Eddie Turner:

Hello, everyone! Welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast, the podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host, Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact.

As leaders, we all like to feel like and give the appearance that we have it all together, we have it all figured out but as quiet as it’s kept, every now and then the reality is we’re really a mess on the inside. Well, how can you and I go from being a mess to a leadership success? My guest today has the answer to that question. In fact, he’s written it in the book. My guest today is Scott Miller, Author of Management Mess to Leadership Success. He’s a 24-year associate of Franklin Covey and serves as the Executive Vice-President of Thought Leadership. Scott hosts multiple podcasts himself, including Franklin Covey’s On Leadership and Great Life, Great Career. Additionally, Scott authors a weekly leadership column for Inc.com

Scott, welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast.

Scott Miller:

Eddie, it is my honor to be here. Thank you for the platform.

Eddie Turner:

Well, I’m just super excited to have you here. Tell us a little bit more about you. What did I miss about your incredible background?

Scott Miller:

Well, you were very gracious in that. I’m 51 years old. I was born and raised in Orlando, Florida, worked for the Walt Disney Company for four years. After four years, they invited me to leave, which is a nice way for Disney to say “You don’t fit here.” And what’s interesting was the Franklin Covey company, of course, founded by the famed author Dr. Stephen R. Covey of the Seven Habits book which has sold 50 million copies, they recruited me and I moved to Utah 24 years ago and I’ve had this amazing journey as a leader inside a leadership development firm. And it’s been tough, honestly. I think leadership is not for everyone and I’ve learned a lot about how to become a better leader of people. I have some very strong opinions on who should and who shouldn’t be a leader of people. And I wrote this book, very vulnerable, very real, very relatable called Management Mess to Leadership Success. It’s done extremely well. I’ve written a few since then. I’ve been Wall Street Journal bestsellers. And I’m just not out talking to people around what’s my own leadership experience and being very vulnerable about it. And I think it’s hit a chord. I think the world needed one more leadership book and that was mine. I think often, Eddie, these books are so academic and they’re so unrelatable for people in the trenches. And although I’m an officer in a public company, Franklin Covey, I’m still very raw as it relates to how to be a great leader. After 25 years I’m still learning and I wanted to share that message with my readers and, hopefully, your listeners today.

Eddie Turner:

Well, we are very happy that you’re here to share that message. And, certainly, you work for a legendary company with a great heritage and the leadership message that you all have put out there, both in print and audio, has reached the masses for sure.

Scott Miller:

Thank you. It’s been an amazing journey to be part of this great brand.

Eddie Turner:

So, you said you had put one more book out there in this great body of knowledge about leadership. Tell us why you wrote the Management Mess.

Scott Miller:

Like you, I host a podcast called On Leadership and every week I’m privileged to interview CEOs, bestselling authors, business titans. And one day I was interviewing Steven M. R. Covey. He’s the oldest son of Dr. Stephen Covey. And he wrote a book called The Speed of Trust. And that book is sold 2 million copies. I was interviewing him. And I said to Steven M. R. Covey, I said “Did you ever feel the pressure under your father to write a book?” And he said “No, I didn’t because I didn’t have anything to say.” And then he said “One day it changed when I did have something to say. I wanted to write about how to build a high trust culture.” And it was in that interview with Steven M. R. Covey, almost two years ago that kind of a light went off and I said “You know what,” at 50 years old at the time, “I also have something to say. I want to share with other leaders what I’ve learned about how difficult leadership is” that, Eddie, I think most people are lured into leadership, not led. Too often we promote individual producers to become leaders of teams. Rarely does the most creative digital designer make a great creative team leader. Rarely does the top producing salesperson make a great sales leader. Those skills are rarely transferable. So, I wanted to talk a little bit about the underbelly of leadership. It’s tough. It’s hard. It’s unrelenting. It’s sometimes unrewarding. It requires you to move outside of your comfort zone, discuss the undiscussables, and have high-courage conversations. So, I wrote this book in a very funny relatable way because I wanted to share with people if you are going to be a leader of people and if you’re not, no shame. I think the industry has done a bit of a disservice to say “Well, if you want to fulfill your potential, you have to be a leader of people.” That’s bunk. Too many organizations require being a leader of teams for advancement. Not everybody should be a leader of people but if you are, for whatever your reason is, and you should know your reason, then I wrote there are 30 challenges, there’s probably more, I condensed them to 30, there’s 30 challenges that everyone faces if you want to become a leader that people will follow.

Eddie Turner:

Well, that’s an exhaustive list to be sure. So, I love the phrase you said that many people are lured, not led into leadership. And so, as a result, they find themselves ill equipped to exercise leadership, to your point, because they were really better as a team member or an individual contributor rather than in a leadership role but they are promoted beyond their level of competence because they were the most technically skilled, because they were the most advanced intellectually in one area but they didn’t shore up their leadership skills in other areas. And so, in this list of 30 principles that you refer to, I don’t want you to give us all 30, but can you give us maybe the top one or two?

Scott Miller:

Yeah, sure. So, I curated with a team at Franklin Covey what we find most people struggle with or even conversely, when they actually execute on these, they have disproportionate impact and leave a legacy. I mean, challenge three – listen first. I mean, as leaders, we’re so deeply enculturated to communicate our message, clarify a vision. We’re always talking. We’re in persuasion mode. We’re in influence mode, whether it be in the town hall or the annual retreat or the sales academy.

Eddie Turner:

We have two ears and one mouth for a reason, right?

Scott Miller:

It’s so true. It’s so true. And I think we lose track of the fact that yes, to be a great leader, you do need to be a strong communicator but if you want to build a culture where people don’t quit their boss because, Eddie, we know people don’t quit their jobs, they quit bad bosses and corrupt cultures, if you want to build a culture where people feel like their leader loves them, loves them appropriately, then you got to get to know them, got to shut your mouth and listen what’s going on in their life, right? Are they liking their job? Are they feeling like you’re helping them build a career they can exercise all their potential in? what’s going on in their personal life? I mean, everybody brings their personal life to work, right? People have bills they can’t pay and teenage sons that are vaping and mothers-in-law that are moving into dementia. And they may sound absurd but it’s not. People’s lives are no longer divisible, right? They’re bringing their whole person to work. So, what is this listening skill?

Another one is declaring your intent. Absent facts, people make stuff up. I live a quote from one of our co-founders. He said ‘Nearly all, if not all, conflict in life comes from mismatched or unfulfilled expectations.” So great leaders move outside their comfort zone and they declare their intent. They make sure that nobody is guessing what their motives are because our motives don’t always match our behaviors.

Another challenge, I’ll mention one more, is challenge 12 – lead difficult conversations. Leaders have to be able to summon the courage to discuss the undiscussables because, as a leader, that’s the greatest gift you can give your people, to call out their blind spots, do it in a way that has a balance of both courage and consideration, not one or the other to an extreme, but to sit down and say to somebody “You know what, Eddie, I’m seeing some behaviors coming out of meetings that are really injuring your brand. And I see a great career here for you but if you don’t change some of these things, you aren’t going to survive here, meaning I’m going to have to terminate you. So, let’s sit down and talk about what it looks like.”

There’s 27 more like that. They’re very practical. They’re very tangible. And they’re things that get most people fired.

Eddie Turner:

So, I caught two – listen first and lead difficult conversations. What’s the third one that I missed?

