success Resilience and leadership play vital roles in organizational success, with true leadership focusing on empowering others to be their best selves while pursuing a noble goal. In this episode, our guest Mike Watson delves into the habits and values that foster resilience in teams, emphasizing the …

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Rick Miller | Be Chief

216: Rick Miller: All I did was apply the lessons my dad taught me

Rick Miller Notes Page

Rick Miller has turned around businesses during a dot com bomb and lead organizations that had to deal with real bombs. And all he did was apply the great lessons his dad taught him at the kitchen table, decades earlier.

Rick Miller was born and raised outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Rick is the oldest of 3 boys who were raised primarily by their father, as Rick’s mother was hospitalized for much of his youth.

Professionally, Rick’s Dad served as personnel (human resources) leader in the only non-union manufacturer in Central Massachusetts. Rick has been described by many as a different kind of turnaround specialist. Rick describes that difference as his balanced focus on human capital and financial capital, and Rick credits his father for that strategy.

The common theme throughout Rick’s career has been a focus on building highly productive teams. He actually started that practice in high school and college sports, and continued in his early professional life. Rick started his career in computer sales, where he quickly moved up first into general management, and then onto turnaround management as a specialty. In the first 27 years of his career, Rick applied his craft to companies in different industries ranging from a start-up to a Fortune 10 multi-national (AT&T), earning a reputation as a turnaround expert, a servant-leader, and a go-to Chief.

Rick’s legacy has been built around creating powerful teams that achieve sustainable growth.  Rick has proven that sustainable growth is achievable in any organization with appropriate focus on the 6C’s – customers, competitors, costs, capital, communities, AND a culture where employees can achieve sustainable growth too.

Rick currently serves as an Executive Coach and Confidant in a company he founded 11 years ago. He also speaks publicly at colleges and companies on how to build powerful teams that can achieve sustainable growth.

He shares the secrets of his strategy in the recently released book Be Chief: It’s a Choice, Not a Title, named an Amazon #1 new release in both Leadership Training and Business Management categories.

Rick has earned a bachelor’s degree from Bentley University and a MBA from Columbia University. Rick has been married for 36 years, and he and his wife Diane have proudly raised 2 public servants. Their son Jack currently serves as Press Secretary for Congressman Ami Bera in Washington DC. Their daughter Casey teaches in a bilingual 2nd grade class in New London CT.

Rick and Diane live in Morristown NJ.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Listen to @BEINGCHIEF to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow – Click to Tweet

“With whatever cards your dealt, play those cards to the best of your ability with a smile on your face.” – Click to Tweet

“Chiefs are people who connect what they do to who they are.” – Click to Tweet

“There’s a huge power in what you feel once you know what you stand for.” – Click to Tweet

“Once you figure out what you stand for, you can take a stand.” – Click to Tweet

“You know yourself more when you’re present.” – Click to Tweet

“You know yourself more when you choose to be accepting.” – Click to Tweet

“You know yourself more when you are generous.” – Click to Tweet

“It is important to know who you are, so that when you make the choice about what to do, they’re consistent with your values.” – Click to Tweet

“7 out of 10 workers are not fully engaged at work. Many times, it’s because what’s being said and what’s being done from a values perspective, isn’t quite matching up.” – Click to Tweet

“It’s the human capital that will enable financial capital success.” – Click to Tweet

“Power comes from when you line up how you think, how you feel, how you speak, write and act.” – Click to Tweet

“Today’s version of power is so much more attainable by everyone.” – Click to Tweet

“Power today is about energy, confidence, clarity, influence and impact.” – Click to Tweet

“When you learn something new and open up to a new truth, don’t be afraid to change your position.” – Click to Tweet

“Anyone that’s told you they’ve figured it all out, run away, they’re dangerous.” – Click to Tweet

“Open up and be open to all input.” – Click to Tweet

“Never confuse titles with power.” – Click to Tweet

“The language of business is numbers.” – Click to Tweet

“Power is never given, it’s only taken.” – Click to Tweet

Hump to Get Over

Rick Miller has turned around businesses during a dot com bomb and lead organizations that had to deal with real bombs. And all he did was apply the great lessons his dad taught him at the kitchen table, decades earlier.

Advice for others

Maintain a healthy impatience because it drives you forward and keeps you centered.

Holding him back from being an even better leader

Going more deeply into meditation.

Best Leadership Advice

Power is never given, it’s only taken.

Secret to Success

Persistence

Best tools in business or life

My network

Recommended Reading

Be Chief: It’s a Choice, Not a Title

Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

Contacting Rick Miller

Website: https://beingchief.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BEINGCHIEF

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/BEINGCHIEF/

Resources and Show Mentions

Power Compass Survey

Call Center Coach

An Even Better Place to Work

Show Transcript: 

[expand title=”Click to access edited transcript”]

216: Rick Miller: All I did was apply the lessons my dad taught me

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 intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

Call center coach develops and unites the next generation of call center leaders. Through our e-learning and community individuals gain knowledge and skills in the six core competencies that is the blueprint that develops high-performing call center leaders. Successful supervisors do not just happen so go to callcentercoach.com to learn more about enrollment and download your copy of the Supervisor Success Path e-book now.

Okay, Fast Leader legion today I’m excited because we have somebody on the show today who really is going to give us some insight on what it means to be the chief. Rick Miller was born and raised just outside of Boston, Massachusetts. He is the oldest of three boys who were raised primarily by their father as Rick’s mother was hospitalized for much of his youth. Professionally, Rick’s dad served as a professional Human Resources leader in the only non-union manufacturer in central Massachusetts. Rick has been described by many as a different kind of turnaround specialist. Rick describes that difference as his balanced focus on human capital and financial capital and Rick credits his father for that strategy. The common theme throughout Rick’s career has been a focus on building highly productive teams. He actually started that practice in high school and college sports and continued in his early professional life. Rick started his career in computer sales where he quickly moved up first into general management and then on to turnaround management as a specialty. In the first 27 years of his career Rick applied his craft to companies and different industries ranging from a start-up to a fortune 10 multinational, AT &T earning a reputation as a turnaround expert, a servant leader, and a go-to chief. 

Rick’s legacy has been built around creating powerful teams that achieve sustainable growth. Rick has proven that sustainable growth is achievable in any organization with appropriate focus on the six C’s, customers, costs, capital, communities and a culture where employees can achieve sustainable growth too. Rick currently serves as an executive coach and confidant in a company he founded 11 years ago. He also speaks publicly at colleges and companies on how to build powerful teams that can achieve sustainable growth. He shares the secrets of his strategy in the recently released book, Be Chief: It’s a Choice Not a Title, named an Amazon number one new release in both leadership training and business management. Rick has earned a bachelor’s degree from Bentley University and an MBA from Columbia University. Rick has been married for 36 years and he and his wife Diane have proudly raised two public servants. Their son Jack currently serves as a press secretary for congressman, Ami Bera in Washington D.C. and their daughter Casey teaches in a bilingual second-grade class in New London, Connecticut. Rick and Diane live in Morristown, New Jersey. Rick, are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Rick Miller:     I’m ready, willing and able.

Jim Rembach:    I appreciate the fact that you’re here. Now I’ve given my Legion a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better?

Rick Miller:     Well, my current passion is all about a service project that really kind of kicked off with the book. In prior years I’ve focused on kids and helping kids, I actually started a non-profit which I ran for about ten years as CEO focused on kids with diabetes, it’s a wonderful success. More recently I’m focused on helping kids with special needs. Thanks for referencing the book, it looks great by the way right back there over your shoulder and just to let everybody know all proceeds of that book go to help kids with special needs. So my focus right now is on kids with special needs their teachers—we’ll talk about that later on, but right now it’s kids and special needs is the is the passion of the day because it’s been of the year, new year new challenges but special needs focus is going to go on for the next couple years.

Jim Rembach:    Well, and so for me—I was reading the book and preparing for our interview together, and so for me, for those that aren’t aware, the education that I get by having some of these phenomenal guests on the show is tremendous and sometimes it hits home in a lot of ways. You shared a story about

Melissa being one of your mentors, and if you could just share that a little bit.

Rick Miller:     Sure, I’d be happy to. I share in the book the story of a wonderful six year old girl who is actually one of my greatest teachers. She was a six year old girl, when I first met her she was in a wheelchair she had cerebral palsy. I met her in a rehabilitation hospital where I had volunteered to work with a physical therapist to work in this hundred-degree heated pool to help kids that had muscles that were just very tight. Now this is what Melissa looked like when I first met her in the pool. Her hands were clenched and they up by her shoulders and she actually had one dream. Her dream was to fully extend her arms to grab a little nerf basketball and drop it in a net and scored two points, that’s all Melissa wanted to do. 

So when I met Melissa though, I should back up just a little bit, when I first saw her though she was in the wheelchair off to the side waiting for her turn to get into the pool, we had been working with another youngster at that point. But what struck me right away when I first met her years ago was that when she was wheeled in everybody on the staff who had known Melissa prior to be volunteering came over to say hello. She was a magnet for people. They came over said hello went by. And then she sat very serenely looking at us in the pool waiting her turn, she had a calmness about her that struck me. Yet when she got in the pool she was one of the hardest-working people I’ve ever met with. She was focused she was at the tasks you could see her intensity at the same time she was very generous with her smile. She was always very grateful whenever we were done with our session she will say thank you to the physical therapist and thank you to me. We worked together for six months for her to take and fully—that first day by the way we got her right arm extended about five inches. One hour of work and a

100 degree heated pool. So when I think about people that I admire I think about people who are Chiefs people who are powerful, we’ll talk about power in a bit, I think about power are people who are accepting of their situation, who are hardworking, who can be gracious, who can be generous, who can give to others, and I view those people as role models. So if that’s the criteria I think about someone like Melissa and she had an impact on me. I’m talking about her decades later, in fact, the book is dedicated—the money is going to special-needs kids because of Melissa. 

I think if the lessons that she taught about how to—with whatever cards you’re dealt play those cards to the best of your ability with a smile on your face.  I get goosebumps when I think about her to this day and I get teary-eyed. 

Jim Rembach:    I told you that’s why for me it just hit home and I shared with you my wife was in a car accident when she was eight years old and she’s in a wheelchair but yet this woman  is a CPA, she is the mother of three children that she carried they were all delivered via C-Section when you start looking at the triumph—she doesn’t like me to tell her story she’s very stoic she’s like, I’m just me. Talking about teary-eyed that gets to me too. I think for me I often have to stop and self-reflect just like you were doing with Melissa and talk about that impact, talk about that affect, talk about all of those things. In the book in the beginning you talk about some questions that are important for us to be able to ask of ourselves, such as, how can living my values bring out the best in me and those around me? How can I develop insight and learn more about myself? How can I use creativity to increase my positive impact? And how can I use discipline to manage better? And how can I support others to increase their positive impact? I think you hit all of that when you were talking about Melissa. However, when you start thinking about levels of importance and the things that really are differentiators they all can’t do that. While they’re all important, which one kind of stands out as one that’s like, this is the unique component that I find in a lot of Chiefs.

Rick Miller:     Well, we can boil all five of those down by list of five, actually, in two different words but to kind of bring them together. Chiefs are people who connect what they do to who they are. Your wife, Melissa, gifted people, we meet every day they connect what they do to who they are. I generally would say that it’s important to understand who you are because you’re different than me are people we know are all different so at the core of this it’s who are you? That would go to two particular elements. I spend a lot of time in the book talking about insight and values, let’s talk about those two if we could. 

Values was actually the first question and values are so important because I regularly talk to people and I say, what are your values? And they will give me a long list, sometimes it’ll be a short ones more often it’s a long one and I will stop and I’ll say, what’s your core for? They’ll look at me and I said, yeah, what’s your north south east and west? What are those that you hold most dear? And many people will stop. The people that I work with I’ll do the same thing and I’ll ask this question. There’s a huge benefit in terms of the power that you will feel once you know what you stand for. Because once you figure out what you stand for, you can take a stand. And when you take a stand you are powerful. So, that’s very much who we are at our core. By the way, very much related to insight and insight is synonym for self-understanding. We talk a lot about in the book and generally about how do you build self-understanding. Everybody says, know yourself. I would say, okay, how do I do that? And I believe this five areas that you can invest in to know yourself better. I think you know yourself more when you’re present when you choose to be present. I think you know yourself more when you choose to be accepting, talked about Melissa was very accepting of her situation. You know yourself more when you are generous when you are grateful and when you choose at certain times to be still to listen to the voice inside you. 

To answer your question directly it is important for you to know who you are so that when you make these choices about what to do they’re consistent with your voice inside your values. But first you have to take a little bit of time to figure those out.

Jim Rembach:    Yeah, I think that time component is really interesting and I think there’s also an exploration component that has to be involved with it. Maybe that’s where this whole fear factor comes in play for a lot of people is that fear stop them from doing that exploration in order for people to find these things out. Do you find that to be a case?

Rick Miller:     Yeah. I don’t know often that it is fear for many people, I just think it’s the question they haven’t asked themselves.  If somebody asked you, what do you stand for? Because maybe you haven’t thought about it many people come up—will I stand with family and ethic, you’ll come up with a set of words. There’s an exercise that I use, I’ll put 50 great words on a piece of paper and I’ll hand it to somebody and I’ll say, are any of these words that you disagree with? They’re all great words, they’re great attributes. No, I don’t disagree with any of them. I said, which of the four do you stand for most? Many of them stop and think. And I said, here’s the benefit, here’s the benefit. I said, go to the ten people who know you best and ask them to each give you four attributes of what they think you stand for. You could do the math, they could come up to with 40 different words in some scenario, 10 different people give you four different words 40 different answers. I said, that’s not a bad thing. But if you want to stand for something, if you want people to know—when I think of Jim, I think of family, I think of faith, I think of trustworthy, whatever those attributes you are wouldn’t it be wonderful if you ask those 10 people and rather than give you 40 different answers maybe they gave you a 10. Maybe some said, kindness—well those are kissing cousins you’re still going in the same direction with those. My point is, it’s a choice. Again, the whole book is titled, Be Chief: It’s a Choice not a Title. The choices we make about taking the time, and I don’t think it’s out of fear so much Jim, I think it’s more about to take the time and do the work to say, you know what? I can’t stand for 50 things, I can’t be viewed as

forty—but if I get it down to four then maybe people will bleed over 5 6 7. But am I more powerful in the way I talk? In the way I speak? In the way I act? In the way I think? If I’m constantly reinforcing what is most dear to me. Now, my core for is different than yours or anybody else’s but the exercise of doing it the people that I work with normally come back and say thank you. I wouldn’t have taken this time and I have a confidence now in where I go and how I go there is based on me not a well-intentioned spouse not a relative not a good friend not the media who’s always tripping at me, this is what you should be doing. How do I develop my own confidence? I think it starts with values. 

Jim Rembach:    As you were talking I did start thinking though that it does require some vulnerability to be able to go and ask those people those questions because you might be afraid of what—you know they’re coming back with even though they’re all positive words. For me I would have to actually go through that exercise and I think I’m going to ask you for those 50 words so that I can actually do that because I do want to know what people think are my—I would like to get it down to that core four.  I have a rough idea and some intuition because I think as you go through life you kind of start centering around certain ones, however, it would be nice to see what others perceive and then that is an important piece of feedback in order to be able to get so that you can do exactly what you were just saying, now I can take a stand. 

Rick Miller:     I think people feel more confident when they do and it’s about your confidence in a world where you’re trying to maintain an equilibrium when everything around you is constantly shifting and changing. Having that insight and having those value set I use that as the core of a topic that I call the compass. How do I use a tool to keep me towards my due north, which is what a compass does, when everything around me is shifting? Everything around me is shaking. I get new information all the time. Things I try to hold true too is constantly getting all this feedback, how to stay and use it in boating analogy? How do I keep my ship pointed in the direction that I want to keep when the waves are coming in from all angles and it’s up but it’s down and all around? How do I stay centered an element of being still? Stillness by the way you can achieve by walking in nature, by listening to music, or by classic meditation, however you stay centered particularly these days really, really important. 