Scott Miller:

Yeah, it was the middle one about declaring your intent. In a conversation, Eddie, my intent is to help you build a great career here. My intent is not to try to exit you by backing you in a corner, right? So, absent someone understanding your motive, people will suspect and ascribe a motive to you. So, leaders that move from mess to success are clear on declaring and clarifying their intent. And then you minimize confusion and conflict and nobody else can suspect what your motives are. We all have motives. Everybody’s got a hidden agenda. Some do a better job than others. Some have sinister intent, some don’t, but if you declare your intent, nobody then can confuse it or a scribe their own to you.

Eddie Turner:

So, what you’re saying is even when we say we don’t have an agenda, we have an agenda?

Scott Miller:

Of course, you do. Everybody’s got an agenda. Your agenda is to advance your own career, increase your income, minimize competition from someone who might be threatening you. I mean, all behavior is an attempt to escape pain, all behavior. Everything we do is an attempt to minimize pain in our life. So, I think great leaders recognize you have a motive and it may or may not be noble. And the more you can be self-aware and sort of peel the onion on what your intent really is, the more you can match your intent with your behaviors and also what you choose to say. I mean, how often do we say “Well, I didn’t mean to offend her” or “That’s not what I meant to say.” I mean, it’s common that our behaviors don’t match our intent. In fact, we tend to judge people by what they do and say but we want others to judge us on what we intended to do and say. We’re fairly unforgiving of other people’s intents but we want everyone to assume that our intent is good.

Eddie Turner:

Isn’t it funny how that works? Okay.

Well, I’m talking to Scott Miller of the Franklin Covey Organization and author From Management Mess to Leadership Success. We’ll have more with Scott right after this.

Eddie Turner:

All right, we are back. I am talking to Scott Miller and Scott is a senior executive at the Franklin Covey Organization and author of Management Mess to Leadership Success.

Well, coming from a story organization like yours, I want to get back into a couple of points from your book but you got to tell me, as I’m sure my listeners may be wondering, what’s it like to work for a storied franchise such as Franklin Covey? Any insights you’ve gleaned from Stephen Covey?

Scott Miller:

Yeah, like I said, I’ve been here for 24 years, right? So, I’ve cut most of my teeth here at this firm. I worked under Dr. Covey for 15 years. He passed seven years ago as a result of a brain injury from a bicycle accident. So, I definitely have learned wear a helmet. He was wearing a helmet but it was too loose and had a brain injury and passed in his 80th year. It’s an amazing experience to work with high character individuals. Like any company we have our cultural challenges. We’re a public company. So, there’s pressure to perform and grow and return profit to our shareholders. Welcome to any organization. I think what Dr. Covey taught me most, Eddie, was in people we have two types of mindsets – an efficient mindset and an effectiveness mindset. And both are good but they need to be present at different situations in your life. You can have an efficiency mindset with things, meetings, mowing your lawn, changing your oil. There’s a time to be efficient in life. And then there’s a time to be effective. And when it comes to your relationships with people in the workplace, at home, in your personal life, you cannot be efficient. You need to be effective, which is a fundamentally different mindset. Dr. Covey was fond of saying “With people, slow is fast and fast is slow.” You can’t be fast with people. You got to slow down. Now, there are occasions you can text or have a very quick stand up meeting but people like me who have a naturally efficient mindset – make lists, get things done, my cars washed by 7 on Saturday morning, my flowers are planted by 8, I’m ready to play tennis by 9, I’m a very productive person – it serves me very well in many areas of my life. Eddie, it’s also tripped me up when it comes to my wife, to my three young boys, to my customers when I’m always kind of in a hurry. And so, I have had to struggle with this, I think, profound insight from Dr. Covey around when to be efficiency minded and when to be effectiveness minded. With people, slow down.

Eddie Turner:

That’s a powerful piece of advice. I love that. So, there’s a difference between being efficient and being effective. That really resonates because I am a perfectionist and, to your point, I am very orderly and very methodical, I have a certain way of doing things, I’m very precise and it works well for Eddie but then I got married. Of course, I’ve also learned from the people in my life that “Yeah, I can’t bring that to them.” So, I had to make those adjustments. And so, I really like how you articulate that. Very nice.

Anything else that you’ve learned that you can share?

Scott Miller:

Yeah. One other thought. Dr. Covey in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People which is down its 30th year and has sold 50 million copies, he popularized, not invented but popularized this concept of paradigms, otherwise known as our mindsets and our belief windows. All of us as leaders, all of us humans have deeply enculturated paradigms since birth. I mean, I was raised in the ‘70s in Central Florida. And this may be laughable but I was raised to believe in an upper middle-class family that doctors, police officers, and Catholic priests always told the truth and were always right. Do doctors always tell the truth or Catholic priests? No, of course not. That’s insanity, right? And think about it. As a young Catholic boy, as an altar server, if I had been led to believe, and I was, that Catholic priests always do the right things and always told the truth, my life could have been destroyed had I been placed in a situation with a corrupt member of the clergy that had taken advantage of me. That did not happen, thank the Lord. I’ve had an amazing journey in that faith but like me, each of us have deeply enculturated paradigms on how we see ourselves, how we see members of different faiths, how we see members of different races or genders or communities, right? And these things are deeply ingrained in us from our parents, from our aunts and uncles, from our neighbors, our siblings, our junior high school principal, the teacher who told us “You’re not smart” or the counselor told us “You’ll never make it to college.” And I mentioned that because when we recognize that we see the world not as it is but as we are, as leaders we have warped paradigms, metaphorically. We’re wearing glasses with the wrong prescription. We don’t have the whole story. We don’t have the full picture. We don’t see everybody accurately. And I mentioned all that to say as leaders, you have deeply entrenched paradigms about the members of your team for any number of reasons. Some you think aren’t very competent. Some you think aren’t productive. Some you think are lazy. Some you think are more talented than you are. So, you hold them back because you’re too insecure to let their talent rise up because that might eclipse your own. Whatever it is, fill in the blank, but as a leader that moves from mess to success, you got to check your paradigms. And can people earn their way out of the way you view them? Can they redeem themselves? Can they grow and blossom? Can they challenge a right, correct? Give a more accurate paradigm of what you hold from them. I think it’s a powerful lesson that leaders need to recognize people may have behaved themselves into a problem and they can only behave themselves out, right? You cannot talk yourself out of a problem. You behave yourself into it. You can only behave yourself out of it. At the same time, are you willing, are you generous, are you vulnerable enough to allow people to challenge and change the paradigm you have of them?

Eddie Turner:

You can’t talk yourself out of a problem you’ve behaved your way into bed. That’s an interesting way of putting it. So, if a person recognizes they have these paradigms, how do they make a paradigm shift?