Jim Rembach:    Well, in addition I started even thinking about when I’ve been within certain organizations and things just didn’t feel right and didn’t seem right to me and I felt like an oddball it’s really going back because of I didn’t share the same values with the organization that I was with and unfortunately I didn’t know that I needed to really put my efforts and then leaving that organization. Many times I would stay and be irritated and I would  be the one who was trying to change things when maybe that wasn’t really where I should’ve been putting my effort.

Rick Miller:     Such a great point. I have certainly and I tell the story in the book there are certainly at least one organization that I left when it became clear that my values and the values that were at least being practiced. It’s not the values that show up on a piece of paper on the wall or in your wallet insert all organizations, if you boil them down I’ve done work with startups to multinationals in a lot of different industries, a lot of organizations will put their values out there—on the website or whatever else—and many of them look the same. It’s teamwork, respect for the individual, it’s innovation, it’s focus on the customer, you and I can probably come up with 10 and of those 10 everyone’s got five. The question isn’t whether they’re on the card or on the website the question is are they in practice in the organization? And I think for those of us who are values-based if you find ourselves in a situation where they’re not practiced that’s when we have to make a decision about how much we’re going to invest in those organizations. And oh by the way, that’s one of the key business topics in the book, is the lack of engagement. Right now in the United States seven out of ten workers are not fully engaged at work they feel powerless. And many times it’s because what’s being said and what’s being done from a values perspective isn’t quite matching up and people are feeling that and they’re bringing their B-game to the office not their A-game. 

And when organizations can do things to have employees bring their A-game that’s the result whether it’s a startup or a multinational you can get organizations to achieve. That’s probably why I’m called an unconventional turnaround specialist because that is my job I generally walk into places where things are really bad or these people perceive they’re really bad so why would we ever go on the outside to bring in this guy. Those are the lessons, frankly, that my dad taught me back at the kitchen table growing up in central Massachusetts because it is a balance of financial capital you certainly have to look at those numbers but it’s the people it’s the human capital that will enable financial capital success. I’m going around a little bit I apologize maybe I had two cups of coffee this morning I’m pretty pumped up to be with you so I apologize. 

Jim Rembach:    I’m glad you’re pumped up. One of the things that’s kind of stood out to me too is you mentioned something about, I think the phrase you use is for those of us that are values-based, well if we’re not values based what are we? 

Rick Miller:     I think it’s on a spectrum, okay, it’s not people who are values-based are good people who are not values-based are bad, I’m not going there, I’m talking about the people who for example don’t use their values actively to make choices consciously. I believe that those people who have—many who I’ve worked with have gone through and picked their core four and are constantly reminded in my speaking consistently with those values in my writing consistently with my values and my acting consistently with those values because that’s where power comes from when you line up. How you think, how you feel, how you speak, write and act. If the framework is those values then you are clearly not only values-based but values-action oriented. There’s a lot of other people who just don’t think a lot about their values. The other generally kind of bumping along. They’re not bad people but the focus, which I always translate to power true definition of power, no we’ve not talked about it yet but it’s so important. When I say the word power many people go in their minds to yesterday’s definition of power which was authority, control that came from positions like chief executive officer, chief financial officer, the term chief in fact is interesting to people only because of the power associated with it. If I’m

a chief then I must have power. That’s one kind of power but today’s version of power is so much more attainable by everyone. Because a power today is about energy. Power today is about confidence it’s  about clarity it’s about influence it’s about impact so any of those five you can have if you’re on the front line of a company or you’re not even part of a company you’re just who you are. But what choices could you make to increase your energy your confidence and your clarity? You meet people who are clear who are energetic and confident, do they have an impact on you? They do on me, that’s Melissa. She had an impact on me because of just her confidence and what she was trying to do. Do those people make a big impact? They sure do. And those are the people I love to learn from and surround myself with because it is a student-teacher thing I think I’m there to share with them. Like I did when I walked into the heated pool at the rehab facility I thought I was there to help and to teach when in fact I was the student but that happens all the time. 

Jim Rembach:    As you were talking I started thinking about how much inspiration we actually get from those people and even when you’re explaining and I started thinking about authentic those people are authentic they say they are who they say they are and they behave in that way and there’s consistency and therefore I can trust them I mean all those core foundational building blocks on how you actually create a culture that’s successful. But when I start talking about these things I automatically start thinking also about quotes in in my head and we love them on the show we’d love to hear the favorites from the guests that are on this show because oftentimes they inspire us. Is there one or two that you can share?

Rick Miller:     One of the ones that I use a lot is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous quote from self-reliance which is, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. And so many times when you hear that quote by the way they will forget the word foolish but the true quote is a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds translate that says, be a lifelong learner there are things that you don’t know certainly you go after something with full intensity but when you learn something new when you open up to a new truth and you become deeper and broader in a particular area don’t be afraid to change your position. If you’re concerned about, well what will somebody else think? If you learn something says, you know what? I was wrong or I need to adjust from going north to northeast or north northwest because I’ve learned something new don’t be foolishly consistent no one has figured it all out. Anyone that’s told you that they have figured it all out run away they’re dangerous. We are all learning every day. So I love that because of the light heartedness and a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. I don’t like to think of myself as small-minded so it’s a reminder, open up and be open to all input. 

Jim Rembach:    I really like that. That actually reminded me of one of the quotes that I like which is, when you know all learning stops. 

Rick Miller:     Well said. 

Jim Rembach:    When you start thinking about all of these issues that you’ve run into these humps that you’ve had to get over and all of those they’ve had to have defined where you are today and really solidify those values so you could take that stand. Is there a time though when you’ve gotten over the hump that you can share with us? 

Rick Miller:     Oh, boy, there’s plenty of humps I thought you were going to go in a different direction. Let me answer the question that I want to answer not the one you just asked. My core four, just so you know are truth, service, equality and connection those are my core four. I’ll go to your question but I want to get those out there not because I think they are the right answers there my right answers yours could be totally different but the fact that I know those so clearly and I live, eat, sleep, and dream them they are my core four. And everything I do that’s the filter that goes in my speech, how I write, how I act. So when I hit those humps and as I say as a turnaround individual life I’ve run into some humps. I’ll give you two ends of the spectrum, in one case I was hired during the go-go days of the Internet boom to take a company public. I was going to be the gray hair to come in and work with a wonderful group of primarily 22 year olds who were destined to take a company and I’ll be billionaires. When I walked in just before it burst, around 2000, the board that brought me in said, hey this is the right move. So I had my first employee discussion and the first hand went up by a wonderful 21 year old who said, can you tell me how many months it will be until we’re all millionaires? Okay, Nasdaq crashed about a month later and over the next 18 months the market lost 68 percent of its value. During that time the people who were questioning why the old guy was here weren’t questioning that anymore. We were able to build, and this is a wonderful millennial team that learned how to serve customers who learned how to pull together, in this particular case despite the market going in the opposite we went from a dot-com to a dot bomb. It was crazy customers wouldn’t return our calls everybody was very quiet people were very scared we went on a road show and we raised 85 million dollars because we convinced Wall Street that we were worth betting on this wonderful group of 21 and 22 year olds we brought us some other diverse ages and things like that. But we raised—we took our IPO and we went public in the middle of the crash. We operated for two years we got products out we serve customers and then we sold the business but when most of our customers are going out of business, we’re going to tell the story in the

book how when the bombs are bursting around you, figuratively not literally we talk about literally in a minute, how do you pull together a group of people who have no experience with tough times to serve customers to pull together and actually drive results? Because all of a sudden we had shareowners. Those are the stories they tell on the book about how people come together. By the way, all I did was apply the great lessons that my dad taught me at the kitchen table decades earlier, simple lessons that can be reinforced and that was clearly on one end of the spectrum.  

Other I would say that a big challenge was that when I actually did work in a war zone. I was the president of a unit that earned the right to provide a public safety wireless network that was deployed throughout all of Baghdad and 70% of Iraq. In 2005, that allowed people to put up purple thumbs because it was the first time in the country’s history that they voted, first time. So my team was the team that was on the ground for years, now I was in and out a couple different times, and I tell the story in the book about never confused titles with power. Because when I arrived at Baghdad Airport in February of 2005 I had the title yet there was a security detail, and I tell the story in the book, the security detail of people without titles who were responsible to get me successfully to the Green Zone, the most dangerous road in the world by the way was between Baghdad Airport and the Green Zone in Iraq in the mid-2000’s, but they were the Chiefs they were the people who really had the responsibility and the authority and the control for someone who had a title and all I did was please just tell me what to do. Title meant nothing the power was with people who were on the front lines. I’d say that probably qualifies as a situation where it was a bit of a speed bump. Thankfully we got through safely and I was well cared for but the lessons of dealing with startups to multinationals the talent all around you the opportunity to help people be more powerful and learn from them as they learn from you it’s everywhere. 

Jim Rembach:    Going through the book I just kept finding myself jumping from these stories from one to another there’s a huge breadth and depth of them. But ultimately it culminates at the end when you start talking about helping folks find their compass and you talk about establishing your power compass baseline. And then you actually have 25 questions and answers to these questions are really going to help you describe yourself. If you could talk a little bit more about that and I think you even said somebody being online. 

Rick Miller:     It is. So I mentioned earlier I would love people to consider buying the book the book is fantastic for you or anybody you care about and all proceeds go to help special-needs kids. That said, if you want to measure your power, because I think in business what we learn is if it’s important you measure it, as a matter of fact I say regularly. The language of business is numbers. The language of business is numbers so if all this stuff about power and energy and clarity and confidence and influence and impact is important shouldn’t I have a number for each of it? The answer is you can. You can go online anytime with your smartphone. Grab your smartphone will take three to five minutes

and you can actually get a score, actually numeric score, for how powerful you are. I call that tool a power compass. The baseline power compass is you asked about the first time you take this tool you in fact will have a baseline it will be a starting point. You’ll look at the score, frankly you’ll look at the score and you may have a number of reactions, some people look at the score and say, well what should it be? This is a score but how am I compared to somebody else? Is my score higher or lower than Jim’s? Higher or lower than Sarah’s? Wrong question. The real question is when you take these 25 questions how do you feel about your answers? They’re very short. But when you answer a question, by the way you don’t have to pass this test in so you don’t have to cheat you have to be honest, when you answer these questions honestly you’ll kind of come away with your gut telling you something. Your gut will say, yeah I’m good. I look at the energy area and the five questions they’re being asked about how I really build real energy, yeah I like my choices. My advocacies don’t change a thing. But if you answer the question honestly, you go, that’s the truth not real happy or proud of it and it probably is impacting my energy. It gives a choice to go back and look at a small change, a small change, you might make with one of your choices that can increase your confidence, your energy, your clarity, your impact or your influence. So that’s all described in the book, how we apply, and I use two quick words which I think are really important. 

There’s a lot of places you can go to get leadership information that is on the supply side. Do these twelve things here’s your eight-point checklist. There’s a wonderful group of writers and researchers academicians who can give you a lot on the supply side of leadership. I think what’s different about this book is it’s not about the supply it’s about the apply. I am NOT an academic, I’m a business guy. I take, and I’ve read a lot, by the way I reference probably 20 or 25 of some of the greatest writing it’s referenced in the book, so I talk about, Good to Great, I mentioned other authors and people who’ve made impact. But my job is how to help a reader take the stuff that’s been supplied and in a simple way apply it. In a startup to a multinational you’re an entrepreneur you got one person in your company and it’s you, how do I actually make this stuff work on the front lines whether you have bombs bursting around you or not? Or market crashes or not? So that’s the focus of the power compass it’s really to be very simple. Redefine your thought it leverages a lot of other deep research that others have done but people don’t have the time to go into the deep research. They wonder, what can I use right now? So I’m a very pragmatic person. I’m a simple business person. The power compass, you can get it online, you go to beingchief.com, which is the name of my company, beingchief.com or you can go to bechief.com which is the book page, either way. You can get a link to take the power compass for free and get your own starter set of, okay, what choices am I making? And could I make slightly different choices that will make me more powerful? And the other thing just real quickly is that there’s a piece in the book that is just so powerful. I’ve come across some research which supports what you and I already know Jim, we already know that when we’re surrounded by positive people we tend to be more positive. In the book we talk about two particular research studies, the work done by Fowler and Christakis which talks about the happiness effect which has been well reported on but there’s a particular piece of research done by Versadi, who did it when she was at Yale she’s now at Wharton, we talked about the positive emotions spreading at work a real research that she did that shows that when you bring someone positive into a work environment they affect everyone else. In the book we talked a lot about this term viral engagement which means sometimes you kind of look up sometimes bosses can have a big impact on how you show up but we don’t really study as much as we could what impact does it have if my peer on either side of me is showing up with a positive disposition? Or is coming in every morning and unloading every negative thought he or she ever had? How does that impact the workforce? So these are things that get a little unconventional but it gets to turn around. When I come into an organization I do look at all the numbers I dot the i’s and cross the t’s and balance sheets and P & L, but we also spend lots of time looking at the people aspect. Where our team’s effective and where are they not? What small changes could we make to make teams happier, more productive and more engaged in bringing their A-game? 

Jim Rembach:    Well, Rick, thanks for sharing that with us and the Fast Leader legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor: 

An even better place to work is an easy-to-use solution that gives you a continuous diagnostic on employee engagement along with integrated activities that will improve employee engagement and leadership skills in everyone. Using this award winning solutions guaranteed to create motivated, productive and loyal employees who have great work relationships with their colleagues and your customers. To learn more about an even better place to work visit beyondmorale.com/better. 

Okay, Fast Leader legion, it’s time for the Hump day Hoedown. Okay Rick, the Hump day Hoedown is a 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 a robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Rick Miller, are you ready to hoedown?

Rick Miller:     I’m ready to hoe down. 

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

Rick Miller:     One of the areas that I’m looking at is going more deeply into meditation. I’m considering going to a five-day silent retreat and meditate daily. But I think if I go deeper into me and delve it even stronger compass that way I think that’s the next step for me. 

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

Rick Miller:     Remember that power is never given it’s only taken. 

 

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

Rick Miller:     Persistence. 

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

Rick Miller:     My network. 

Jim Rembach:    What would be one book that you’d recommend to our listeners, they could be from any genre, of course we’re going to put a link to–be chief—on your show notes page as well.

Rick Miller:     I’m a big fan of Adam Grant and his book, Give and Take because there’s a misnomer out there takers get ahead. He’s done the research another wonderful Wharton professor and good friend, Give and take by Adam Grant. 

Jim Rembach:    Okay, Fast Leader Legion, you can find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going to fastleader.net/RickMiller. Okay, Rick, 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 back you can just use one. So what skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

Rick Miller:  I think what I would bring back is to actually maintain a healthy impatience. I think that there’s an opportunity to learn and everything else and you have to always balance to be patient because sometimes we’re not or to be kind of frenetic. I love the term healthy and patient because it drives me forward and keeps me centered. I would practice healthy impatience. 

Jim Rembach:    Rick, it was an honor to spend time with you today, can you please share it the fast leader legion how they can connect with you? 

Rick Miller:     Sure. Easiest way is the website, let’s go to the book 1, bechief.com there you can download a free chapter you can take the test you can read about the nonprofit the wonderful special-needs facility that’s going to get all the money from this thing and you’ll get started on your own version on your own way of being more powerful. 

Jim Rembach:    Rick Miller, 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 fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster. 

END OF AUDIO 

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Danita Bye - Millennials Matter

186: Danita Bye: This is not about complaining – it’s about doing

Danita Bye Show Notes Page

Danita Bye and her husband decided to buy a snowmobile sleigh manufacturing company. Then El Niño moved in and stayed for three years. Danita was angry at everyone. Then a mentor told her to stop playing the blame game. That’s when she developed the catalyst question.

Danita grew up on the TTT Ranch in northwestern North Dakota. 800 square foot house with no running water!  This means that she used an outdoor biffy daily and a took a Finnish sauna weekly. The sauna was located about a football field away from their house. Great in the summer time. Not quite as fun in the winter time when it was 30 below and the wind was howling at 30MPH!  FYI: Currently it’s offer one of the finest hunting preserves for pheasants in the nation!

Her parents have been married almost 60 years. She has one younger sister and two younger brothers.

Her parents continue to make a huge imprint on her life. They are entrepreneurs who figured out how to not only survive, but thrive in homestead country. So, Danita is an entrepreneur. They are intent on stewarding their gifts of encouragement and hospitality, especially to young adults. So, Danita is focused on building next gen leaders.

After completing a pre-med degree, she decided to shift directions and move into the business world. She started her career with Xerox Corporation in sales.  After about a decade in the technology space, she became an angel investor and part of a turnaround management team in the medical device world.

Having sold that company, she analyzed what she got a kick out of doing. She decided she loved helping business owners in the STEM space (Software, Technology, Engineering, Manufacturing) get traction with the sales teams. So, she started her own sales development firm, Sales Growth Specialists.

Her current book, Millennials Matter: Proven Strategies for Building Your Next Gen Leader, is part of her legacy – to inspire and encourage senior leaders to STOP complaining about Millennials, and to START coaching and mentoring them.  To inspire them to be intentional about the imprint of their Leadership Legacy.

After living for 30 years in Minneapolis, she moved back to the ranch in North Dakota about 4 years ago. She operates a global sales development and global leadership firm, overlooking the beauty of a pristine animal preserve.

She’s been married to Gordon for 33 years.  Has 3 Millennial children. 2 delightful grandchildren…with one more on the way.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Listen to @DanitaBye to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow Click to Tweet 

“They look mature, but they haven’t gone through all the trips, falls, and crashes that we have had in life.” -Danita Bye Click to Tweet 

“60% of business leaders express some concern with working with millennials in some way.” -Danita Bye Click to Tweet 

“It’s character that destroys a leader.” -Danita Bye Click to Tweet 

“If we want to be building good, strong, solid leaders for the future, we have to start coaching virtues.” -Danita Bye Click to Tweet 

“For long-term leadership success, you’re going to have to deal with a lot of no’s in life.” -Danita Bye Click to Tweet 

“What do you get out of bed and you just naturally do?” -Danita Bye Click to Tweet 

“What is your core passion, what are you always thinking about.” -Danita Bye Click to Tweet 

“We can have a lot of discussion, but let’s put an action plan together.” -Danita Bye Click to Tweet 

“You’ve got too much talent, you’ve got too much opportunity, you’ve got too much brilliance – just shift into gear and get going.” -Danita Bye Click to Tweet 

“If you don’t create win alignment you’re not going to get the impact you want.” -Danita Bye Click to Tweet 

“You have your goal in place, you’re going to get obstacles, you’re going to get thrown off track and you just need to get back on track.” -Danita Bye Click to Tweet 

“Lack of accountability is a massive erodeer in our culture.” -Danita Bye Click to Tweet 

“If we will begin to look at what we can do differently, then that stimulates our own creative juices.” -Danita Bye Click to Tweet 

“Get active, get engaged in coaching and mentoring.” -Danita Bye Click to Tweet 

“Everything that you’ve been doing in life is preparing you to pass your leadership insight and wisdom and legacy onto the next generation.” -Danita Bye Click to Tweet 

“Don’t let excuses get in your way of making it happen.” -Danita Bye Click to Tweet 

“We don’t learn, we don’t serve, we don’t love by talking.” -Danita Bye Click to Tweet 

“Everything we want comes from listening and caring about the people in our lives.” -Danita Bye Click to Tweet 

Hump to Get Over

Danita Bye and her husband decided to buy a snowmobile sleigh manufacturing company. Then El Niño moved in and stayed for three years. Danita was angry at everyone. Then a mentor told her to stop playing the blame game. That’s when she developed the catalyst question.

Resources and Show Mentions

Call Center Coach

An Even Better Place to Work

Show Transcript: 

[expand title=”Click to access edited transcript”]

186: Danita Bye: This is not about complaining—it’s about doing

 

Intro: Welcome to the Fast Leader Podcast, where we uncover the leadership like hat that help you to experience, break out performance faster and rocket to success. And now here’s your host, customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

 

Call center coach develops and unites the next generation of call center leaders. Through our e-learning and community individuals gain knowledge and skills in the six core competencies that is the blueprint that develops high-performing call center leaders. Successful supervisors do not just happen so go to callcentercoach.com to learn more about enrollment and download your copy of the Supervisor Success Path e-book now. 

 

Jim Rembach:     Okay, Fast Leader legion today I’m excited because I have somebody on the show today who’s opened up my eyes to several things and I think we’re going to have a great discussion that you’ll get some benefit from. Danita Bye grew up on the Triple T ranch in northwestern North Dakota 800 square foot house with no running water this means that she used an outdoor biffy daily and took a Finnish sauna weekly. The sauna was located about a football field away from their house, it was great in the summertime not so much fun in the wintertime when it was 30 below and the wind was howling at 30 miles an hour> Currently it offers one of the finest hunting preserves for pheasants in the nation. Her parents have been married almost 60 years. She has one younger sister and two younger brothers. Her parents continue to make a huge imprint on her life. They are entrepreneurs who figured out how to not only survive but thrive in homestead country, so Danita is an entrepreneur. They are intent on stewarding their gifts of encouragement and hospitality especially to young adults so Danita is focused on building next gen leaders.

 

After completing a pre-med degree she decided to shift directions and move into the business world. She started her career with Xerox Corporation in Sales. After about a decade in the technology space she became an angel investor and part of a turnaround management team in the medical device world. Having sold that company she analyzed what she got a kick out of doing she decided she loved helping business owners in the stem space that software technology engineering and manufacturing helping them to get traction with their sales teams. So she started her own sales development firm, Sales Growth Specialists. Her current book, Millennials Matter Proven Strategies for Building Your Next Gen Leader is part of her legacy to inspire and encourage senior leaders to stop complaining about millennials and to start coaching and mentoring them to inspire them to be intentional about the imprint of their leadership legacy.

 

After living for 30 years in Minnesota she moved back to the ranch in North Dakota about four years

Ago. She operates a global sales development and global leadership firm overlooking the beauty of a pristine animal preserve. She’s been married to Gordon for 33 years. Has three millennial children and two delightful grandchildren with one more on the way. Danita Bye, are you ready to help us get over the hump?

 

Danita Bye:    We are ready let’s go let’s roll. 

 

Jim Rembach:     I’m glad you’re here. Now I’ve given my legion a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better? 

 

Danita Bye:    You know what, my current passion is really about energizing and equipping those senior leaders to get on track, stop complaining and to start coaching and mentoring and working with those next gen leaders. So I’ve got posters all over my office that relate to that I dream about that that’s what I’m working on. 

 

Jim Rembach:     Now there are several things in your book that kind of stood out to me that I’m looking forward to talking with you about and there’s one phrase that you use that I think senior leaders including myself have to be very, very mindful of and that is you call it artificial maturity.

 

Danita Bye:    Well, that’s actually a concept by coined by Tim Elmore which is one of the people I follow, listen, and pay attention to. And where it comes is that with all the technology and information that’s at the fingertips for millennials if they can walk into any scenario and they look knowledgeable and confident and they look good but what business leaders are telling me is that when they trip and fall or they encounter something that they’re not finding on You Tube or Google that kind of confidence kind of cracks a little bit. And so it’s important for us as leaders and coaches to recognize that they look mature but they haven’t gone through all the trips and falls and crashes that we have had in life.

 

Jim Rembach:     You know the reason I bring that up is because I just had this conversation the other day with somebody where I talked about the perception of arrogance and I said you know, oftentimes, when we perceive somebody as being arrogant really what it is it’s a mask. It’s a mask for insecurity that doubt that whole self-assurance issue and it manifests itself as that arrogance. And so sometimes we just need to stop and take pause and say, okay, I shouldn’t judge this as arrogance and therefore be offended or irritated or someone buy it  but maybe try to seek out and discover what’s the underlying things that are going on here. 

 

Danita Bye:    Absolutely, absolutely. In the research that we did for the book sixty percent of business leaders express some concern in working with millennials in some way. And actually 53 percent of them cited what they call this know-it-all attitude and you’re absolutely right is to see it as a—you use the word mask I was going to say facade and it’s something for us as leaders to recognize and to push through and to keep asking questions and learning and asking questions and spending time in developing the relationship so that we could have an imprint on their lives. You’re absolutely right. 

 

Jim Rembach:     And I also love that with the acronym that you brought up in regards to helping really coach and mentor these folks in order to be able to build so that—you mentioned the word resilience and all that and it’s Dakota. Yes, not surprising, but tell us what Dakota means?

 

Danita Bye:    Well, let me tell a little bit of the backstory on that so as we mentioned in the intro I grew up on this cattle ranch in Northwestern North Dakota I’d been living in Minneapolis for 30 years and then through a series of events felt that it was important to move back to North Dakota, that’s where my parents still live, and to get involved with the business. It was about at this same time that I had this wake-up call in a sense to start focusing on millennials. And began to think about what are the things that are important for leadership that are important for resiliency and many of those things tie to the homes, the character, qualities in the immigrants and the homesteaders that I grew up with. And so I began to develop this concept of Dakota which is really taking some of the ancient virtues, which is a word we just don’t use in modern time as virtues, but taking those ancient virtues and put it into modern language. So D stands for determination A for awareness K knowledge O optimism T trustworthy and A accountability. And that really is taking some of those ancient virtues that make for solid long-term leadership and then put them into language at least I could understand and I’m hoping that our readers can understand it too. 

 

Jim Rembach:     Well, and I think when I started looking at my kids and their education and I don’t think they get that type of clarity on building the virtues, of course we’re trying to give those things at home and I say a lot of these words a lot because of what I get exposed to and all the people who I’ve met and so I mean they’re getting that benefit but outside of that I don’t see that it’s really occurring it’s just kind of like you were saying it’s non-existent not just in our vernacular vocabulary but just in our practices.

 

Danita Bye:    Just in our practices. When I first started researching and talking to colleagues about what I was working on millennials matter the pushback that I got from my colleagues and from business leaders when I mentioned the word character was, Danita, character that’s what you work on at home you don’t work on it in the business. And then there was a whole another set of colleagues, business leaders, who said character Danita that’s a little embarrassing to talk about in the workforce isn’t it? Yes, and we know when we look at all the headlines that it is character that destroys a leader that they can cover up the flaws but you know what? It’s that character flaw that will eventually undermine them. So if we want to be building good strong, solid leaders for the future we have to start talking about and coaching determination and trustworthiness and dealing with ethics and those virtues.

 

Jim Rembach:     Well, I mean you’re right. Because the reality of where we are today, you can try to avoid it all you want but it’s not going to help, is that there isn’t a lot of that taught in the home. I’ve had the opportunity to coach baseball for past couple years with some kids and I’m just looking at some of these kids and saying how they don’t have that strength and fortitude the courage it’s just non-existent they haven’t overcome things because it’s always been so simple and easily hand it to them they haven’t had the guidance in the mentoring and the tough love but we need that we all need it. So what’s happening is now they’re getting in the workforce and guess what they haven’t had it so you got to do it.

 

Danita Bye:    We got to do it, we got to do it. I was telling a story—I’m a pre-med student I shifted gears went to work with Xerox Corporation and in those days we had to make cold calls and our activity called for making 50 cold calls a day, excuse me 50 cold calls a week and of those 50 we would if we worked the numbers right we would get one yes. That means we got 49 no’s to deal with every week, ten a day. I would do pretty good the first time but you know, man, kind of thirdsy end of the day I actually had a rule that if I cried—this is when you just had like a tear well up if I had a tear well up three times a day I was still having a good day. And the fourth time I would call my boss Bob, who was a wonderful coach and a wonderful mentor, and I was telling this story and someone said, you know, Danita that’s the difference in today’s world people probably would quit and find a new job after the first no and what we know for long-term leadership success, man, you’re got to you’re going to have to deal with a lot of nose and life to get hold get traction so that is something that we as business leaders need to be acutely aware of and to begin nurturing that in our own teams and our own young leaders. 

 

Jim Rembach:     Without a doubt. And there’s one thing that you talked about too as well that I think could also be some of that fuel and foundation for some of that cure courage and you talked about knowing what your jazz is and I think we have to help younger people really do that I mean I think for many of us that are older that are supposed to be coaching and mentoring really don’t know what that is. I think everybody needs to find their own jazz.

 

Danita Bye:    Well yeah, I think where I’ve gotten at is just looking at myself. You know there’s times for all of us that we all—I ‘m not doing well I’m not having fun this doesn’t feel like it fits it’s not purpose a whole host of question that we have to wrestle with at different times in life. What’s been insightful for me is to keep just a mini diary for about a week on I loved doing this and this was the energizing and we can do the same thing with people these people are fun these people, man, you know they just SAP energy from me. And so I’ve found when I’ve been coaching young leaders and people going through transition that it just it provides some helpful aha’s. 

 

Jim Rembach:     So when you start thinking about helping people find their jazz what it is that that you do or that you guide people or to direct people or tools that you give people in order to be able to do that.

 

Danita Bye:    So I have a couple of tools that I like. One is a process called life’s core purpose. And in life’s core purpose you begin to look at what are you just naturally competent at what do you get out of bed and you just naturally do? So what’s your core competence and then what’s your core passion what are you always thinking about? I’ll use it an example for, I guess I’ll use for me, I am no matter what situation I am in I, I get things moving I get things moving off the dime. We can have lots of discussion but let’s put an action plan together no matter where I’m going about engaging so that’s a core competence. And then my core passion is about getting people launched on the growth path. To shift into gear for me it drives me nuts when people are status quo players. You’ve got too much talent you’ve got too much opportunity you’ve got too much brilliance shift into gear and get going. Once I was able to put words around that it was just helpful for me to be able to analyze activities and that’s one of the tools that I’d like to use. 

 

Jim Rembach:     So that’s interesting that you say that because with my son who’s 13 I’ve started asking him and I told him I’m got to ask it until he can actually help you know to formulate some ideas and thoughts around as I asked him I said what is that one thing when you go to bed that you have a hard time actually going to sleep you know because of it. And when you get up in the morning it’s actually top of mind and you’re like, I can’t wait to do this and be part of this and by the way, it can’t be a video game it has to be something that actually is got to better the world. So what is that thing that’s got to better the world that you really think about all the time?

 

Danita Bye:    I love that.

 

Jim Rembach:     Right now he’s like, I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. I said well I’m got to keep asking. I said, you’re got to have to start seeking it out. I said, and if you can’t figure it out on your own I said we’re got to sit down and figure it out together. I said, because you have to have something that is a target for you something that gives you that internal juice and something that really causes you to take that extra step instead of sit on your hining. 

 

Danita Bye:    Absolutely. There’s lots of different ways it’s just a whole—obviously with parenting there’s a whole host of ways that we can do that. Interestingly when I was hiring and building a sales team I actually asked that as part of my interview process. Remember there was one in particular I asked that too and he was at that time he was 23 24 25 and he was a little cheapy she didn’t know if he should answer that and he says, well, what I really want to do is I really want to own an auto dealership, which had nothing to do with the medical device company that I was involved in which is the reason he was a little nervous about telling me this. And I said, great, let’s talk about owning that car dealership and why is that. What are the sparks? What are the things that are interesting? And then what sort of skills do we need to be developing on a regular basis so that you’re ready to run that auto dealership? And every time we had a rhythm of doing a quarterly review where we would step back and look at a big picture we talked about it every single time.

 

Jim Rembach:         That’s what we need to do some people talking about the status quo people they would say, well gosh I don’t want to hire this person because they don’t want to work here long they just want to auto dealership and they’re just not going to stay they’re not going to be motivated. That’s not what you should do what you should do is what you did is you take that and you use it as the way for you to actually get them to motivate themselves. There’s a saying that I heard a long time ago a Kirk Weisler who was actually a guest on my show, he said, don’t make the mistake. He goes, you don’t motivate anybody that’s not the way it works people motivate themselves your job as leader is to create the environment by which they will motivate themselves.