Scott Miller:

My gosh! I think it’s associated with people who aren’t like you, right? I mean, I’m a Caucasian guy in my 50s. I live in Salt Lake City. It’s a predominantly Caucasian state. I am in the leadership industry. So, you can imagine who my friends and associates are. You can imagine how my warped paradigms are reinforced, I mean, whether you watch CNN or Fox News or read the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. I think, you’ve got to associate yourself with people who are different than you – different gender, different races, different socioeconomic backgrounds. If you’re a white guy in his 50s, watching Fox News, I probably can predict some of your politics, right? And if you’re a Latino that’s not watching Fox News, I might have an idea of your perceptions. I don’t mean to say or to cast a broad net but we’ve all got to befriend people of different backgrounds. It’s why you see these demographic maps of which states have the most number of passports issued, right? I mean, if you want to challenge your paradigm, travel, invite somebody of a different race to your home for dinner, invite someone of a different sexual proclivity or different age group or different socioeconomic background. Surround yourself intentionally with thoughts and ideas and people who challenge your conventional wisdom. I think, so many of our political problems are we tend to surround ourselves with likeminded people, we have our own paradigms, right or wrong, reinforced that we can’t even have a civil dialogue. Dr. Covey used to say “Oh, you see it differently than me. How great that is.” And I think that’s so important is to be comfortable, be vulnerable enough, be confident enough to friend and associate people that have nothing in common with you. I have a tennis coach here who’s Muslim. He’s from Tunisia. And I love to say I’m a Catholic, I’m a Christian. I love to sit and just listen to him about his upbringing but what he was taught to believe. This guy never met a Christian until he moved to America and attended a university. He never met a Christian in his life. All he heard about was what he saw in the news. This guy’s one of my best friends. I love this guy. I think that’s a good way to challenge paradigms is get a passport, travel, go to dinner at a restaurant that doesn’t have food that’s just from your own ethnicity or your own part of the country. Encourage people in your life that will challenge your deeply entrenched mindsets.

Sorry, I’m passionate about that but I think that that that’s the root of a lot of America’s challenge right now. We can’t even have a civil conversation with people who disagree with us, it gets into a brawl. And I think that starts at the top.

Eddie Turner:

Okay. Well, thank you very much, Scott. And we appreciate your energy and passion around the topic. So, tell me how would you summarize our conversation we’ve had today?

Scott Miller:

I think we all need to be kinder, more tolerant, check our own views, do we have the whole story. We’re all messes. Everybody’s got a mess. Every leader needs to own their mess. Once as a leader you’re willing to be confident enough and vulnerable enough to own your mess, you then give permission, Eddie, for others to own their messes. It doesn’t mean that you license bad behavior or that you wallow in your messes but when a leader can develop a culture on his or her team in their company, on their club, on their committee, when you’re confident enough to own your mess, you then make it acceptable for others to own theirs and everybody can move to success.

Eddie Turner:

Thank you. Scott, where can my listeners learn more about you and your organization?

Scott Miller:

Well, to quote my wife, it’s kind of hard not to find me these days. She thinks I’m a little bit overexposed. You can follow me on Twitter, on LinkedIn. You can Google Scott@FranklinCovey and find my Instagram handle. You also can visit ManagementMess.com. That’s where you find the book. I’ve also co-authored a new book called Everyone Deserves a Great Manager. That debuted at number three in the Wall Street Journal list a few weeks ago. And if you just visit FranklinCovey.com, you can also find me there.

Eddie Turner:

Fantastic. Well, Scott, thank you again. I’ll make sure I put this in the show notes for everybody. I appreciate you for being a guest of the Keep Leading!® Podcast.

Scott Miller:

My honor. Thank you, Eddie.

Eddie Turner:

And thank you. That concludes this episode, everyone. I’m Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®, reminding you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is an activity. Leadership is action. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So, whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.

Eddie Turner:

Hello, everyone! Welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast, the podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host, Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact.

On the Keep Leading!® Podcast, I talk about leadership from many different aspects. Today, I’d like to talk to someone who is leading at the highest level. I will interview Jeremie bacon. He’s the CEO of the Imagineer Technology Group and the Chairman of the Illinois Technology Association. He’s been featured in Fast Company, Crain’s Chicago Business, and appears on Chicago INNO’s 2019 50 on Fire List, a list of the top innovators in Chicago. Jeremie Bacon co-founded Backstop Solutions which provided back office support to hedge funds and other investment managers in 2003. In 2015, Bacon co-founded Synapse Software Labs where he pioneered Software as a Service platforms in the financial services and customer relationship management markets, a relationship software company which merged with Imagineer. Fun fact – he’s a musical theater junkie and performs at least once a year in a show.

Jeremie, welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast.

Jeremie Bacon:

Hey there! Thanks so much for having me on the show today. I appreciate it.

Eddie Turner:

Well, you’re a pretty impressive guy. What should my listeners know about you?

Jeremie Bacon:

I don’t know. That was a pretty exhaustive list. I think one thing that people usually don’t know about me is that I also am an ultra-marathoner and endurance athlete. I love doing adventure races. And that love and passion for doing ridiculous things in the mountains and in the woods also led to another company that I co-founded called the Forge Adventure Parks and we build outdoor recreation parks which are pretty fabulous, hundreds of acres of outdoor awesomeness. So, that is, I guess, one of the things I could throw into the mix.

Eddie Turner:

So, you’re just a serial entrepreneur is what I hear you saying, Jeremie.

Jeremie Bacon:

I was bitten by the entrepreneurship bug when I was eight years old and it has been both a blessing and a curse ever since.

Eddie Turner:

Eight years old. Wow! Now, that’s impressive. I’m often asked are leaders born or are they made. So, it sounds like you are almost born?

Jeremie Bacon:

Well, I think the entrepreneur part of me was definitely born. I think the leadership thing is something that we all learn. I would argue, I guess, that I probably was born with some innate leadership traits and skills and things but I think it’s through experience and, honestly, through a lot of effort that those traits are developed into real skills over time. At least in my case that’s how it’s been.

Eddie Turner:

Okay. And I understand from talking to your staff and some of the amazing work that you’re doing and just the level of enthusiasm and passion that your staff has, the culture that you’ve built in your organization is just phenomenal. And you have a phrase for the culture you’ve built. Can you share that with my audience?

Jeremie Bacon:

Sure. So, we focus most of our efforts and most of our energy on being customer centric in all things and in all ways. Our culture sort of focuses on four key values. And those four key values drive that customer-centric approach that we take. We’re really big believers in the idea of openness and integrity and pragmatism and gratitude. And, in fact, most of our conversations start and stop with us talking about how grateful we are for the opportunity we have to build our products and service our clients. And those values for us, anyway, sort of lead us down this path of being focused on customer centricity which, we feel, at the end of the day, is just another way of saying having an acute always-on focus on needs versus wants of our customers and in our teammates as well.

Eddie Turner:

Very nice. So, service-centric leadership has four pillars. You said openness, integrity, gratitude. And, I think, I missed the fourth one.

Jeremie Bacon:

Pragmatism.

Eddie Turner:

Pragmatism. Excellent, excellent. So, tell us a little bit, if you would please, how you arrived at this as a leadership philosophy.

Jeremie Bacon:

Yeah. So, for me, the journey, I think it was with a lot of journeys, it kind of starts inside my own head and inside my own heart and sort of getting to know myself as a person. When I was a little kid, my dad always used to say to me that one of the most important things that I could do as a young man, as a boy and then as a young man, is truly get to know myself. He always used to say “Know thyself. You have to know yourself before you can know anybody else or really be of great value to those around you.” And as a kid, I didn’t really understand what that meant or how to apply it but as I got to know myself better and got to know my own strengths and weaknesses as a person and as a leader, I began to see the value in sort of focusing on that as a thing. And, for me, my natural, I guess, tendencies and persona are such that I have this crazy passion to grow and expand and explore the world around me and I have probably too much energy, great need for excitement and, for better or worse, I’m constantly driven to seek bigger and better things. And better can be defined in many different ways. In fact, my wife would tell you, my wife is my soulmate and my rock and my island and she’s stuck with me now for 20 years of marriage and 23 plus years as my partner in crime …

Eddie Turner:

That’s outstanding.