 

Danita Bye:     Absolutely, absolutely. When typically my work is with sales organizations and getting them unstuck and moving forward and one of the very first things that I find that we have to do is to help each salesperson create alignment between their personal goals and their professional goals. Often to get alignment we have to look at what their personal goals are, which is where we talk about what jazzes them, and we have to look at what their professional goals are not what their managers goals are not what the company’s goals are but what their goals are. Then we take those and start to weave those together to create something that is inspirational, fun, energizing that they can get out of bed in the morning and have some hope and some direction for the future.

 

Jim Rembach:    I think we’re a lot of leaders make a mistake is that they don’t realize that the manager meeting his sales numbers the company meeting their sales numbers and all that’s really an output that’s an output of all the things these other things that you were just talking about. 

 

Danita Bye:    Absolutely, absolutely. There’s at least three wins like a win, win, win strategy because no matter what you do it has to be the win for the salesperson employee it has to be a win for the company it has to be a win for the client it has to be—there are so many wins and unless you create that kind of win alignment you’re not going to get the engagement you’re not going to get the business growth you’re not going to get the impact that you want so it does all need to align and come together.

 

Jim Rembach:     Without a doubt. One other thing that you expose me to and I actually had to reach out to a friend was something called the Sisu spirit, which has some Finnish origin so I reached out to my Finnish friend Yona she gave me some additional insights into Sisu, but tell us a little bit about the Sisu spirit.

 

Danita Bye:    Well, growing up in the Finnish background, you mentioned it in the bio, this going to the sauna which was a football field away when you’re three years old and four years old and it’s 30 below and the wind is howling our parents never let us off the hook this is what we needed to do. So as I look at the growing up and leading that is that’s just what you do you have your goal in place you are going to get obstacles you’re going to get thrown off track and you just you need to get back on track. I pulled this out to make certain that I got my quote correctly. I was a young salesperson at Xerox, who as I’d mentioned got tears in my eyes like three times a day, but there was a quote that I blew up into a poster I know that you’ve heard it before but it goes like this—what you do when you don’t need to determines what you will be when you can’t help it. And isn’t that the Sisu spirit that there’s a whole host of things in life that we don’t want to do? In sales we maybe don’t want to make sales calls or we don’t want to talk to this person because they’re scary we don’t want to ask this other question cause really one with send people –there’s a whole host of things in life that make us uncomfortable or they don’t make us uncomfortable. And yet in doing those things it develops that resilience and that determination and that ability to keep going and I call that the Sisu spirit coming from my Finnish heritage. 

 

Jim Rembach:     It’s definitely something that I want to research a little bit more and hopefully expose my kids to that because I’m always trying to give them things that will hopefully help them find stronger and more firm footing. Anxiety is a huge problem with a lot of youth today, quite frankly for everybody today, for a lot of different reasons. 

 

Danita Bye:    Yes. We live in an anxious, anxious ridden society. 

 

Jim Rembach:     Without a doubt. You shared that quote, thanks for doing that, and I’m sure too when you start thinking about—you talked about that sales experience and actually growing through that you talked about in your bio being an investor a lot of different things that you’ve done having this business the book, but I’m sure there’s humps that you’ve had to get over that have taught you a lot. Is there one of those stories that you can share so we can learn?

 

Danita Bye:    So my life is filled with hopes it just seems like we’re always kind of working through. There’s one in particular that there was a mass of learning for me. I had been with technology business with Xerox Corporation for about ten years I had been in the medical device world for about a decade which I loved and then we were having some shifts and changes in our life and we decided that I would buy a snowmobile sleigh manufacturing company. Now in retrospect it was absolutely an idiot decision. Why would some—there were so many idiot decisions on this but anyway we did it. That was 1997, El Nino hit that winter there’s no snow. Most people don’t know this but the El Nino actually lasted for three years there’s no snow and I have a bit snowmobile sleigh manufacturing business. I was not happy. I was angry at my clients because they weren’t purchasing things. I was angry at my husband because he was the one who had kind of persuaded me that this would be a good idea and I was angry at God he’s the  one who makes it snow, right? 

 

As I was working with this I had a mentor who just really pushed in and said, Danita you’re playing the blame game and you are sapping your own creativity and energy and you need to shape up. Of course, I did not like that conversation I think I walked away angry from that conversation also. However, I guess I begin to process that and work with that I thought, okay, I’ve been sitting with this company that I hate for three years I’m just got to sit down and do a white boarding session and see what ideas I came up with. So, my husband and I sat down we came up with ten ideas. One idea was to sell the company and I thought that’s great because I don’t want to expand the company I want to sell it I hate it. We did everything we put all the paperwork together got the word on the street we had it sold in 45 days. And I sat and complained for three years and we sold it in 45 days? It was just a huge, huge lesson for me. Out of the experience and research developed a concept which I call the catalyst question. And there’s four things that I had to learn, one is, I can’t point the finger at anybody else I have to look at me. What might I do to get the results I want? And then number two is they use the word might. Might is a creativity question, so that’s what helped me to generate my options. What might I do, this is not about complaining this is about doing to get the results that I want? So that’s a key question that as I’m working with leaders that we start to integrate because lack of accountability is a massive eroder in our culture. 

 

Jim Rembach:     And that word has always kind of played a little bit of an irritation for me. Because for me I need to hold myself accountable. But I as a leader I need to create the environment by which people take ownership as well as convey that as an expectation because I think lazy leaders use accountability in the wrong way and they say, I’m going to hold you accountable and it becomes a control issue and I think it’s just totally misapplied in so many different ways. 

 

Danita Bye:    what a lazy leader will do. In my work with sales organizations we have actually researched over a million salespeople sales professionals and our statistics show that 60% of people within sales or the revenue generation side of a business have a tendency to point their fingers at someone else for not achieving an objective. They’re going to blame the economy they’re going to blame the competitor they’re going to blame the boss they’re going to blame the marketing department they’re going to blame someone and yes there are realities that we deal with. The reality is that if we will begin to look at what we might be able to do differently that kind of stimulates our own creative juices and helps us to reach out to the right people it helps us to ask a better set of questions. Again that’s an area where we as leaders we don’t hold people accountable we help to develop that culture of ownership.

 

Jim Rembach:     I really like the book and I highly recommend it and we’re going to actually put it on your show notes page. So for me when I start thinking about where you’re going with this and how things are progressing and you look at all these goals that you can have for your business and everything else what is one of those goals? 

 

Danita Bye:     Well, one of the goals is the message. The message of—get activated get engaged in coaching and mentoring. We baby boomers across the nation are retiring at record speed and many of them are at this time of searching for purpose. Some are afraid to retire because they don’t know what they’re going to be doing others are wrestling with feelings of relevance or it could be a really confusing time. One of my messages is that everything that you’ve been doing in life is preparing you to pass your leadership insight and wisdom and legacy on to the next generation. And I believe that this generation is calling out to us as senior leaders and that we as senior leaders need to respond and recognize that that that is a huge leadership legacy and responsibility that we can step up to. 

 

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.

 

An even better place to work is an easy-to-use solution that improves the empathy and emotional intelligence skills in everyone. It provides a continuous diagnostic on employee engagement and provides integrated activities that will improve the leadership and collaboration skills in everyone. This award winning solution is guaranteed to create motivated, productive and higher performing employees that have great working relationships with their colleagues and your customers. To learn more about an even better place to work visit beyondmorale.com/better. 

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

 

Danita Bye:    I think so, I don’t know. 

 

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

 

Danita Bye:    Focus. 

 

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

 

Danita Bye:    Listen and ask more questions. 

 

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

 

Danita Bye:    Prosperity mindset don’t let excuses get in your way of making it happen. 

 

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

 

Danita Bye:    One of my best tools it’s called a life map. And it outlines my goals and three areas of my life and I go back to that on a monthly basis just to recalibrate and make certain I’m on track. 

 

Jim Rembach:     What would be one book that you’d recommend to our listeners that could be from any genre? Of course we’re got to put a link to Millennials Matter, on your show page as well. 

 

Danita Bye:    Yes, the book that we need to read is the Bible and specifically Jesus. Jesus is this phenomenal leader that we can learn a lot from.

 

Jim Rembach:     Okay, Fast Leader legion you can find links to that another bonus information from today’s show by going to fastleader.net/danitabye. Okay, Danita, 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 back you can only choose one. So what skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

 

Danita Bye:    It’s the ability to ask insightful deep questions so that you can also listen well. The reason behind that is one of my assets in life is to talk but the problem is we don’t learn we don’t serve we don’t love by talking everything we want comes from listening and caring about the people in our lives. 

 

Jim Rembach:     Danita, 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?

 

Danita Bye:    I am at danitabye.com 

 

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

 

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 fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster. 

 

END OF AUDIO 

 

[/expand]

 

151: Shawn Vij: I began to distance myself from my core values

Shawn Vij Show Notes Page

Shawn Vij was just out of business school and he was given the responsibility of the accounting for a project. He spotted something shady in the books and began to ask questions. He must have asked too many questions because his boss terminated him. That’s when Shawn’s outlook took a turn for the worst.

Shawn was born and raised in the metro Detroit area. He is the oldest of three with a younger sister and brother.

His father worked as engineer for Ford, for many years and is now enjoying his pension. His father was a part-time professor as well and his mother raised three children.

His parents moved to the United States from India in 1968, looking for a better life for themselves as well as family. Shawn grew up in a very segregated area, and we faced lots of racism in the Detroit area.

He found myself in lots of fights growing up. Despite this, his family was influential in focusing on an education as the key to getting out of living in these areas. His Indian culture was influential as well, but it also became overbearing at times. Such as the idea that you must be a doctor, marry an Indian princess and make lots of money. Unfortunately, he learned the hard way that happiness does not equate to the CULTURAL HINGES.

At the age of 29, Shawn left the mid-west and moved to San Francisco during the dotcom boom, and then to Seattle where he’s lived since 2005.

Shawn is an accomplished business leader who has over 25 years of Industry and Consulting experience. He has worked in various leadership positions for Ford Motor Company, Ernst & Young, VISA, Deloitte Consulting, Microsoft, and Intel Corporation. He holds an MBA from Purdue University, an MS in Engineering from the University of Michigan and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan Technological University and is the author of Moral Fiber: Awakening Corporate Consciousness.

He currently lives just East of Seattle with his daughter and reddish Labrador where he enjoys writing, wine, coffee and cooking.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Listen to @shawnvij to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow Click to Tweet 

“If you’re unethical in the practice and play, what good does it do for anybody?” Click to Tweet 

“I believe in the bottom line, but how we do it is so critical.” Click to Tweet 

“The world is becoming smaller, and you’re seeing the diversity skillset within companies.” Click to Tweet  

“The four diseases of corporate suffering are deception, detraction, doubt, and discrimination.” Click to Tweet 

“Every day you’re not going to be happy at work.” Click to Tweet 

“We’re dealing with human beings and how you navigate through that.” Click to Tweet 

“We’ve all had that terrible boss.” Click to Tweet 

“With fear and the unknown, it’s very hard to make a stand at times.” Click to Tweet 

“We cage ourselves to things that we think are going to make us happy.” Click to Tweet 

“We need to trust ourselves more.” Click to Tweet 

“Walk into the unknown, don’t be fearful, it will be okay.” Click to Tweet  

“In the suffering, you will find the inner strength.” Click to Tweet  

“When you see something that’s wrong, either say something or just leave.” Click to Tweet  

“If you see something that’s going wrong – be direct, be transparent, be timely, and be calm.” Click to Tweet  

“Humanity plays a big role and business is always is always personal.” Click to Tweet 

“I believe in making money, but you shouldn’t have to suffer for it.” Click to Tweet  

“Everybody should have the same equal right to work, make money, and do well.” Click to Tweet 

“Raise the human condition through conscious capitalism.” Click to Tweet 

“Take the best quality from everyone you meet.” Click to Tweet  

“Take the time to know yourself and love yourself.” Click to Tweet  

“Take accountability for your own action.” Click to Tweet  

“When you’re true to yourself doors just seem to open.” Click to Tweet  

Hump to Get Over

Shawn Vij was just out of business school and he was given the responsibility of the accounting for a project. He spotted something shady in the books and began to ask questions. He must have asked too many questions because his boss terminated him. That’s when Shawn’s outlook took a turn for the worst.

Advice for others

Be true to yourself. We lie to ourselves every day. Take the time to know yourself and love yourself.

Holding him back from being an even better leader

Take more risk. When we get comfortable we get complacent.

Best Leadership Advice

Take the best quality from everyone you meet.

Secret to Success

Hussle. When you fall down you need to get up.

Best tools that helps in Business or Life

Wisdom, awareness, taking all of the vantage points.

Recommended Reading

Moral Fiber: Awakening Corporate Consciousness

The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World

The Art of Happiness at Work

Contacting Shawn Vij

Email: shawnvij [at] moralfiber.world

website: http://www.moralfiber.world

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnvij/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/shawnvij

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shawnvij.moralfiber

Resources and Show Mentions

Developing a Better Place to Work

Increase Employee Engagement and Workplace Culture

Empathy Mapping

54 Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Competencies List: Emotional Intelligence has proven to be the right kind of intelligence to have if you want to move onward and upward faster. Get your free list today.

 

Show Transcript: 

[expand title=”Click to access edited transcript”]

151: Shawn Vij: I began to distance myself from my core values

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 intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

The number one thing that contributes to customer loyalty is emotions. So move onward and upward faster by gaining significantly deeper insight and understanding of your customer journey and personas with emotional intelligence. With your empathy mapping workshop you’ll learn how to evoke and influence the right customer emotions that generate improve customer loyalty and reduce your cost to operate. Get over your emotional hump now by going to empathymapping.com to learn more. 

 Jim Rembach:     Okay Fast Leader legion, today I’m excited because I get the opportunity to talk about something that’s been nagging me for quite a while with somebody who can give me the answer. Shawn Vij, was born and raised in the metro Detroit area. He is the oldest of three with a younger sister and brother, Sue and Dave. His father worked as an engineer for Ford for many years and is now enjoying his pension. His father was a part-time professor as well as his mother raised three children. His parents moved to the United States from India in 1968 looking for a better life for themselves as well as fily. Shawn grew up in a very segregated area and was faced with a lot of racism in the Detroit area. He found himself in lots of fights growing up but despite this his fily was influential and focusing on in education as the key to getting out of living in these areas. His Indian culture was influential as well but it also it also bece overbearing at times, such as the idea that you must be a doctor and marry an Indian princess and make lots of money. Unfortunately, he learned the hard way that happiness does not equate to the cultural hinges. 

 

At the age of 29, Shawn left the Midwest and moved to San Francisco during the dot.com boom and then to Seattle where he’s lived since 2005. Shawn is an accomplished business leader who has over 25 years of industry and consulting experience. He’s worked in various leadership positions for Ford Motor Company, Ernst & Young, Visa, Deloitte Consulting, Microsoft and Intel Corporation. He holds an MBA from Purdue University. A master’s in engineering from the University of Michigan and a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from Michigan Technological University and is the author of Moral Fiber–Awakening Corporate Consciousness. He currently lives just east of Seattle with his daughter and a reddish Labrador where he enjoys writing, wine, coffee and cooking. Shawn Vij, are you ready to help us get over the hump?

 

Shawn Vij: I think so. I hope so.

 

 Jim Rembach:   I’m sure you are. But, I’ve given our listeners a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better.

 

Shawn Vij: Sure, Jim and personal thanks for having me on I really appreciate it. My current passion I would say has to be being a father. I do have a 14 year-old daughter, and most fathers they love their children and I think the passion there is I don’t teach her what to think but I’m learning on teaching her how to think on her own, if you will, really kind of have her learn from my everyday actions if you will. Be compassionate, be caring, help others, and most of all stand up for what you believe and what is right. It just takes me back when I see the stuff that she’s going through in high school and seeing all the—it’s different, it’s just but it’s different. Se nuances the se bullying all of that stuff it’s that in different approach. But what I believe in is living your values and having the courage to never back down. And that’s what I try to instill in her and everybody around her and her friends. And so that’s my current passion, that’s my current passion.