Jeremie Bacon:

She would tell you that that’s the thing about me that drives her the most nuts is that I’m too crazy in that way but what’s interesting is that it’s through that passion that I have for sharing and for developing and building teams and growing things and designing products and working with customers and working with people that sort of helped me to see the possibilities for the future and what we can grow and what we can go do and then gives me the sort of the strength to rally the troops, if you will, and help guide and lead my teammates to, I guess, [inaudible][08:17], if you will. It’s this sort of natural tendency to drive groups toward results is something that just comes naturally to me as is that ability and that desire to share passion and energy and to drive changes and to keep things moving at a rapid pace. I think, for me, it’s those things that makes it essential that I try to work in and try to create environments that are built around openness like you need to be open to new ideas and new ways of thinking and you need to be open to being wrong and being told you’re wrong by your teammates bluntly from time to time but if you’re not acting with integrity, then you can’t accept that feedback and accept that criticism, if you will. And if you’re not pragmatic, you can’t implement and build and design the kind of products and the kind of experiences you’re working toward. And, lastly, if you don’t have gratitude to do all that, you can’t share that thankfulness with your teammates for them being open and being pragmatic with you and forcing you to be better and forcing you to work for your client and do things in a bigger, better, more efficient way. So, for me, those four principles are really tied together but they also are grounding principles for me as a person who is driven to run early sprint all the time. They help keep me grounded and help keep me in place.

Eddie Turner:

Wonderful. Well, it sounds like you’re doing an outstanding job of it. And what I love about it is that all this is authentic but I see corporate values all the time, as I’m sure you do in the line of work, you are as a CEO, but this is the first time I will say that I’ve seen gratitude and certainly pragmatism as a part of a core values. So, fantastic.

Now, you said you allow your team to challenge you and speak openly. That says a lot about you as a leader because at times that’s difficult for leader. So, in this openness, what are some lessons you’ve learned that have made you an even better leader?

Jeremie Bacon:

Yeah, thank you for asking that question because, to me, that’s a super important one. I wasn’t always sort of self-aware. And I think, again, coming down to this notion of knowing yourself and knowing your strengths and weaknesses, for me, anyway, opened me up to being able to take that criticism. And, in fact, people who work most closely with me know that I demand it. There are a few things that I demand. One of the things I absolutely demand and use a strong word for is “You’ve got to tell me what you think. And you’ve got to tell me if you think I’m wrong.” One of the challenges that’s associated with my leadership style is that I believe in planning and I believe in deep thought and deep analysis but I’m also oriented toward action. So, as my teammates will say, I don’t sleep much and I’m kind of always on and always wired and always thinking. So, oftentimes I’ve thought through a problem, thought through a bunch of different variants, thought through the solutions and made a decision about what I think is the right path forward but because I do so much of that behind the scenes or while I’m running a marathon or whatever, sometimes I bring those things to the team and like it’s all new and fresh. Not everyone works that way. And so, I’ve found that if you have an environment where your teammates can’t say … actually, I should back up, where a) your teammates don’t understand that that’s how you work and that’s how you’re wired and therefore, you can’t help it, it’s just who you are and then b) don’t understand that they can tell “Jeremie, you’re wrong and here’s why” or “Hey, should we stop and think about this angle?” or “Did you look at this as a potential problem?”, then you end up in a situation where you’re setting yourself up and your teammates up for failure. So, as a result, I demand that people are open and frank with me about how they see or perceive my thinking, my thoughts, and my vision for a particular thing. And that can be a little intimidating for some people. Also, I think, it’s so important to be open and honest about that trait.

Eddie Turner:

Well, that says a lot because a few people, especially at the higher levels, want to be told and you say you demand it. So, that’s very strong. So, I’m sure that would catch a lot of people off guard.

Jeremie Bacon:

No one’s right all the time, right? If that’s the case, you’re right 1% of the time. So, I grew up in the asset management industry. And although I’ve been building software companies that serve asset managers for a couple of decades now, our clients are all money managers and these men and women get paid very well to make the right investment decisions with regards to which securities they’re going to purchase and how long they’re going to own them and who they’re going to back and all this stuff. And the most wise and humble of all asset managers will tell you, and those that are the most successful long term, will tell you their entire purpose for being, their entire goal when they go into the office and look at the markets is to be right 52% to 55% of the time. And if they are, they will win. And the biggest and most successful fund managers in the world, that’s their focus – “How do I be right not 100% of the time but 55% of the time?” And that’s how you win. And it’s really interesting when you think about that way because traditional business isn’t much different, right? No one ever has the best product. I should say that the group that wins rarely has the best product. The group that wins rarely has the best resources. It’s how they spend those resources and how they allocate their time and energy that matters the most. And, again, for me, that’s why it comes back to we got to be out in the open, we got to talk about it, we got to work it out, and then we got to work like crazy for the good of the customer. It doesn’t mean bending over backwards to do a bad deal or to be taken advantage of by a customer. It means being open and transparent with that client and working together to drive a result for them too.

Eddie Turner:

Okay. Well, excellent. Well, we’re talking to Jeremie Bacon. And what we’d like to do right now, Jeremie, is just to pause for a word from our sponsors.

Eddie Turner:

We’re back. We’re talking to Jeremie Bacon, CEO of the Imagineer Technology Group and Chairman of the Illinois Technology Association. Before the break, Jeremie was telling us about his company’s service-centric leadership philosophy that he’s built and the four pillars it’s built on and his viewpoint on leadership, leading from the top as a CEO.

Jeremie, you started to tell us a little bit about the type of work that you are doing. So, tell us a little bit more about who Imagineer Technology Group is and who your primary audience is.

Jeremie Bacon:

Sure. So, Imagineer Technology Group is a 21-year-old software company that makes software services for asset management firms. When we say asset management firms, we mean money management firms. So, our clients are the world’s largest hedge funds and traditional asset managers, think groups like Vanguard or BlackRock, Fidelity, those types of money management firms, all the way through to private equity and venture capital firms as well. So, our customers use our platforms to do a couple of pretty important things. One is they use our systems to manage their marketing and investor communications and fundraising activities. So, they use us to help them manage the fundraising process, to deal with opportunity tracking, to monitor their perspective of an existing client’s engagement with their websites, to do marketing services and marketing automation things for them as they’re trying to raise more money, and then ultimately service those investors once they’ve gotten their funds. So, someone comes in and invest a bunch of money. They then use our platform to send them everything from performance estimates and statements and documentation around their performance and the strategies of the funds and things like that. It’s a pretty interesting industry.

Eddie Turner:

It sounds interesting, especially when you start to talk about some of the biggest money market or asset management firms that are out there that you mentioned such as BlackRock and others. Is there a sweet spot that you have if someone is interested in reaching out to you for services? Is there a group that might say “Well, maybe we’re not big enough for this company?”

Jeremie Bacon:

Well, what’s interesting about the way that our platforms work is we have a series of service offerings that are uniquely situated and positioned for everything from startup fund managers that might be two or three people in the proverbial garage somewhere working on their trading strategy and starting to raise money. We have product offerings that are capable for them and that are price point perfect, if you will, for that particular side of the market. The majority of our clients are larger managers that have more experience, either five years, seven years, 15 years old as asset managers and have anywhere from a billion to a hundred billion dollars under management on their platforms. And then sort of everybody in between is a good fit for what we do because we’ve been able to break the platform down on a sort of feature-by-feature and service type by service type basis.

Eddie Turner:

And what’s interesting is you are truly on the leading edge and one of the reasons you’re on the INNO list of 50 on Fire is because of your use of technology to supply financial solutions.

Jeremie Bacon:

Yeah, that’s all we do. Every day all day we think about how do we improve the tools that we already have and how do we think about creating deeper integrations between our own tools and other tools in the marketplace that our clients use to help them complete the picture and sort of further streamline their own operations and become even more efficient with how they build and manage their client relationships.

Eddie Turner:

And I think that’s interesting and I think that’s important because we started off our conversation talking about some of the soft skills that are important for leaders but when we look at the business acumen that you’re demonstrating here and what you’re doing leading in this space, what leadership lesson is there that you could share with other leaders who are listening to our conversation?

Jeremie Bacon:

Well, let’s see here. There’s a couple of things, I guess, that come to mind immediately. And they also conveniently, I suppose, relate back to our own values as a business and how we try to position things. One of the things I wish I had known, if you will, or wish I had been told as I was sort of growing and developing as a business person, as an entrepreneur and as a leader is that the most important thing you can do when offering a product or offering a service, whether it’s your first day in the market or your 5000th day in the market, is to develop mutual respect between your customer, your prospect and yourself, your business. Everyone who talks about your company, whether they’re a salesperson or a customer service representative or your CFO or your Head of Product or anybody in the middle, ultimately, is a champion for and a representative of your business. And their first and foremost number one job should always be garnering, gaining, and earning the respect of their prospective or existing customer because respect sort of leads to trust and, in my mind, trust leads to commitment. And to build a team or to build a customer base and build a relationship, you need all three of those things. And, as you know, relationships that aren’t built on deep trust and deep respect don’t last very long. It just is the way it is. And in an industry like ours, we’re focused on owning our relationships with our clients forever. For as long as they’re in business, we want them to be a client and we have a very good track record of retention of our clients. And, in fact, generally speaking, the only reason we lose a client is if they go out of business. And we get there because of that lesson.

Eddie Turner:

That’s really interesting because not a lot of industries can say that you truly want a customer for life.

Jeremie Bacon:

It also means that we’re willing to walk away from customers that we don’t think we’re going to be a great fit. And so, for me, and my sales teams will tell you I harp on this all the time, the most important thing we can do in sales and marketing when we’re qualifying and working at the top of the funnel is qualify that customer and to do that requires real meaningful discovery and diligence. And if you fail to qualify your customer and you fail to prepare to service them, then you’re preparing to fail them as a vendor and they’re preparing to fail you as a customer. It’s like the old Benjamin Franklin quote – “If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail” – old Ben is one of my favorite leaders of all time. And I think that that truism, if you will, certainly applies in what we do. It’s far easier to service an existing client than to get a new one. So, when you are getting new one, you owe it to yourself and your clients to pick the right ones.

Eddie Turner:

Absolutely. So, do you have any heroes or people who you look up to in the leadership space as a CEO. Oftentimes, it can be a lonely place.

Jeremie Bacon:

Sure. So, there are lots of entrepreneurs, women and men alike, who are in sort of the modern era that I respect and look up to and follow but, to be honest, I spend more time looking at leaders of the past than I do at leaders of today. And mostly that’s because most of us who are in leadership roles today, we all learned it from somewhere. This is a bit of a sidebar but I’ve been a musician and singer and stuff my whole life and one of my favorite musicians of all time, is Robert Plant, the original lead singer for Led Zeppelin but he has always been famous for saying that we all make it from somewhere. We all learn and we all steal our ideas from others, from those who’ve come before us, whether it’s musical or it’s anything else. So, the person I go back to the most, honestly, is Benjamin Franklin. Although he’s not always thought of as a leader of men and women, he’s thought of as an innovative idea thinker and entrepreneur in his own right, but I think he’s actually often under-looked or underappreciated as a leader. In addition to truisms like “If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail” that he’s known for, I think one of the things that I really respect about his approach and one of the quotes I often go back to with my own children is he said “If you tell me, I will forget. If you teach me, I will remember. And if you involve me, I will learn.” And that, to me, has always sort of been powerful. I remember reading it the first time The Art of Virtue.

Eddie Turner:

Yes, one of my favorites.

Jeremie Bacon:

It’s on my desk. I refer to it literally every week. And I read that as a kid and it blew me away and I thought “Wow, that’s really cool. It’s really neat.” And, of course, he nicked it from some Chinese philosophy, the whole “If you teach someone to fish” thing but it’s really neat, right? To me, it’s really cool. So, I like Ben. He’s a good dude.

Eddie Turner:

Excellent.

Jeremie Bacon:

I also like my mom. And so, one other person I think about all the time, particularly as it relates to sort of eccentric leadership is my own mother. She led by example through her whole life and was always focused on service. And, in fact, one day she sat me down when I had just turned 15 and we were talking about how to live a life that you will feel is rich and fulfilling and rewarding and how to get through good times and bad alike and she basically said to me “Look, the most important thing you can do,” from her perspective, “is to fill your heart with love and admiration and go out and serve others. And what’s truly important is how we live, serve, and love others today in the now.” And, as a person, because I tend to be focused on tomorrow and next week and next year because I’m always thinking about the next thing, that has always been really grounding for me to, again, remind me to stay in the now as much as possible, to be present, and to lead in the moment and to lead with the teams that I’m with because I spend a lot of time in the clouds.

Eddie Turner:

Wonderful. So, Jeremie, tell me, if you will, how would you summarize our conversation today.

Jeremie Bacon:

I guess, I would summarize our conversation by saying that in the world of entrepreneurship and business development and leadership, from my perspective, the most important thing we can do is to keep the customer, keep your teammate, and keep your values at the center. And doing so, ultimately, I found leads to greater success for you as an individual and for your team, as a business group, and ultimately for your client as well.

Eddie Turner:

All right, very good. And on the Keep Leading!® Podcast, we like to give leaders something to help them to keep leading. Do you have a piece of leadership advice? You’ve given several great quotes throughout this interview. Do you have any other quotes or any other advice you’ve received that helps you lead as a leader?

Jeremie Bacon:

Yeah, there’s one other piece that comes to mind all the time and that is it mostly because of the power of the message and the power of the person who delivered it to me but without boring you with all the details, I think the best advice I got as a 17-year-old was from George Bush Senior. I was at the White House and he and I were having a conversation. And during that conversation, he said something to me that also lives in my mind every day all day. And he said “Look, it’s not enough in life to know what your goal is and what you want. You have to understand why you want it and the true why behind that goal or accomplishing it is meaningless.” And that, to me, as a kid going into my senior in high school was mind blowing, to say the least.

Eddie Turner:

Well, I bet. That’s quite an experience to be 17 years old in the White House and be able to talk to an American president. And you may not know this but I’m based here in Houston, Texas. And so, he is truly a legend. And so, yes, George Bush. Excellent. Thank you for sharing that with us.

I just have really enjoyed talking with you. Where can my listeners learn more about you and your organization?

Jeremie Bacon:

Sure. So, ImagineerTechnology.com is how to find our company. And I’m on the internet on LinkedIn.

Eddie Turner:

Excellent. So, what we’re going to do is in the show notes we’re going to put links to you and your organization. We want folks to reach out to the Imagineer Technology Group, connect with you on LinkedIn, follow you on Twitter, and get to know you. You and your team are doing some really amazing things.

Jeremie Bacon:

Well, thank you for saying that. We appreciate that. We’re certainly trying real hard.

Eddie Turner:

Well, it’s been a pleasure to have you and we’ll have to catch up and talk again next time I’m in Chicago.

Jeremie Bacon:

Sounds good. I’d love that.