 

 Jim Rembach:   That resonate so much with me because I have 14-year old daughter. I grew up in the Chicago area an area where even though I’m white I was a minority so a lot of the fights and a lot of the standing up for your morals despite what was going on around you was an important thing and oftentimes I didn’t do that I succumbed to the peer pressure’s and the social influences like so many kids do today. Like you said some of these things are just so much the se yet somewhat different. I don’t know about you but with my daughter when I try to share with her the things that I’ve experienced and some of those se core fundamental things I’m still just—“dad” 

 

Shawn Vij: Yeah, yeah, totally. And that’s a great feeling and so I just love that. I don’t know how you feel about your daughter but like now it’s like—I guess she’s at the teenage—I feel like an Uber driver sometimes. It’s one of those—drop me off at the mall dad, pick me up but don’t come in here, but they still love you, it’s a great feeling. You adapt to it and you give them the room to grow and that’s what I’m learning too. At the early age they’re more dependent and so now it’s about how do we start gaining that independence in a very confident way and so that’s something I try to instill. It’s actually learning for me, this passion is a learning for me. I love being a student of life and a student of all these things that happen and so I think raising children is just amazing it’s a great, great learning experience for myself.

 

 Jim Rembach:    What we’re really talking about here may not seem like it’s important to the workplace or to organizations and corporations and governments for that matter but it is. We often find that a lot of kids aren’t getting some of these things that we’re giving ours and then they’re making it as the workplace. Many of them have actually come many generations before and created a lot of the problems that we currently have in existence. And so the thing that’s been nagging me so long that I think your book and looking through it and the things that you’re addressing maybe you have some insight that you can share but a neighbor of mine was a long time Dean of a Business School and I was talking to him about ethics and morality and he stops me and he says, you know what? Corporations don’t care about ethics, he goes, they don’t feel that it actually makes them any money.

 

Shawn Vij: It depends on the corporation. I don’t want to make a blanket statement or an ignorant statement but it just depends. It depends on certain companies that I’m gravitating now having written this book and changing myself and the way I think, I’m starting to gravitate to companies that do. Now granted companies are there for the bottom line, right? So the companies are like—look, I’m a capitalist, I’m a pure capitalist but I’m a conscious capitalist and if you go back and you look at Adam Smith and you see how capitalism is defined they do talk about boundaries and so that’s what I mean by conscious capitalism. I believe in free trade. I believe in these things but doing it the right way. It’s like a match, a football game, if we’re unethical in the practice in the play, what good does that do for anybody? My point is this—I believe in the competition I believe in the bottom line but how we do it is so critical in what we do. You’re starting to see companies understand that more especially the world is becoming smaller. The world is becoming smaller and you’re seeing a diversity skill set within the companies and within their customer base and therefore that community drives the culture and the behavior of the company. As millennial come in and they stand for these things outside of just profits but people that becomes a shared value. You’re starting to see companies gravitate to that because I would say inherently they are interested in the bottom line but they’re saying, “Well, okay let’s see these customers our employees care about this we can still get the bottom line.” I agree with the professor but I think how they’re going about it is in a more tactful human way now. 

 

Jim Rembach:     I think that’s a really interesting point. In your book you talk about corporate suffering and you talk about these four diseases associated with corporate suffering, share those with us. 

 

Shawn Vij: You have what I call deception, detraction, doubt, discrimination—I’m not going to define them all I think they’re pretty self-explanatory—but I categorize these in a way to share the outcomes of what I call the four D’s in a company but where they come from is where we need to get to. What I mean is that—having studied a lot about Buddhism and after meeting the Dalai La I started doing that, I just started exploring that. I started seeing that in Buddhism they talk about the three poisons, and they talk about it a lot in their literature, anger, greed and ignorance and they talk about it at the individual level. I believe just trying to connect the dots, I started seeing that—gosh, these three things they’re derivatives, they’re mixed cocktail poisonous cocktail. And as we build on that they drive those four behaviors, those four D’s if you will. And I talked about that in the book and I go into it a little bit more and I get surgical on how do we—and then I talk about how do we manage those emotions, how do we manage those behaviors.

 

Jim Rembach:     One of the things when you start talking about those four diseases you start getting into how individuals also start having issues with these if it does not align with them internally. And in the book at the very beginning you talk about that this book is actually made for the following people—those who feel trapped in their job, those that are focused to compromise their values at the office, those who agonize over becoming someone they are not, those who are bushed in corporate politics cast aside, those who seek to be conscious change agents at the office and those who seek a greater purpose in their professional lives. So, I have to ask, if you’re not one of those what are you?

 

Shawn Vij: If you’re not one of those you’re extremely happy. You’re right everybody has some of that and so I would say this book is for a lot of people and it’s the degree of it. Look, every day you’re not going to be happy at work, every day we’re dealing with human beings and how you navigate through that and some environments are more toxic than others we’ve all been there and we’ve all had that terrible boss, there’s movies made about a terrible boss–we’ve all been through that but how you deal with it how you manage that is what I talk about. How do you go about that? How do you handle a very toxic environment? You’re right, I think it applies to a lot of people. Not just at work also at home as well and in personal lives.

 

Jim Rembach:     As you were talking I also started thinking about being leader of other people that I happen to identify with the people who this book is for yet I’m feeling that pressure and I have to buffer, I have to that deflector. How does someone actually—when they’re kind of feeling stuck in that situation and knowing that they don’t want to disseminate or affect or impact all of their reports how can they not do that?

 

Shawn Vij: I talked about it—the most important thing—there’s a lot of organizations and I’ve been in a lot of them and I’ve consulted with a lot of them where they’re driven by fear and that’s not a healthy way. Yeah, it gets to the bottom line and so with that fear, that anxiety, the unknown. It’s very hard to make a stand at times because we also have a tendency—we cage ourselves to things that we think that are going to make us happy like buying that car buying that house and we become dependent on the job and so we start to lose sight of what’s important and so the job we the job shackles us. We are so dependent on that now and we’re so fearful, if you’re in a fearful environment, and the last thing you want to do is make a stand on what you think is right or listening to your inner voice because you’re fearful of losing everything that you’ve caged yourself with and so that takes courage. So, I truly believe that the toughest thing about human beings—children, we just talk about children—we need to trust ourselves more human beings are very resilient., it’s amazing. If you look at all the success stories a lot of people they’ve lost their jobs and they’ve started huge companies. I guess what I’m saying is walk into the unknown, don’t be fearful it’ll be okay in fact you will be stronger. What I talked about is in the suffering you will find that inner strength that is the key and that allows you to build courage and strength to make the decisions, If you see something that’s wrong you can either—I guess I’m getting pretty deep and in your question, but when you see something that’s wrong either say something make a choice or just leave you’ll find something else. Companies don’t own you it’s at will employment and you can play that on them as well it goes both ways. I’m not saying you wanted you to do that, you want to be tactful you could do it either really good. In my book I interviewed the head HR for Starbucks and she had told me some really good advice and I’ve seen her in action actually. I’ve seen her talk to executives she’s say’s, as long as we’re so fearful of we see something that’s going wrong be direct be transparent be timely and be calm, it was very thought-provoking because I started acting on that. It’s so funny we actually put our own curtains up. You’ll be amazed the recipient tends to be more open about it and they respect you more for that, they appreciate you more–a good leader not looking for the yes woman or yes man, if you will. And you know what? If they respect you for it then you’re in a good environment. And if they don’t then you need to leave. If you’re yelling and screaming you shouldn’t do that that’s not the right way to do it or either right. Like she said, be respectful, be timely, be transparent, be honest and that usually works.

 

Jim Rembach:    I think that’s a very good point. In this book and even the way you started the book—talking about meeting the Dalai La and the impact that that had on you, gosh! I can imagine that there’s a lot of quotes that you have that can all learn from and gain some insight from and have some energy from. Is there one or two that you can share with us?

 

Shawn Vij: I haven’t an epigraph that I’ll lead that one alone, that’s a powerful quote, but the quote that hits me the most and kind of inspired me to write this is from the Dalai La. He says, “In my own experience the period of greatest gain in knowledge and experience is the most difficult period of one’s life. Through a difficult period, he says, you can learn, you can develop inner strength, determination and courage to face the problem. And he says, “Who gives you this chance? Your enemy.” And what’s powerful is he told me this, our greatest enemy is ourselves. Obviously you can learn from your enemy, he’s talking about the Chinese, but he’s also talking about ourselves, our inner selves. When I talked about the anger, the greed, ignorance in finding that balance that to me was a powerful quote. 

 

Jim Rembach:     You even end your book as far as that is concerned and you come back full circle and being true to yourself and that’s how you ended it. I know even when you were starting to talk about the opening of the book and your own trials and tribulations and meeting him, there’s humps that we have to get over. And you talk about one big one and at the beginning of the book, but is there one that you can share that we can learn from?

 

Shawn Vij: I think the biggest one, like you mention—I appreciate the introduction—I’ve worked 25 years in industry in various capacities in consulting and all the way from working at the Rouge at Henry Ford’s—I work on the line. I started working on line and then I ran multi-billion dollar relationships for Microsoft. I’ve had the opportunity to work across various capacities but I think the biggest hump or the biggest learning I learned was—I started to lose myself, I would say early on. Early on in my career I started to—what some people call ethical fading or psychic numbing where I began to distance myself from my core values and I let the successive greed take over and these toxic environments take over. What happened was I had an old boss and this old boss, I found something that was shady in the books. I was new and I was just out of business school and I was like, hey, I don’t know this doesn’t seem right and it just didn’t feel and it just doesn’t sit well. I won’t get into the details but the accounting practice there was something going on and I was hired to do something else but yet she was making me the accountant for this project. I was wondering why and I was kind of like, wow this is what you call the guinea pig or the scapegoat. And so you realize later on—so to make the long story short, I started asking. I started asking a lot of people in the different hallways and they didn’t like that so she let me go and took me into an office and I walked through the experience in the book. The thing that got to me, the biggest hump—the thing that hit me was that—she says to me as she was tearing she says to me, this is business it’s not personal. I truly believed at that point business was just business and so I started to take that on. I guess what I’m trying to say is I learned really the hard way. We make compromises every day at every level of the company. I truly believe—we’re human beings and companies are made up of humans. I believe people are company’s greatest asset so I truly believe that humanity plays a big role and it’s always personal and that’s the difference. If you take that approach then I think you can approach business in a different way—in a human way.

 

Jim Rembach:     When you start talking about the experiences that you’ve had, the work that you’ve been doing, the companies that you’re working with writing of this book, your daughter—you have a lot of things going on but if you were to say you had one goal, what would it be?

 

Shawn Vij: I’m tired of watching countless people suffering and compromising the values for the sake of a dollar. I believe in making money but you shouldn’t have to suffer for it. I wanted to help people be more successful without feeling trapped in toxic environments. I truly believe we can raise a consciousness at work which leads to greater productivity by raising what I would say the human condition to conscious capitalism. So that to me is a big goal—how do we raise the human condition. Everybody has the right. I believe in capitalism but I believe it needs to be fair in the sense that if you work at it everybody should have the same equal right to work and make money and do well. But if you don’t, that’s on you but you should at least have the right to do that, that’s why I believe in this. When companies are excessively greedy and they shut that out and only them benefiting from it. I guess what I’m saying is that—for example, micro-financing, providing people in third world countries the opportunity to make money and do good with it. And so, that to me is one of the biggest goals—is to raise the human condition through conscious capitalism. I’ve been working with folks—look at companies like John Mackey and Whole Foods, you see this conscious capitalism movement it’s a good thing.

 

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.

 

An even better place to work is an easy-to-use solution that gives you a continuous diagnostic on employee engagement along with integrated activities that will improve employee engagement and leadership skills in everyone. Using this award winning solutions guaranteed to create motivated, productive, and loyal employees who have great work relationships with our colleagues and your customers. To learn more about an even better place to work visit beyondmorale.com/better. 

 

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

 

Shawn Vij: I’m ready to hoedown. 

 

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

 

Shawn Vij: Taking more risks. We need to push ourselves out of our comfort zone and when we get comfortable we get complacent. So jump in the pool make sure there’s water there be calculated and learn how to swim. 

 

Shawn Vij: What is the best leadership advice you have ever received?

 

Shawn Vij: Take the best from everyone. What I by that is take the best quality from everyone you meet. There’s no rocket science not all people are perfect but we know what’s good and bad, so take the best.

 

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

 

Shawn Vij: Hustle. I’m from Detroit, true Detroit grit. I don’t quit ever. When you fall down you need to get back up. I like being that underdog with a purpose not just to complain but to truly have an impact. 

 

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

 

Shawn Vij: Wisdom, awareness, taking all the vantage points. I never used to do that so now I do. 

 

Jim Rembach:     What would be one book that you’d recommend for our listeners and it could be from any genre? Of course we’re going to put a link to Moral Fiber-Awakening Corporate Consciousness on your show notes page as well.

 

Shawn Vij: Alright, I guess the book that I really truly enjoy and I’ve worked with him a lot, the book is called The Art of Happiness by Howard Cutler and he’s also done one—The Art of Happiness at Work. 

 

Jim Rembach:     Okay Fast Leader legion, you can find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going to fastleader.net/Shawn Vij. Okay, Shawn 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 back you can only choose one. What skill or a piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

 

Shawn Vij: That’s a good question. The one skill I would take back is to be true to yourself. Never lie to yourself. Never lie to ourselves every day, we lie to ourselves every day and it’s just the degree of it. Take the time to know yourself and love yourself but also at the same time take accountability for your own action. Listen to that inner voice. Do what’s right. I truly believe life is a full-circle and Karma does exist. When you’re true to yourself it amazing doors just seem to open.

 

Jim Rembach:     Shawn, 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?

 

Shawn Vij: They can reach me out at www.moralfiber.world, I’m also on Facebook 

 

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

 

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 fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster.

 

END OF AUDIO

[/expand]

 

Danny Gutknecht Finding Meaning at Work

148: Danny Gutknecht: Don’t do things to make me proud

Danny Gutknecht Show Notes Page

Danny Gutknecht’s daughter came home crying. She did not want Danny to be disappointed in her because she brought home grades she was not happy with. That’s when Danny said those were her grades and her journey. Just like employees at work, she needed to find her own meaning.

Danny was born and raised in Hastings and Lincoln Nebraska and then moved to Yuma, Arizona with his younger brother Michael.

Ever since Danny can remember he had two competing energies in his life. He knew he was an entrepreneur, even though he didn’t know what that term meant at the time. He also had a deep curiosity to know what makes people great. Not just famous or someone who seemed to be a default icon – but people who seemed to stand out and do something valuable – because they had tapped something unique within themselves and contributed something unique to society. This led to what he thought was hobby while he built and helped build companies.

Danny had no idea that business would become a living lab at massive scale to explore the most prevalent relationships in our lives – between ourselves, the work we do and the companies we build. He also didn’t know it would also lead to a deeper understanding of the stage-by-stage individuation of both companies and people beyond basic programs.

It took about 10 years for Danny to begin figuring out what he was doing and another 20 to develop models and processes that aid people and companies on their journey to tap their essence. Over the last 15 years more and more people kept saying, “you have to write a book.” He would always tell people he thought there was too much information “out there,” Finally, one of his good friends Bijoy Goswami, who he had been collaborating with on most of the models and processes explained in the book said, “Danny, you have to write a book and I am not taking no for an answer.”

Danny is the author of Meaning at Work: And Its Hidden Language and currently lives in Peoria, Arizona with his Melissa as an empty nester.