Eddie Turner:

That concludes this episode, everyone. I’m Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®, reminding you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is an activity. Leadership is action. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So, whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.

Hello. Welcome to the Keep Leading Podcast. I’m your host, Eddie Turner, the Leadership Excelerator.Are you a successful woman who still finds herself struggling to get the next promotion or career opportunity you deserve? If this is you or a woman you know, you will want to listen to this episode. I have the honor to interview the legendary Sally Helgesen, the world’s premier expert on women’s leadership. Sally will explain how women everywhere can advance to the next level right after this.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Keep Leading Podcast, the podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host Eddie Turner, the Leadership Excelerator. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive live impact through the power of facilitation, coaching, and speaking. I have had the opportunity to interview you some really impressive people. I’m especially honored however to interview Sally Helgesen, my guest for today. To give you an idea of why I am so excited to have Sally here, let me share the words of one of the foremost thought leaders in the leadership space today Jim Kouzes. He’s the author of The Leadership Challenge. Jim says is this.“Sally Helgesen is an original. She pioneered women’s leadership before it was a popular topic and has established herself as the gold standard in the field. No one is more qualified than Sally.”

Now, that is an impressive testimonial, if I’ve ever read one now. Sally Helgesen is cited by Forbes as the world’s premier expert on women’s leadership. She’s a bestselling author, speaker, and leadership coach. For 30 years her mission has been to help women leaders around the world recognize, articulate and act on their greatest strengths. Sally’s most recent book How Women Rise, co-authored with coaching legend Marshall Goldsmith, became the top selling title in its field within a week of publication. Her previous books include The Female Advantage, Women’s Ways of Leadership. It was hailed as the classic in its field and continuously in print since 19990. Also, The Web of Inclusion – A New Architecture for Building Great Organizations. This was cited in the Wall Street Journal as one of the best books on leadership of all time and is credited with bringing the language of inclusion into business. So, this is why I am so excited to have Sally Helgesen with me today.

Sally, welcome to the Keep Leading Podcast.

Thank you, Eddie. It is wonderful to be here.

Sally, would you please tell my listeners more about you?

Well, I have been working in the field of women’s leadership and inclusive leadership for the last 30 years starting with the publication of that book you referenced, The Female Advantage, Women’s Ways of Leadership which I’m very proud to say was the first book that looked at what women have to contribute rather than how they need to change and adapt. This resulted in a very unexpected career for me as an author, speaker, and leadership coach and I have always had this entire time a consistent mission which is to help women recognize, articulate, and act on their greatest strengths and to help organizations develop more inclusive cultures where women and other diverse employees can really thrive and realize their best talents.

That’s very interesting, Sally. Now, you mentioned that part of this inclusivity was helping organizations understand that women have something unique to offer and don’t necessarily need to change to be included.

That’s correct. I did actually the diary studies of some of America’s most accomplished women leaders for the book The Female Advantage and what I saw was that they had certain strengths that were consistent even though they were extremely diverse as leaders and strengths like capacity to build strong relationships and encourage strong relationships throughout their organizations and an appreciation of as opposed to a tolerance for diversity because they themselves had been outsiders and understood both the value that an outside perspective could bring and also the value of fresh eyes looking on a problem. So those things were very obvious to me, comfort with direct communication as opposed to communication up and down the chain of command. So, I felt it was really important to put those out there because especially over the last 30 years as the technology has redefined organizations, these are the strengths organizations need now.

Indeed. And I can imagine the refreshment that must have come to understand that they did not have to become someone else. They could be who they are and that should be celebrated and appreciated by organizations.

That’s one of the big messages here that by digging down and seeing what is most authentic about what you have to contribute, you are going to be able to build a leadership profile, a leadership style that is sustainable and that is rewarding to you and that really reflects your talents because when you’re trying to just to meet expectations that may not reflect your best talent, that’s not necessarily sustainable because you’re always trying to achieve something that isn’t really authentic to you and you can end up disengaging. So what we really need to think about in the workplace now that the nature of talent pool is so highly diverse. And this is not obviously just in the US. I work all over the world and in global companies we have a highly diverse talent pool will. In order to realize the real benefits of that, we need an inclusive culture in which people can bring their best selves strategically and tactically to work.

Yes. And, as you said, even across the globe you’re seeing this. This isn’t localized. It’s not a regional phenomenon. More and more organizations are trying to really understand and appreciate the value of inclusivity.

That’s exactly right. And the reason they’re being pushed to appreciate the value of inclusivity has to do with that diverse talent pool. I often hear organizations saying things like “Diversity is our goal.” No, diversity is not your goal. Diversity is your reality. You need to figure out how to lead that well, how to lead in that environment and inclusivity is the method or the means for leading in that environment.

And part of helping organizations and specifically women celebrate their contributions in a lot of organizations that hired them to be inclusive and to value their diversity is helping women recognize and tap into their talents. And you’ve written a lot about this including the book that you referenced but your latest book, I absolutely love this book and thank you for sending me a copy.

Thank you.

How Women Rise – Break The twelve Habits Holding You Back from Your Next Raise, Promotion, or Job.Now, I have to admit I’ve also been referring this and I bought a couple copies for clients because it really is to me one of those things that becomes a tool in the toolbox of senior women and a lot of my clients happen to be women and they’re very well educated, highly successful but they hit certain roadblocks. And it’s been interesting to me to see this and you address them and that’s why I’ve given this as gifts since I’ve been recommending it because you address these things in your book. So, can you tell my listeners what motivated you to write this book?

Yes, exactly. How Women Rise, I co-authored it with Marshall Goldsmith who, of course, is a legend in the field of leadership coaching. What inspired me was Marshall had written a great book published in 2010, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, which is about the behaviors and habits most likely to get in the way of successful people and hold them back from achieving the next level of success. I felt the template Marshall came up with was brilliant. Basically, his insight was that same habits that may serve you early in your career can become problematic as you seek to move higher and yet you’re invested in them. You hold onto them because you recognize that they played a role in getting you where they are. So, you keep trying to use them even though they may be getting in your way as you try to move higher. So, I loved the template. I loved the idea. It really resonated for me in terms of the women I’ve been working with for 30 years but I noticed that, and it’s not surprising because Marshall works with the CEOs and the most senior executives, and his coaching base is probably traditionally about 80% men. So, it wasn’t surprising to me that some of the habits and behaviors that he focused on weren’t necessarily that appropriate or that much of a problem for women. He starts by saying “Learn to apologize” and it made me laugh. I work with women even at the most senior levels who cannot stop apologizing. They apologize when they open the door. They apologize to the door. That’s their opening line when they walk in a room. So, I thought “Well, that’s not that big a deal.” And then he has things like “Stop talking about how great you are all the time.” Well, again, I haven’t noticed that being a big issue for most women. So, I suggested to Marshall that we collaborate based on our, probably putting it together, 65 years of coaching experience and working with leaders around the world that we collaborate on a book that look specifically at the habits and behaviors most likely to hold women back as they seek to make it to that next level. And what you had to say about it is exactly what we’re finding, which is that coaches find this enormously useful. I’m heading to Tokyo next week to work with a group of coaches on using the material in How Women Rise in coaching women and also in coaching man to be more effective allies, supporters, mentors, and sponsors for women.

Yes. And I’m glad you said that because it absolutely addresses both sides of that coin. And indeed, Marshall’s book was required reading when I went through my coach training program. So as a result, it was a book I always refer to my client as well but as I gained more experience as a coach, that’s when I started to see the stark difference that you just described. Women don’t have those challenges that we see very clearly in senior very successful men. And so, a different resource was needed. And so, I think this is kind of a one-two punch for every coach to have in their toolkit and every leader to have in their toolkit to understand the value that both books offer.

Thank you, Eddie. We’re really finding that they’re highly complementary. And, as I said, they’re really rooted in that fundamental insight that the behaviors and habits that can serve you well early in your career can become problematic as you seek to move to the highest level.

Yes, absolutely. And what would you say is the biggest takeaway from the book?

I think the biggest takeaway is that it’s possible and, in fact, not that terribly difficult although you need persistence to begin to change habits and behaviors that may have gotten in your way. In addition to offering observations about 12 behaviors that are most likely to hold women back, we present a very powerful template for changing habits and behaviors that breaks it down and makes it something that people can really do. Our habits and behaviors are not rooted in our character. They are rooted in our experience, which is the primary reason that men and women often have different habits because our experiences in the workplace are often different. So, I’ve always believed that by practicing new behaviors you begin to change what your experience is and that becomes a self-reinforcing cycle. So, we have a really good road map for doing that, which is, again, I think, one reason that coaches are finding this so useful.

Yes, the roadmap is one of the key things, I think, as well in the book that I absolutely value. Clients can almost do it yourself. They almost don’t need us, which is actually what we want, right?

Yeah. We’ve got four steps in there and the second step is “Don’t do this alone.” So that can mean engaging a coach, it can mean engaging a peer coach and it can mean getting comfortable sort of engaging people for spot peer coaching on the fly, to give you feedback or feed forward about something you’re trying to change.

yes, I was going to say that. That’s Excellent. I appreciate you highlighting that but there’s something else, I think, that people will find value in, at least I did when I was reading it. It’s all the case studies, real-life examples that you include, because as I was reading it, I was thinking “This is Client A. This is Client B.” And so, yes, those stories really bring the content, the theory to life. And then you give that roadmap for people. So just a really excellent resource for coaches and clients alike.

Yeah, as you say, those are real-life stories. They come from, as I said, my 30 years out there and some of them come from Marshall’s experience when he coached women. So, I think they jump off the page to people, that’s what we’re hearing, and make it vivid and real and not theoretical. This is not an academic book. This is a book that is aimed at people in the workplace who want to be more successful.

Yes, yes indeed. Well, thank you, Sally.We’re talking to Sally Helgesen and she’s talking to us about How Women Rise. We’ll hear more from Sally right after this.

We’re back, everyone. We’re talking to the legendary Sally Helgesen and she is helping us to understand How Women Rise and she’s also sharing with us of the importance of diversity and inclusion.Sally, before we took our break, you were telling us about your fantastic book How Women Rise – Break the Twelve Habits Holding You Back from Your Next, Raise, Promotion or Job. And I’d like shift gears just a tad now. We cited the stat that Forbes has provided about you. You are one of the world’s premier experts on women’s leadership and we cited what Jim Kouzes said about you that, in fact, no one is more qualified than you and you were a pioneer in women’s leadership before it was even popular but I found something else out about you. In addition to those amazing words, I happen to be reading a book when I was at the Doerr Institute not long ago. You and I were introduced to each other through the Executive Founder Tom Kolditz.

Yes.

And I was there on a little work. And while I was waiting, I was looking through a book that caught my eye. It was entitled The Art and Practice of Leadership Coaching. This book was written in 2005 although it was reprinted again in 2011 but as far back as 2005 you were being cited even then as one of the top 50 executive coaches in the world. So, your work speaks for itself. You are a thought leader and I’m just so super excited to have you on the show.Tell us, if you would, please, your perspective as an executive coach, tell us a little bit more about your work in that area.

All right. My work as an executive coach has grown directly out of the research that I’ve done in the seven books about women’s leadership but also leadership in general in a changing technologically interconnected knowledge economy. So, it really draws very much out of that and it is very focused on practicing better behaviors to get better results. I am certified in Marshall Goldsmith’s wonderful stakeholder-centered coaching method which basically requires coachees to enlist other people in the organization, the people who actually have the experience of working with them, to evaluate how they’re changing what the impact of that is. And I find it an extremely powerful method because, again, it’s focused very much on making measured, sometimes very small, positive behavioral changes and sustaining them over time. And I think that engaging stakeholders is a very powerful way of doing that. So, I get a lot of value from that. I work with individuals but you know what I really love is group coaching. Yes, I think it’s because small group coaching, taking four or six individuals who are maybe just below the most senior leadership level or who are partners in a law firm or an accounting firm but possibly not equity partners etc., I like working with a small group and I think it’s because so much of my work and my thinking has evolved out of doing workshops over the last 30 years. After The Female Advantage was published, people started asking me “I want you come in and talk to our women. Can you come in and talk to our company, our organization?” So, I started doing so and I did a lot of keynotes and I still do a lot of keynotes. I still do a lot of those kinds of presentations but increasingly I’ve focused on doing workshops because I find that they have a more measurable impact and also because I don’t have to do all the work. I get people engaged and we have a lot more fun than be standing up there grinding on. So, it’s a wonderful way of working with people, or working with companies. I’ve done these all over the world from Egypt to up above the Arctic Circle, Northern Norway to Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne, Singapore everywhere. And I’ve really learned a lot from them. People work with one another. So, what I find about small group coaching is its way of intensifying and kind of continuing that process but doing it in a way that you can really measure the results of people’s change and the impact that they’re having both in terms of creating more satisfying careers for themselves but also beginning to shift the culture of the organization. So, I just love doing that kind of small group coaching. It feels very hands-on, it feels intimate, but it also feels high impact.

Very well said. Thank you for sharing that. And indeed, group coaching, team coaching is a new aspect of coaching. It’s really getting a lot of attention as of late and more people are looking for ways to get involved with that and I see more programming becoming available but also something you said there that resonated is the fact that obviously you’re a professional speaker and you give keynotes. I just recently wrote an article in Speaker Magazine that’s published by the National Speakers Association and that is one of the suggestions I made to keynoters – When you give your keynote, it feels good, the audience loves it but then they go back to work. When they go back to work, they have a hard time applying, even if they have the best intentions, the things they heard and were inspired by when you spoke. And so, the recommendation that I put in there was to offer workshops as a follow-up to the keynote and gave a method and things that they should consider. And it’s interesting just, it hasn’t gone live and yet, but when I offered this as part of my workshop that I delivered to chapters, the response was very intriguing. It was intriguing for some people to hear that because they had not considered it. And the fact that you really have a chance to move the needle for the client far more in a smaller group than of course with a large audience of the keynote. And so, some people reached out to me and told me how they’ve been applying that but then you said something that really matters even more. It’s not just having a small group Interaction, that small group coaching, that small workshop but it’s measuring the impact. Can you talk a little bit more about what that does to your relationship with clients and the people who you’re measuring?