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Listen to @DannyGutknecht to get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow Click to Tweet

“There’s a lot of identity issues that we have wrapped up with work.” -Danny Gutknecht Click to Tweet

“For the first 21 years of our lives we’re programmed.” -Danny Gutknecht Click to Tweet 

“Taking responsibility for someone else’s motivation is a common mistake leaders make.” -Danny Gutknecht Click to Tweet 

“The employment journey today is very parental.” -Danny Gutknecht Click to Tweet 

“Values are contextual as the environment around you changes.” -Danny Gutknecht Click to Tweet 

“When you ignore your inner voice, it will come out in other forms of energy.” -Danny Gutknecht Click to Tweet 

“Our words change with our mood and our moods change with our words.” -Danny Gutknecht Click to Tweet 

“The organization itself is a being on its own journey.” -Danny Gutknecht Click to Tweet 

“I’m responsible for my own meaning journey.” -Danny Gutknecht Click to Tweet 

“With every experience we have we’re learning something new.” -Danny Gutknecht Click to Tweet 

“The organization has to keep evolving their meaning.” -Danny Gutknecht Click to Tweet 

“When you do things that are out of tune with yourself, you struggle.” -Danny Gutknecht Click to Tweet 

“Steward your own meaning.” -Danny Gutknecht Click to Tweet 

“You can’t do the work, they have to.” -Danny Gutknecht Click to Tweet 

“Constantly reflect and evaluate your thought processes.” -Danny Gutknecht Click to Tweet 

Hump to Get Over

Danny Gutknecht’s daughter came home crying. She did not want Danny to be disappointed in her because she brought home grades she was not happy with. That’s when Danny said those were her grades and her journey. Just like employees at work, she needed to find her own meaning.

Advice for others

Improve your meaning competency. When you do you will live a much richer and deeper existence.

Holding him back from being an even better leader

Stewarding my meaning.

Best Leadership Advice

You can’t do the work, they have to.

Secret to Success

Constantly reflecting and evaluating my thought processes.

Best tools that helps in Business or Life

The Human Fugue

Recommended Reading

Meaning at Work: And Its Hidden Language

The Undiscovered Self: The Dilemma of the Individual in Modern Society

The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

Why Motivating People Doesn’t Work . . . and What Does: The New Science of Leading, Energizing, and Engaging

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Contacting Danny Gutknecht

website: http://www.pathways.io/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannygutknecht/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/DannyGutknecht

Resources and Show Mentions

Developing a Better Place to Work

Increase Employee Engagement and Workplace Culture

Empathy Mapping

54 Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Competencies List: Emotional Intelligence has proven to be the right kind of intelligence to have if you want to move onward and upward faster. Get your free list today.

 

Show Transcript: 

[expand title=”Click to access edited transcript”]

148: Danny Gutknecht: Don’t do things to make me proud

 

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 intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach. 

 

The number one thing that contributes to customer loyalty is emotions. So move onward and upward faster by gaining significantly deeper insight and understanding of your customer journey and personas with emotional intelligence. With your empathy mapping workshop you’ll learn how to evoke and influence the right customer emotions that generate improve customer loyalty and reduce your cost to operate. Get over your emotional hump now by going to empathymapping.com to learn more. 

 

Jim Rembach:   Okay, Fast Leader legion, today I’m excited I get the chance to talk to somebody who is going to actually broaden my horizons in a couple different areas and I know he will do the same for you. Danny Gutknecht was born and raised in Hastings and Lincoln Nebraska and then moved to Yuma, Arizona with his younger brother Michael. Ever since Danny can remember he had two competing energies in his life he knew he was an entrepreneur even though he didn’t know what that term meant at the time. He also had a deep curiosity to know what makes people great not just famous or someone who seemed to be a default icon but those people who seemed to stand out and do something valuable because they had tapped something unique within themselves and contributed something unique to society this led to what he thought was hobby while he built and helped build companies. Danny had no idea that business would become a living lab at massive scale to explore the most prevalent relationships in our lives between ourselves, the work we do and the companies we build.

 

Danny Gutknecht:     He also didn’t know that it would lead to deeper understanding and of the stage-by-stage individuation of both companies and people beyond basic programs. It took about 10 years for Danny to begin figuring out what he was going to do in another 20 to develop models and processes that aid people and companies on their journey to tap their essence. Over the past 15 years more and more people kept saying, “You have to write a book.” He would always tell people he thought there was too much information out there. Finally, one of his good friends Bijoy Goswami, who had been collaborating with Danny with most of the models and processes explained in the book he said, “Danny, you have to write a book and I’m not taking no for an answer.”

 

Jim Rembach:   Danny currently lives in Peoria, Arizona with his wife Melissa as an empty nester. Danny Gutknecht are you ready to help us get over the hump?

 

Danny Gutknecht:     Absolutely Jim.

 

Jim Rembach:   Danny, I’m glad you’re here. I’ve given our legion a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better. 

 

Danny Gutknecht:     Well, my current passion is certainly the intersection between work and meaning. We spend 57% of our lives at work and meaning is really the way that we parse our existence it’s how we understand the world and ourselves in it and so there’s a lot of identity issues that we have wrapped up with work and a big struggle right now today with people that are disconnected a little bit from work.

 

Jim Rembach:   I had the opportunity to look through your book, Meaning at Work and It’s Hidden Language and there was one model that that stood out to me that as I started looking at it and thinking about a particular commencement speech that I had watched on the internet it got me to thinking about something. You talked about the evolution of societal foundations and right now you’re talking about this self-actualization which is kind of like the current stage we’re in but this guy was talking about, at this commencement speech, how maybe we’re actually putting too much pressure on ourselves. We’re trying to find this meaning, we’re not finding this meaning we’re not finding the purpose maybe we just need to stop worrying about it so much and just get on with the work and then you’ll find your passion. What are your thoughts on that?

 

Danny Gutknecht:     Well, one of the issues that we have with just feeling good about our lives or finding meaning in our life is that for the first 21 years of our lives were programmed. We’re programmed by parents, society, and culture. All of the answers that we have and the ways that we learn to understand what our existence is and how we should act in it is given to us by some external source, some external authority. The issues that people run into the struggle that they have internally with that it comes from the fact that it doesn’t resonate with who we are all the time and so there’s certain facets of our journey that were in conflict with. 

 

Jim Rembach:   I’ve interviewed even doctors, the whole family was doctors, and the doctor was particularly unhappy when I got down into it I found out that he had this dream of being a cellist all of his life and he would fly off on weekends from being a doctor to Boston to try out for the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. And so you get that to where this is somebody that did what they were supposed to do, they were supposed to grow up as a doctor it was prestigious to society there’s nothing wrong with that. On the other hand his hidden passion the thing that he really wanted to do was play in the orchestra.

 

Danny Gutknecht:     That’s really interesting. As you’re talking I started thinking about someone who has 14-year old a 12 year old and a nine year old and I just got back from a parent-teacher conference from my twelve-year-old and I’m like, “He’s not going to mount to anything at the moment.”

 

Jim Rembach:   You know what’s fascinating about that? You think about it this way. So, you’ve got three kids you put all three of those kids in the same environment they all migrate they all kind of move in and asphyxiate on different things and that journey of fixating on those things are something that they resonate with and they develop skills around that resonance. And so in the development of the child in addition to education helping them progress their mental models, their ability to understand complexity and the ability to reflect and really build themselves comes this—where is your passion? And can you help them find that and can you help them maybe even go through some of the phases of the things they don’t like to do because that helps you get to where your ultimately going anyway. 

 

Danny Gutknecht:     That’s a good point but it goes back to—for me I’m like, “Okay” because I’m even thinking about this from my younger years. And of course as parents we don’t want our kids to follow the same path that we’ve had when we know that there’s humps in it we try to help them avoid them. The fact is sometimes they have to get over them themselves but e in themselves but I’m sinner and said, “Okay, you don’t like to push yourself physically, you don’t like to push yourself mentally, I’m like, “Okay, how can I even help you find a particular passion and I would dare to say that that’s kind of what happens today when people get into the workplace they’re in the same position like you said, it’s 21 30 35. I keep telling my daughter you’re not allowed to do things until you’re 30 because then maybe you’ll have it figured out. How do we help people? 

 

Jim Rembach:   Well, that’s a really good question. One of the things that I had unconscious knack for for a long time. I was trying to do it so I don’t mean unconscious in that way but I was unaware of all the levers that I would work with and pull with individuals. I was always able to build business environments where people performed at a high level and really enjoyed it. Part of that process was the fact that I never, as a leader, wanted to take responsibility for somebody else’s motivation it’s a common mistake that leaders and parents make. That’s the employment journey today it’s a very parental type of journey and a little bit of a parochial journey if you think about it this way. One of the issues that we have is that we are trying to, in society, get people to do things this control of our meaning. I want you to understand my world and I want you to get on my cause and be there with me and so I want to be able to control that. 

 

You’re seeing this breakdown in all of society today, you’re seeing it in the NFL, prayer in schools all of that people are basically showing up and saying, hey, wait a minute my value system is my value system a lot of times there’s nothing that I can do about that. It’s comes preinstalled it’s part of what I resonate with from a young child. And then you’ve got company saying, well I pay you, you should believe what I believe. Well, no that’s not the case and that’s actually improper motivation you’re demotivating your workforce. So people take this job they lie about their employment they say, oh I match those values on the wall, right? Well not even the company can match those values on the wall. Values are contextual as the environment around you changes you have to change and you value different things. And so when you have a different context in your life as a company or as an individual you have different values that you interact with and so that intrinsic motivation is really important. There’s a guy named DC that wrote a book why we are the way we are and he really got in to that like even when giving people a raise. If you give them a raise and expect them to do more because of that raise it ruins the raise. But if you just give them a raise with the intent of saying, hey they deserve it it’s part of our growth they’ll continue to be intrinsically motivated, real fascinating stuff.

 

Danny Gutknecht:     As you were talking I started thinking about Susan Fowler’s book, Why Motivating People Doesn’t Work and What Does, she’s been a guest on the show and it’s exactly what you’re talking about it’s that, first of all I have to identify and understand my own motivators make sure I don’t project those or try to place those into or on to other people and really help them try to identify what their motivators are and really tap into those so that they can reach and achieve the goals and oftentimes expectations that they never get ahead of themselves. I know when we’re talking about a lot of this there’s a whole lot of emotion wrapped up in it and one of the things that we look at on the show are quotes to help us focus and give us that extra sense of energy and desire and drive. Is there a quote or two that you can share? 

 

Jim Rembach:   I love the quote by Carl Jung that says that, “What you resist will persist.” It’s about repression it’s about ignoring your inner voice. And so when you ignore that inner voice and you don’t address it positive or negative it will come out in other forms of energy. You mentioned raising kids earlier he also has a quote about, “The gift that the parent gives you their kid good or bad is their unlived life.” So if as a parent you’re going out and there’s certain issues that you’re repressing within yourself your child is likely to repeat those either by completely rejecting them and doing the opposite thing or emulating them and doing the exact same thing over and over again. And so I always viewed my job as a parent or as a leader in an organization as I have to number one Stuart Danny I have to focus on Danny’s meaning journey, how I’m addressing things in my life.

 

Danny Gutknecht:     As you were talking I started thinking about a lot of things. One of the things that you had talked about in the book is, let me make sure I get this right, the organizational dynamic lingua franca, and I’m not going to try to spell it, and when you started talking about your quote and you started talking about the motivation I think this comes into play, tell us what that is exactly? 

 

Jim Rembach:   I just read some research this morning about how our words and our moods change our words change with our mood and our moods change with our words and that’s one of the biggest things that change our social network. So you think about a business and so the organizational dynamic lingua franca I uncovered just by taking this, I took four years, I took Carl Jung and Maslow and I took all of these concepts and models about the human psyche and I started to implement them in interviewing people. And as a recruiter in a recruiting organization, I had all of my recruiters do it and we would circle around the table every day and talk about what we uncovered. So, instead of just going skills for dollars we went into what does it mean to be a computer programmer for you, why did you get your CS degree? Why did you go get a PhD? What did you want to accomplish? And what we were doing at the time as we were covering people’s work journey their meaning journey at work. 

 

Danny Gutknecht:     Well, when the recession hit I took a camera and I went inside of the organizations that I was working for and I started to interview people in there. And what I realized is that people even organizations who had different locations Seattle, Germany, North Carolina and as disparate as they were they had themes of why they were connected to the organization in a meaningful way. And that led me down the road to understanding that the organization itself is a being on its own journey, it’s a really hard concept for people to get but once they get it you see this liberation of the workforce, you have to unplug that projection journey. I look at it as like a marriage, if two people get married and then one goes in and says, “Hey, you make my dinner and get me my drinks and the other one says, “Hey, I’m going to supply your money and your security” what happens is that that turns into a relationship of projection. Instead of saying, “Hey, I have my own journey that I’m on my own journey that I’m exploring and it’s meaningful to me and so do you and we should remain empathetic to each other and understand that when we do that we will find shared meaning which I call themes it’s the reoccurring meaning patterns and the way that I uncovered those was through the people’s mantra. I called it a mantra because it was like, what are the things that we’re telling ourselves over and over again that’s writing that program, that we believe in that we’re reinforcing this particular belief? And so the organizational dynamic lingua franca is the set of themes that make up organizational meaning. And when you realize that that organization is a being on its own journey now employees can show up with the proper responsibilities of themselves and say, hey I’m responsible for my own meaning journey the company doesn’t control it but I choose to come here as an employment proposition and share it with the company. And they show up with intrinsic motivation as opposed to extrinsic and they steward the organization as much as they steward themselves. So that’s the power of that that construct it’s really the architecture of a culture. 

 

Jim Rembach:   Well I also started thinking about how—and you mentioned it a while ago, how you talked about how the organization may even have a difficult time you know following what they say are their own sense of values and especially when look at this in context it’s like, okay, I can see that’s also an issue where people have problems. It’s like, okay you’re telling me one thing I came here for one thing and I expected one thing but this ain’t how it is.

 

Danny Gutknecht:     Right. 

 

Jim Rembach:   So, I would think that you’re doing a lot of work to trying to make sure that organizations are authentic in those things and aligned with one of those things and congruent with those things. 

 

Danny Gutknecht:     The reason that I call it a dynamic lingua franca dynamic being the key operative word there is that meaning is dynamic with every experience that we have we’re learning something new. The organization has to keep evolving their meaning. If you look at Southwest Airlines they went from “no-frills to freedom to fly to without heart it’s just a machine” they keep they keep evolving and they do this actually through mining what their employees feel about it and communicating that to their customers. So, it’s a circular mining of understanding what concepts what themes are emerging that the airline has to deal with today this keeps you in touch with what’s going on in the ground. The problem with values and other things that are set in stone that come from people who said so you get an executive and you get a board and you get a marketing team and they’re like we’re going to say so, and there’s an element of that that’s really good don’t get me wrong, but when you say we’re going to say so it comes from a very small groups perspective of what that company is and who that company is. And that may be okay early on for a founder led business but when you have to scale beyond the founder then the whole honorees of carrying the meaning of that organization falls on a very few people. And that’s—you see it today with Gallup 70% unengaged nobody’s allowing for participation in understanding who the organization is and who it is except a few really great companies a lot of them I see doing it with some unconscious competence.

 

Jim Rembach:   I could definitely see what you’re talking about how all of this impacts both the employee experience and the customer experience. And I would dare to say that you probably had to go through a lot of humps yourself in order to be able to figure these things out. Is there a time where you’ve over the hump that we can learn from? 

 

Danny Gutknecht:     How many of them I’ve had all along the way are enormous. Yeah, one of them just in terms of the parental journey which I oftentimes equate to my learning experiences at work as well. You know you’d mentioned kids and daughters I had a daughter when she was in the sixth grade she came in with these grades that she wasn’t happy with. I walk in the front door and she just starts crying automatically and I said, oh, what’s wrong? We sat down on the couch and she said, “You know I don’t want you to be disappointed in me.” And I said, “Well, first of all why would I be disappointed?” And she said, “Well these aren’t grades that I want.” And I said, “Okay, I said let’s look at them” and we looked at them and I said, “What’s this up in the top left-hand corner?” And she said. “That’s my name.” And I said, “These are your grades, these aren’t mine and you have conditional love for me these can all be F’s I don’t care it’s your journey.” And so one of the things that I tried to continually impress is don’t do things to make me proud follow your heart do things that you feel are right for you and learn from them and if you plug that in as a continual learning experience it’s the same thing—these are all learning experiences from myself. When you do things that are out of tune with yourself with the human being I always struggled but when I did things that were in tune with myself I didn’t struggle. 

 

Jim Rembach:   Thanks for sharing that. There’s one thing that you said in there for me to just kind of really resonate it hard is that—somebody said something to the effect of, when you tell somebody you’re proud of them you now made it about you. And you just kind of elaborated that story and basically just said that, look those grades are about you and don’t seek but meet my pride, what I’ve essentially started doing now is I try to be very mindful and not to say I’m proud of you what I try to say is I’m happy for you. Because that’s about them and because the same thing would be on the other side from an empathy perspective is that, gosh, I feel bad for you. But again it’s about them it’s not about me. I’m disappointed in you, no, no I should not say that but I think that’s hard enough from a society perspective for us to kind of change that but I think there are really important distinctions.

 

Danny Gutknecht:     Oftentimes when I first introduced these concepts to people the biggest issue that they have is the controller. And the controller in us there’s a guy named Daniel Kahneman that wrote a book called, Thinking Fast and Slow, and he calls it system one and system two brains. I don’t think that terminology describes what those two brains do effectively enough. The system one brain is basically our executor so it’s that thing that we do when we just go we’re driving and we don’t have to think about driving and so that’s—a lot of people associate that with the ego we want our set rules and we just want to run this execution thing. The other one is the editor, it’s the reflective part of our brain. A so what’s really important is that we understand how we’re plugging in and editing those programs because if you just mindlessly run those programs you get—and so when I introduce these concepts to people they think, oh my god is that chaos? What am I doing by letting go? What am I doing by telling this child don’t make me proud go make yourself proud go do in life what you do and bring back those experiences and let’s share them together and I’ll share mine with you too my learning experiences it makes it more human. It’s the same thing that I’ve had to learn as a leader which is like—you’ve got your journey to go on as an employee and how can I help you but you have to do it you have to do the work. 

 

Jim Rembach:   That’s great point, thanks for sharing. You have the book, Meaning at Work, you have you’re speaking, you’re consulting all of these things going on but if I was to say you had one thing as far as the goal was concerned what would it be?

 

Danny Gutknecht:     Steward your own meaning. Helping people and companies steward meaning is probably the ultimate objective. It helps really liberate creativity it talks about those words individuation that you said earlier it’s a word from Carl Jung who basically said, the thing that we seek most in life is a differentiated life it’s why we seek out unique experiences it’s why we love to interact with unique things in the universe is because it’s opening up our mental models and our experience to learning and growing and if you think about that even from an evolutionary standpoint it makes a lot of sense. And so stewarding your meaning is really getting that editor part of your brain the system to your brain to start thinking about—are these models that I’m running working for me? Are they not working for me? If they’re not working for me how do I address them and reflect on them in a way that works for me? And that’s what stewarding meaning is.

 

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. 

 

An even better place to work is an easy-to-use solution that gives you a continuous diagnostic on employee engagement along with integrated activities that will improve employee engagement and leadership skills in everyone. Using this award winning solutions guaranteed to create motivated, productive and loyal employees who have great work relationships with our colleagues and your customers. To learn more about an even better place to work visit beyondmorale.com/better. 

 

Jim Rembach:   Alright, here we go Fast Leader legion it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay, Danny, the hump day hoedown is a 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 a robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Danny Gutknecht, are you ready to hoedown?

 

Danny Gutknecht:     You bet, let’s go. 

 

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

 

Danny Gutknecht:     Stewarding my meaning.

 

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

 

Danny Gutknecht:     You can’t do the work they have to.

 

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

 

Danny Gutknecht:     Constantly reflecting and evaluating on my thought processes. 

 

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

 

Danny Gutknecht:     The human fugue, it’s a model that Bijoy Goswami created. 

 

Jim Rembach:   What would be one book that you’d recommend to our legion, and it could be from any genre. Of course, we’ll put a link to Meaning at Work and it’s headed in language on your show notes page as well.

 

Danny Gutknecht:     Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self.

 

Jim Rembach:   Okay, Fast Leader legion you can find links to that and other bonus information from today’s show by going too fastleader.net/Danny Gutknecht. Okay, Danny, this is my last hump day hoedown question: Imagine you were given the opportunity to go back to the age of 25 and you were given the knowledge and skills that you have now and you can take them back with you but you can’t take everything you can only just choose one. What skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why?

 

Danny Gutknecht:     I would take back my meaning competency. Because I unconsciously stumbled into this whole meaning territory which is more than just a feeling. And so, I would be able to quickly evolve how I address everyone that I was engaged with every relationship in my life. It changes everything once you realize that you are the interpreter you are the person making the decision. And the sooner that you develop those competencies you’re going to live a much richer, deeper existence.

 

Jim Rembach:   Danny, it was an honor to spend time with you today, can you please share with a Fast Leader legion how they can connect with you?

 

Danny Gutknecht:     Obviously off of my website for the book which is, essencemining.com. The organization that I run is called pathways.IO. We help organizations do exactly this find their meaning.

 

Jim Rembach:   Danny Gutknecht, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom the Fast Leader Legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump. Woot! Woot!

 

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 fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster. 

 

END OF AUDIO 

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096: Paul Larsen: I became very alone overnight

Paul Larsen Show Notes

Paul Larsen was promoted into a manager role. He wasn’t up for it so the authority went to Paul’s head. After a short period of time, Paul found himself all alone. One Thursday night, all of Paul’s direct reports went out to celebrate a birthday and he wasn’t invited. That’s when Paul realized he needed to make some changes to get over the hump.

Paul flew into his Northern California home in the early 60s, being raised in the Bay Area communities of Hayward and Livermore. The youngest of 4 spirited children, Paul is the son of an airline pilot and a very creative homemaker and talented artist.

Instilled at an early age to the value of education and learning, Paul consistently found himself in “teacher” roles no matter if his job was flipping hamburgers, selling shoes or bagging groceries. It seemed that friends, family, colleagues and strangers always sought him out for advice, counsel and coaching. It was this intuitive talent that led Paul to his various and successful corporate roles, such as leading human resources or learning and development teams at Charles Schwab, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Adobe Technology.

However, it was not until later in life, in 2009, that Paul truly “found his voice.”  On a warm day in June, Paul was sitting on a solid church pew with the sun streaming in through the stained glass windows. He was listening intently to people as they each extolled the virtues of a man that had recently passed away. That man was Paul’s father, Alf N Larsen, Jr.  Each person got up to the microphone and talked about the positive impact that Alf had on their life…as a colleague, friend, family member and Army Air Corp fighter pilot of WWII. It was during this “lovefest” that Paul had one of the biggest epiphanies of his life: “What will people be saying as my memorial service? What will my legacy be? What impact do I have on other people…my communities…the world? What impact do I want to have?” Calling this a final “mentoring moment” from his father, Paul set out to find his “true voice” and realize the potential he knew was still hiding within him.

Saying good-bye to the traditional corporate roles, Paul created his core message around “Find Your V-O-I-C-E as a Leader” by discovering your Values…creating your Outcomes…exercising your Influence…demonstrating your Courage…and communicating your overall Expression for positive impact. This is what his parents had always modeled…he was just putting it into practice to share with the world.

Paul now works at his true calling as an established executive coach, partnering with incredibly smart and committed leaders across all industries and organizations. His talent and ability to help leaders “find their voice” comes from his own life experience of successes, failures, loves and losses. He is the author of the new book, “Find Your VOICE as a Leader”, and is a board member of the wonderful foundation, “Together We Can Change The World” which supports the education and empowerment of women and children throughout Southeast Asia.

When not traveling the globe, he lives in San Francisco, CA with his partner of 25 years, Steve, and relishes his relationships with his 7 nieces and nephews and his 25 “great-nieces and nephews”…while always living by his motto: “Life is too short not to find your voice…so what are you waiting for?”

Tweetable Quotes and Mentions

Listen to @VoiceasaLeader and get over the hump on the @FastLeaderShow Click to Tweet 

“You don’t have to have the title to be a leader.” -Paul Larsen Click to Tweet

“Find your true calling, find your voice, and take a stand.” -Paul Larsen Click to Tweet 

“Corporations stifle creativity because of the bureaucracy.” -Paul Larsen Click to Tweet 

“Bureaucracy creates leaders who are all the same.” -Paul Larsen Click to Tweet 

“Conventional wisdom would say that the author of our legacy is someone else.” -Paul Larsen Click to Tweet 

“What’s your legacy; what’s the legacy you’re leaving?” -Paul Larsen Click to Tweet 

“Author who you are as a leader.” -Paul Larsen Click to Tweet 

“Do not let other people author your legacy.” -Paul Larsen Click to Tweet 

“You better take the steps to establish the legacy that you want.” -Paul Larsen Click to Tweet 

“Without knowing your values, how do you know where you’re going?” -Paul Larsen Click to Tweet 

“What do you value and how do you know you value that?” -Paul Larsen Click to Tweet 

“Values are at the forefront of conversations, but do we really know what they are?” -Paul Larsen Click to Tweet 

“It’s not about likability; it’s about creditability.” -Paul Larsen Click to Tweet 

“The ability to be self-aware establishes who you are.” -Paul Larsen Click to Tweet    

Hump to Get Over

Paul Larsen was promoted into a manager role. He wasn’t up for it so the authority went to Paul’s head. After a short period of time, Paul found himself all alone. One Thursday night, all of Paul’s direct reports went out to celebrate a birthday and he wasn’t invited. That’s when Paul realized he needed to make some changes to get over the hump.

Advice for others

Write your own legacy.

Holding him back from being an even better leader

Jumping to conclusions too fast.

Best Leadership Advice Received

Hire smart people and then get out of their way.

Secret to Success

Stepping out of my comfort zone on a continual basis.

Best tools that helps in business or Life

An egg timer.

Recommended Reading

Find Your VOICE as a Leader

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

Contacting Paul

Website: http://www.paulnlarsen.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulnlarsen

Twitter: https://twitter.com/VoiceasaLeader

Resources

54 Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Competencies List: Emotional Intelligence has proven to be the right kind of intelligence to have if you want to move onward and upward faster. Get your free list today.

 

Show Transcript: 

[expand title=”Click to access edited transcript”]

096: Paul Larsen: I became very alone overnight

 Intro: Welcome to the Fast Leader Podcast, where we uncover the leadership like hat that help you to experience, break out performance faster and rocket to success. And now here’s your host, customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

Need a powerful and entertaining way to ignite your next conference, retreat or team-building session? My keynote don’t include magic but they do have the power to help your attendees take a leap forward by putting emotional intelligence into their employee engagement, customer engagement and customer centric leadership practices. So bring the infotainment creativity the Fast Leader show to your next event and I’ll help your attendees get over the hump now. Go to beyondmorale.com/speaking to learn more.

 

Jim Rembach:     Okay, Fast Leader Legion today I’m excited to have the guest that we have on the show today because he has a system that I think can help us all. Paul Larsen flew in to his northern California home in the early 60’s being raised in the Bay Area communities of Hayward and Livermore. The youngest of four spirited children Paul’s the son of an airline pilot and a very creative homemaker and talented artist. Instilled that an early age to the value of education and learning, Paul consistently found himself in teacher roles no matter if his job was flipping hamburgers, selling shoes or bagging groceries. If seeing that friends, family, colleagues and strangers always sought him out for advice, counsel and coaching. It was this intuitive talent that led Paul to his various successful corporate roles such as leading human resources and learning and development for teens at Charles Schwab, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Adobe Technologies. 

However it was not until later in life in 2009 that Paul truly found his voice on a warm day in June. Paul was sitting on a church pew with the sun streaming through the stained-glass windows he was listening intently to people as they each extolled virtues of a man that had recently passed away, that man was Paul’s father. Alf N. Larsen Jr. each person got up to the microphone and talked about the positive impact that Alf had in their life as a colleague, friend, family member and Army Air Corps, fighter pilot of World War II. It was during this lab test that Paul had one of his biggest epiphanies of his life. What will people be staying at my memorial service? What will my legacy be? What impact do I have on other people, my communities & the world? What impact do I want to have? Calling this his final mentoring moment from his father, Paul set out to find his true voice and realize the potential he knew was still hiding within him. 

Saying goodbye to the traditional corporate roles, Paul created his core message around find your voice as a leader by discovering your values, creating your outcomes, exercising your influence, demonstrating your courage in community and communicating your overall expression for positive impact, This is what his parents had always modeled he was putting it into practice to share with the world. Paul now works at his true calling as an established executive coach helping leaders find their voice and is the author of the book “Find Your Voice as a Leader.” 

When not traveling the globe he lives in San Francisco, California with his partner of 25 years Steve and relishes his relationships with his seven nieces and nephews and his 25 great-nieces and nephews. While always living by his motto, Life is too short not to find your voice, so what are you waiting for, Paul Larson are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Paul Larsen:  I am ready Jim to help us all get over the hump. 

Jim Rembach:     I appreciate that. So, I’ve given our listeners a little bit about you, but can you tell us what your current passion so that we can get to know you even better. 

Paul Larsen:  Yeah. My current passion is working with leaders in any capacity in life. You don’t have to have the title to be a leader. So get out and lead, find your true calling, find your voice, take a stand as you just so eloquently put in terms of my story, life is too short for us not to find our voice, so get out and lead and that’s really what I work on.  My experience has been in the corporate world so I really work in leaders because a lot of times corporations do a job of trying to stifle creativity, stifled communication and they do that because of the bureaucracy, because of momentum they need to have around their business but what it does is creates leaders who are all the same, who norm all the same. And what I want to do is I work with leaders individually so they create their unique voice, that unique value, that unique set of DNA to make them stand up and have an impact for the people in their community. 

Jim Rembach:     I appreciate your energy and your passion for this because definitely contagious and for me I want to get on the edge of my seat. Now, we had the opportunity to talk earlier and there’s several things that stood out to me and there’s a couple that I’d like to focus on. You had said that the reality is for all of us is that our legacy is currently being authored. And if we stop and think about the author of our own legacy, who is it really? 

Paul Larsen:  You know Jim that’s correct. Conventional wisdom would say that the author of our legacy is someone else. If you look at folks and you look at leaders and you look at people in the community many times the legacy is being written by people other than the individual. When I work with leaders one of the very first questions I asked, I’ll always ask, what’s your legacy? What’s the legacy you’re leaving? And the look I get is beyond that chicken and beef look, or what are you going to have for a drink, it’s like—wooh! I’ve never thought of that. I think my legacy is this. And what I want people to do is really have an anchor, author who they are as a leader, author who you are as a community and not let it be authored by other people. Certainly, in today’s world we live in a society we are bombarded with all the media, we are bombarded with likes and tweets and postings and so forth that can certainly shape people’s viewpoints but you have an absolute accountability to establish who you are especially in a leadership role and especially the impact you want to leave. 

There’s always the old adage I remember when growing up, there’s always an old adage I remember my grandmother and my aunt, who are of course older at that time, reading the obituaries and I’m thinking to myself, why are you reading obituaries it just sounds depressing? It just sound like, gosh! You just want to see who has passed or who dies, but if you really think about it the obituary is an archive record of the legacy of that person. And many times that obituary that is printed online or in the paper is not even written by the individual who it’s about. So I use that as a lesson because it’s not about writing our obituary but it is crafting a legacy because no matter when you’re gone, and when I say gone I don’t necessarily mean gone from the world I mean gone from the meeting, gone from the room, gone from that organization that legacy stays there. So, you better have an accountability, you better take the steps to establish that legacy that you want and author it yourself. 

Jim Rembach:     So many things are running through my head as you shared that, and thank you for doing that, is that even last night when I’m driving home with my 11-year-old son from baseball practice, and one of the things that my wife and I always try to focus on with our children is their effort, and he was not putting together a very good effort last night. And so I asked him the question I said, “What do you want people to think about you when they hear your name?” 

Paul Larsen:  Beautiful.