Well, it’s so important to be able to measure that. When and I do workshops, I try to suggest “Let’s have a check-in in three months and I won’t charge you. Let’s have a check-in in six months. I won’t charge you.” I want to see how people are doing so they can remain on track. That’s really part of what I offer because what concerns me is impact. As I said earlier, my mission has always been helping women to recognize, articulate, and act on their greatest strengths and helping organizations create more inclusive cultures in which everyone can thrive. So how do I know whether my own work is creating those kinds of impacts unless in there in the loop and can hear how it’s going. So that’s one of the things that’s so powerful about group coaching is you really can do that. And how do you measure it? You measure it by gauging what the people around the person who’s being coached or if you’re coaching a team, what the experience of the team is in terms, depending on their goal, is their goal to be more harmonious, is their goal to be more creative, is their goal to be more impactful, is their goal to be more strategic, is their goal to change the culture of the organization, what is the goal that they’re trying to achieve. And then once you get people to really focus on that and articulate it, then you can do some background interviews with people around them and you know how well is this working. And if the answer is “Oh, it’s working fantastically,” that’s nice but if the answer is “You know, I think it’s working well but,” then you listen to that and you begin to include that or in recalibration going forward. So, I think it really keeps the process honest and it keeps the process focused on the client whether it’s an individual or a small group or a team, and those are two different things. I think that that’s really, really important. So, you want to have impact. That’s your goal. Impact is your goal. You’ve got to find a way of checking in and seeing how it’s working and find out the perceptions that the people around the members of the group or the team to see if it’s working.

Yes, and as the proverbial saying goes, what gets measured is what gets done.

That’s it.

And certainly impact is a part of my tagline – “Accelerate performance and drive impact.” So, we have to have measurement if we’re going to be able to do that and prove that we’ve done it. So, thank you for sharing that.

I wanted to say one thing though, Eddie, also. Measuring does not have to always be hard numbers. There are many qualitative measures that you can pay attention to in terms of what people’s experiences are. And sometimes I’m concerned that when we talk about measurement, it means you want to quantify absolutely everything. And what we’re talking about is human relationships. And as my friend Tom Peters always says, “Numbers are soft and relationships are hard,” and I agree with that. Numbers can be adjusted. Relationships are tough to do. So, I think that the awareness, the qualitative improvements are also measurable, not just quantitative is key.

That’s interesting. Thank you for sharing that because, yes, I am only thinking about the quantitative side but the qualitative side, do you have recommendations for that, have you written about that someplace that we can reference?

Interestingly, I don’t think I’ve really written about it. It’s a good idea. If I ever get 5 minutes, I probably should do that. By quantitative, I really mean I come at my career not as an organizational psychologist but really my background was as a writer, as both a journalist and speechwriter. I did a lot of corporate communications before The Female Advantage and it was in fact my experiencing in corporate communications that led to the frustration that resulted in my writing The Female Advantage – Women’s Ways of Leadership and publishing that book way back in 1990. So, I come at this from a writing point of view. And when you’re a writer, whether you’re a journalist or a speechwriter, you are always trying to interview people in a very comprehensive way to try to understand what their experience is, what their perspective is, etc. Journalism that is highly quantitative is unbelievably boring to me. That’s not research. Research is different than the kind of comprehensive analysis. So basically what I try to do in order to get that qualitative aspect is to interview as many people as I can around the group, the team, or the individual I’m coaching, get them to share what their experiences are instead of questions like “How many times did so and so do X, Y, and Z?” and then you get a number but how meaningful is it.

Well, thank you for sharing that. That shifts my perspective, yes, because I’m only usually thinking about the quantitative but the qualitative component of measurement, there is some value there. I can see that. Thank you for sharing.

Sure.

Now, you talked about your work as an executive coach but you also are known as a great leadership coach. In your mind what’s the difference?

Well, I really don’t see myself as an executive coach. I see myself as a leadership coach. And I think executive coaching, and my guess is that Marshall would agree with this definition, executive coaching is often very much focused on helping an executive make certain strategic decisions, financial decisions, etc. I really view leadership coaching as a more comprehensive term that basically what I’m committed to is helping people realize their best leadership talents. So, it’s more focused in a way on the individual or the small group than necessarily on what the organization is looking for in terms of quantitative outcomes. So that’s how I see the difference to some degree but I’m not weathered to that but I’m much more comfortable describing myself as a leadership coach.

Interesting. Thank you for sharing that because that’s a big difference. I really appreciate that.So, if someone’s listening to our conversation right now and thinking that they would like to make a change for the better, what’s one thing they can start with?

One thing they can start with is to really start enlisting other people in their development. And as noted in How Women Rise, we’ve got a really good template for doing this. So, when you identify something that you get feedback, maybe getting in a way. It could be through a performance review or it could be just that you notice that a number people in your organization and probably including your spouse are telling you you’re not very good at listening or you need to be a little more patient with people or you share too much information, you’re not quite concise enough or you need to stop minimizing what your achievements and contributions are and stand with it, present it more. These are very easily observable habits and behaviors that can get in your way as a leader. So, once you identify what that is, I think it’s very helpful to kind of break it down. Say you have feedback that, and this is true for a lot of women, too much information, too many details, too much background, try to be more concise when you present about something, when you get that, what is helpful rather than feeling overwhelmed or “What am I going to do?” to just pick a situation where you’re going to practice being more concise – “Oh, this meeting I have every two weeks and I’ve gotten some feedback back that people were saying “You were a little all over the map there.” So, I’m going to try in this meeting to prepare to be more concise.” And then you can enlist people to help you. You can say “You know, I’m going into this meeting. You’re always there. You’ve seen me in the past. I’m really working on getting much more concise and focused in how I present. Could you watch me and let me know how you think I’m doing, if there’s something I could do that would be more effective?” or you can go to somebody who’s very good at being concise and say “Look, I’m really working on this. I’ve noticed you seem to be terrific at it. Do you have any tips for me? Is there anything you do when you’re preparing?” So that process of enlisting other people to sort of get their ideas, get their input, get their support is really important.And I want to say one thing, and marshal’s really clear on this. When you do that, you only have one response when they tell you that – “Well, the reason I don’t do that is but” or “but that would be difficult for me in this situation.” Your only response is “Thank you.” You don’t you have to it. You may disagree with it but your only response is “Thank you.”

Yes. I started laughing because I knew exactly where you would go with that. That’s so true. So, as you said earlier, don’t try to go it alone. Thank you for that advice.Sally, this has been an incredible conversation. I could talk to you for hours. What is the main message you’d like to leave our listeners with?

It’s partly “Don’t do it alone when you’re trying to make change” but I think also the best advice I have to give, and this is really important for women and for any kind of diverse employees who may constantly be worrying that they’re going to be perceived as arrogant if they talk about themselves or if they present their achievements, and that is doing your work is half the job. You also need to know how to market what you contribute. Connections and visibility are as important to your career as just doing a great job.

Wonderful! That is excellent advice indeed. Doing the work is only half the job. You also need to know how to market what you contribute.

Yes.

Thank you.Where can my listeners learn more about you?

Well, my website certainly which is SallyHelgesen.com. Also, although I notice on my screen, I’ve got 46 messages that I have to respond to on LinkedIn, LinkedIn is my preferred social media channel. So, connect with me on LinkedIn and I will get back to those 46 people and I will also get back to you if you decide to connect with me.

Well, I believe after this interview airs, you’re going to have far more than 46 people knocking on your door to connect with you. So, we’re going to be sure put how to connect with you in the show notes that people will see on their handheld devices and also my website and my website will also have a link to how they can pick up a copy of your book. So, thank you so much for being here. I have thoroughly enjoyed our conversation, Sally.

It’s been a great pleasure. I particularly enjoyed our talking about leadership coaching, group coaching, and how the habits and behaviors that get in people’s way can really be addressed through coaching.

Indeed, indeed. Thank you so much.

My pleasure, Eddie.

And thank you for listening. Well, that concludes this episode, everyone. I’m Eddie Turner, the Leadership Excelerator, reminding you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is an activity. Leadership is action. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment we put on and take off. We must be leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So, whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.