Jim Rembach:     And he goes, he stop for a moment he goes, “Good.” And I’m like, “What do you mean?” What do you mean by good? You want them to think good, good about what? And so I tried to get him to talk and think about that and then I tied it back around to his behavior. I said, “So, do you think people think good about you when you sat down in that field and didn’t want to participate?” Do you think people felt good about you when everybody else is running and you are dragging your feet? So, when you talk about having people think good about you, what do you have to do in order for that to happen?

Paul Larsen:  Yeah. Jim that is a brilliant example on so many levels. Number one, you touched on the questions that we should always think. You touched on the definitions that go beyond just good, just go beyond to say, “Well, I think I want to be used thought of as good or okay or a nice person, what does that mean? But more brilliantly and what you just described is that it was 11-year-old son that you were talking to and talking with. And if you really think about this, if we took the responsibility in today’s community and we had discussions like that with our children, with our students, with people who are up-and-coming in life, and up-and-coming through our academic process, think the difference that will have long-term I have no doubt, not even knowing your son and knowing the relationship but I have no doubt that will stick with your son and that will carry forward as he progresses to 12, 13, 14 and into later in life and he will remember that and be very deliberate with his actions and that legacy. The brilliancy of that I just applaud you on that. 

Jim Rembach:     I appreciate that and I can tell you it came from a lot of hard knocks and that’s why there’s fall and loss on top of my head and I know that I’ll probably having to have this conversation repeatedly for many years and probably until—maybe I get my I don’t want to say satisfaction because I don’t but when he’s sitting in the pew and the light is shining in his eyes, hopefully he’ll have his moment. Now, one of the things I also too I think is really important because you and I had chat about this a little bit is that, I want him to be able to know and understand his values as he progresses throughout his life. And we talked about that finding your voice in that first step, to me I think is one of the most critical ones is having people to identify their own values.

I was conducting a workshop with about 50 or 60 leaders where we we’re doing some values identification and I asked folks, as we’re like three quarters away through the workshop, I said, how many of you have ever done anything like this before? And maybe three people raised their hands. And the only reason they had done that is because those folks were part of the corporate environment that went through this discovery process. 

Paul Larsen:  Right. Right.

Jim Rembach:     But when you talk about values most people, I don’t think really know what they are. 

Paul Larsen:  Right. You’re absolutely right Jim. And if you really thing about it without really knowing who we are without knowing what our values are, how to we know where we’re going? How do we know the decisions that were making are going to be the best decisions whether it’s for today, next week, next year, for ourselves, our family, our friends, whatever that might be, and really understanding our values, our core DNA that is everything around how we judge, it’s everything around the actions we take, it’s everything around the purpose that we have, it’s how we behave. So to your point around the folks that are really looking at sort of like, (11:28 inaudible) what do I value? One of the first things I ask when I enter into a coaching partnership, certainly, when I ask the user, what do you value? And how do you know you value that? And the reason I ask the second piece which is the kind of the ROI or the return on investment of your values because many times when I ask leaders to your point around the corporate world, I’ll ask leaders like, “What do you value? All of a sudden start to get a list of values that are cock tip on their wall because they’re the corporate values or the corporate mission which are great and those are wonderful and we all have had experience with those and companies need that as a compass but more importantly I want that leader to understand what is their compass. 

So I’ll get that superficial response first, which is, well, I value teamwork, I value open door, I have an open door policy, I value open communication. Like, really? Then why is door close every time I come in here? Why is it when I ask your team members they say you’re completely unapproachable and you’re never available? So the behavior does not match what you’re actually saying. And a lot of times, not all the time, but a lot of times when I dig deeper through discussions, through assessments whatever that might be, truly the values come out, it’s like no I don’t really value that. I actually value a different type of style or I have a different motivation and that’s all good. This is not judgement on what’s a good value and what’s a bad value but leaders in organizations get to a point where they think they need to value X or they need to value Y because if I really value A or B that’s not good for this organization or that’s not good for what people will think of me or like me for. And thus we get wrapped up in that so people just kind up to your point they don’t do the work on values and then they wonder why they’re like a ship that just kind of drifting, kind of rudderless. And then they wake-up seven years later it’s like, “How did I get in this company where I don’t like what I’m doing? How is my life like this? It’s because it didn’t start with that core sets of beliefs and really identifying what those are and then living those out with your behavior, your impact and again it goes back to creating that legacy. 

Jim Rembach:     You know, oftentimes we hear a lot of differences about generations, multiple generations and workforce and we talk about bloomers, Xers,  it just goes on and on and on. However when you start thinking about values a lot of times value seemed to be something that’s inherited and passed throughout family generations and things along those lines. When you start talking about values and working with different folks, what do you see are some of the interesting dynamics of it?

Paul Larsen:  I work with millennials, I work with the Gen Y’s, I work with the Gen X’s, I work with the Baby boomers and to be honest with you sometimes I’m so confused I don’t even know what’s what except what you said was key. Many times when I’m working with let’s say, let’s take the millennials who had come up and they certainly have a brand, right? We hear that all the time that’s the workforce of the hour right now. How do you manage millennials? And how do engage millennials and all that stuff? But they actually come up, and I think it’s because of just the communities had been raised in the parents and or the mentors or the guides they’ve had, they come up with the true set of who they are and what their values are. And many times those values that the millennials are espousing, of course not everybody, but many of them in leadership positions are contrary to the values of let’s say the Gen Xer’s or the baby boomers or the older generations of which, by the way I’m part of so I own that, and hence we get all this kind of contradiction or we get this gaps that come in around—the millennials are XYZ because they don’t share XYABC over here, in other words, the values are in contradiction when in fact the values are just different and the values are identified early on.   

The Gen Xer’s have certainly have a value of working hard and really being committed and persevering. The millennials have a value of really looking at where can I do the best work? What does that look like? And if I’m not doing engagement here, I’m not making an impact I’m going to go somewhere else, so they get the reputation of they’re just flighty, they cross over, they go from company to company when in fact, when they’re at those organizations they’re working as hard, at least my experience has been, they’re working as hard as the Gen Xer’s. And this isn’t about one generation is better than the other but there are certainly brands and there are certainly value judgements that are made because of the way that they live and the way that that behavior then is espouse by the values. And I think if you really think about today’s work and you think about where we are as a society, where we are as a community, our global community, those of us in the United States values are at the forefront of all conversations. But yet even though they’re at the forefront of all conversations and they drive conversations, do we really know what our values are?

Jim Rembach:     Is there a quote or two that kind of stands out for you that you can share?

Paul Larsen:  Yeah, there’s one I have Jim, I use it. It’s not as probably eloquent as a lot of other quotes that we see now all over social media that come out. And especially in today’s climate in our society, the political climate as well, and it’s about, “Hey leader it’s not about like ability, it’s about.” Find your voice, get out and lead or get out of the way. There are enough leaders in today’s world that will hide in the shadows or hide at the coattails of someone else, it’s like then get out of my way I’ve got better things to do, I want to get out and lead and make a difference. I would much rather have in my career and I think about all the leaders I’ve interacted with both from a team member, both as a peer, and certainly now as a coach, I would much rather have a leader in front of me who I may not agree with but I certainly understand where they’re coming from. I certainly understand their opinions. I certainly understand their decisions they make their values. I may not agree with them at all and I may even judge that, that’s okay, I know where they coming from versus somebody who sits there and shakes their head and does the bubble head leadership and you never know what they’re thinking, you never know what their thoughts are, you never know what their decisions will be until they zing you and they zing you in a way that it would be a blind site. And we have so much of that in today’s world where people are for whatever reasons resistant, hesitant, afraid, intimidated to actually speak up and really take a stand  especially as a leader.

Jim Rembach:     That’s true and I don’t know what’s it’s going to take in order to get over fear, I mean really then, just individuals doing it. And it comes back to—you had mentioned about the epiphany that you had sitting in the church pew and to get to that point, to get past that point, to do all of these things, to stand up, to find your voice, you have to get over a lot of humps to do that, that’s for sure. Is there a time that you’ve had to get over the hump but it helped you find your voice that you can share?

Paul Larsen:  In my very, very first job as a manager. I was promoted into a manager role and I’ve got to tell you—it was a software company it was it was decades ago, and when I got that promotion I wasn’t even up for the promotion. I was just kind of cap on the shoulder, so man, my ego just went—my head must have been like big head, it was just expanded. And I’m sitting there like, wow! I’m going to be a manager and going to have 15 people,  nowadays I would probably run screaming with 15 people without any kind of leadership strength or bench strength or succession management but at that time it was like, 15 people and of course where did I go? Right to power? Right to ego? Right to all those things you’re not supposed to go but will make your head implode. 

But where I went also was that popularity piece, so, this was really key for me, Jim this was such an “aha” moment. It was a software company we’re in a big business park I got a nice big office, I was like, Wow! Look at the size of this table, how many chairs I get, look at all these stuff. All of a sudden now I was really alone. I became very alone over night because all of a sudden with the ego, the power trip, the whole bit—I was not a great popular or influential manager. I became the manager of my peers and who I thought were my friends and overnight I became absolutely a pariah. I became that pariah leader, that pariah manager, like, what happened to Paul? And I was looking at myself like, I haven’t changed. I haven’t done anything different, I’m not manager I can control this, I control your work. So, I remember it was a Thursday night, and to this day, it was a Thursday night, it was 6:30, I was in the office the light were kind of dim and it was raining outside and the whole group of folks that I’d managed, again this 15 folks I been pretty close to, had all gone out for dinner for a birthday party and I was not invited. And I sat there feeling sorry for myself in that little office as it got progressively darker outside and I sat there just like the victim. And I remember just sitting there thinking, “Oh, woe was me, just woe, woe, woe was me and I am like, what happened? And then in an instant I’m sitting there like, what’s going on? Who is this? Who is this person sitting in this chair thinking this? Cause I’d always been, sort of like somebody that was always looking for kind of the next, next and kind of growing, and kind of like –looking the kind of like expand sort of my skills and comfort zone and everything my parents had done such a wonderful job with me. And I’m sitting there feeling so sorry for myself and I’m like, this is not who I am. 

Now, at that time, to be honest with you, I would love to say I have the strategy and the force out to like, oh! I want to build my legacy. I’d (21:57 inaudible)get through Friday, which was the next day but I said I got to change, I have to change something. I’ve got to change my mindset if I want to be successful in this role I’ve got to change my thinking. And I went right outside and my boss’s door was open, she was still in and I said, “Hey, can I grab a minute with you?” and I said, “I don’t know what to do.” And right there in that moment I kind of show he vulnerability if you will and I kind of open myself up which up to that point do not happen. And she says, “Yes” she goes, “I was kind of wondering how long did it was going to take for you to come in here? And I said, “You—what do you mean?” she said “Your struggling” and she goes, “They don’t want anything to do with you? And you are creating, you’re just digging a hole” and she goes, “I was just kind of wondering at some point, I knew something would hit you and I was wondering if today would be that day given what was going on.” Cause she knew as well we weren’t that huge of a company and sure enough she goes, “as soon as you became manager, you became the topic of dinner conversation at their tables every night, you became the manager. You took on a different role that Paul the friend, Paul the fun guy, Paul the humorous, Paul the nice colleague, you became the manager and that build something very, very, different. This is before we—again this is early 90’s, it was way before we talk about brand as a leader and all those things, but they’re definitely that was such a moment for me, Jim in terms of like, what do I do? And she goes, “You can figure it out.” She goes, “I want you to go back and fix it, and I’m not going to tell you.” She was a great coach and again it was an introduction it was like, “figure some staff out because you got it in you because I’ve seen it that’s why you’re in the role you’re at. And you have to kind of go through this to come out on the other side otherwise I’m just telling you and you’re not going to learn anything.” And of course, it was a struggle it took some time and then I had to really kind of very purposeful with what I wanted out of my role as a manager and the impact I wanted to have with this folks. I’m not by any stretch of imagination, I’m not going to say things changed overnight, I’m not going to say, “Oh, I just became this—I still had the triggers in my mind as we do as folks. As Marshall Goldsmith love to say, “What are your triggers? What triggers you?” 

And at that time I had a lot of triggers they’re going off all the time. But I took the time, I was very methodical I built new relationships with these colleagues I had one by one. And they were new relationships because I was in a new role. And that was such an epiphany for me to say, “Wow! This is so different, I’m not going to say that it was something I necessarily just engendered with or was happy about because it really foster a lot of hard work but that became the core and foundation of who I am today.

Jim Rembach:     Thanks for sharing that story. The advice that she gave, well, that is the coach response is still painful because you’re looking for answers. 

Paul Larsen:  You have no idea. I didn’t walk out of there kind of kicking out and walking lighter, I walk out of there like, Wow! Now what? But it was a food for thought and it was just that little spark of awareness that we all look for, right? And sometimes we get in so many aspects in our life. Like maybe your 11-year-old son got when you ask what’s good, definite good.  It’s that little spark of awareness that came up that I didn’t drill deeper on. And you’re absolutely right, I was sitting there like, why are you not given me a checklist of what I should be doing? Why are you not doing that right now? And what it also then taught for me was, “Oh, that’s how I want to be as a manager.” So, I don’t want to necessarily always direct people. You know, situation as we all know, there’s different situational leadership scenarios but that’s what I wanted to subscribe to be at some point. So, yeah, it was a great, very visceral reaction.

Jim Rembach:     So I know you got a lot of things going on, the release of your book. But what are some of your goals?

Paul Larsen:  One of my goals—it’s always been—I think I’ve always been somebody who has really prided himself on being a multitasker. The more I can multitask, the more successful I am. So, all the roles I had in the corporate world, I can do this, this, I can be a generalist, I can be specialist, I can be generalist and specialist in the same minute. I can do everything and I do it really, really good. And so I really, really work hard, Jim on multitasking. And you look at today’s world now, we live in a multitasking environment we have so many ways to multitask. So, I have now flip that, I have become so much more deliberate with my actions, with my thoughts, with my purpose, and with my message that even when I had the epiphany in my mentoring moment with my dad about six years ago, seven years ago, I still approached it from my multitasking environment. I can now like, okay, I’m going to do coaching, I’m going to this, this, I’m going to touch everybody, it’s like—I have now funneled it down, I take deep breaths, I create a mindset in myself where it’s like I want to be much more deliberate with everything that I do so that I have that maximum impact that I want that I desire. Because for me the multitasking is not a success ratio anymore. It really is being very deliberate with my message hence the first outcome of that, in which I’m celebrating and I so appreciate this ability to engage with you, is the book. It really forced me to just say I have a message, I have craft, I have something I want to share, may not agree with everybody people may not like it that’s okay I have something I want to share that was my first step in being very deliberate and committed. So that’s actually what I’m working on.

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

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Jim Rembach:     Alright Fast Leader Legion, now it’s time for the Hump Day Hoedown. Okay, Paul, 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 a robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us onward and upward faster. Paul Larsen are you ready to hoedown?

 

Paul Larsen:  Absolutely. I am ready to hoedown. 

 

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

 

Paul Larsen:  Jumping to a conclusions too fast.

 

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

 

Paul Larsen:  Hire smart people and then get out of their way.

 

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

 

Paul Larsen:  Stepping out of my comfort zone on a continual basis.

 

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

 

Paul Larsen:  An egg timer. 

 

Jim Rembach:     What would be one book, and it could be from any genre, that you’d recommend to our legion? 

 

Paul Larsen:  Absolutely, Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

 

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

 

Paul Larsen:  Absolutely. I can even remember 25, but if I went back to 25, Jim, it would be ability to be self-aware. The ability to be self-aware because that starts everything. That ability to have that self-awareness establishes who you are, establishes that ability to self-monitor and self-regulate. Establishes the ability to deal with any type of environment. So that one skill, that one attribute to be able to be self-aware would be absolutely, especially, taking that back to my aged of 25 I would take that in a heartbeat.

 

Jim Rembach:     Paul 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?

 

Paul Larsen:  Absolutely, Jim. I’ve got a website at www.paulnlarsen.com

 

Jim Rembach:     Paul Larsen, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom the Fast Leader Legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump. Woot! Woot!

 

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 fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster. 

 

END OF AUDIO

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