Leadership is more than a buzzword

Being given a leadership position does not make you a leader, it makes you a manager.  In most organizations, the term leader is represented by “the boss.”  What does it take to effectively lead when you aren’t the boss?

Chris Lin, a human capital professional with a passion for activating leadership from every corner of a company, sits down with Kyle and they discuss what leadership really is and how everyone inside an organization has a voice.

Chris shares his leadership principles on:

• How to be an effective leader
• When to lead up
• Where organizations can find leadership
• What to do when you need to lead in the face of bad management
• Why so many are missing out on the power of their leadership voice.

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: 0:00

Welcome to The Summit. A podcast focused on bringing you the knowledge and insights for industry leaders. I’m your host Kyle Hamer, and I’m on a mission to help you exceed your potential. As a sales guy, turned marketer, I am passionate about building sustainable businesses. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 20 year career, say you won’t find an overnight growth scheme, a shortcut to success or way to hack yourself to the top. Nope. Success is the by-product of hard work, great relationships and deep understanding done over and over. We’re here to help you unlock that success with some secrets from other people, one conversation at a time.

Kyle Hamer: 0:34

Thanks for joining us. Today’s guest is Chris Lin. Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Lin: 0:39

Hey Kyle. Good to be on. Thank you for having me.

Kyle Hamer: 0:42

We’re excited to have you here for those of you who don’t know, Chris, Chris is a podcaster, a natural connector, and somebody who loves helping people find the most in their environment at the heart of every operation, he believes there’s people and by investing individuals molding their experience and guiding their journey, he believes that you can create positive growth in your culture, that blooms into a thriving organization, Chris, outside of those things, is there anything I missed? That’s important to being you and, and what’s important for telling people who you are.

Chris Lin: 1:16

Well, yeah. Thank you for that, that introduction. I think the thing that we don’t tend to share our personal lives, so I am a husband and a father of two out here in California and man, it is a crazy, crazy ride, especially right now with, with the pandemic trying to learn how to be a teacher as well at home. Right. And , and deal, and also be a daycare when normally we have other people doing that for us. So it’s definitely interesting. It’s interesting. It’s a learning experience in what we’re eight months in now. So I mean, it’s a new adventure every day.

Kyle Hamer: 1:54

Well, I tell you what I think there’s a, there’s a new appreciation for preschool, for daycare, for educators. If anything, that’s, we’ve been taught through this, you know, this, this quarantine period in this lockdown is , is we probably should extend a bit more grace to those people that are in childcare and child service, because it is a exhausting and never ending series of changes. I mean like , like every day is something new for us. We’ve got four. So I’m , I’m right there with you.

Chris Lin: 2:28

Yeah. I mean, it’s something that you know, I I’ve I’ve long believed in is we really need to invest in our education system and our, in our edge and educators. And so that’s something that I hope, you know, our government will really focus on in the future, no matter who’s in the administration or who’s leading our country, like there needs to be a refocus on education as a whole. So yeah,

Kyle Hamer: 2:55

I’ll I’ll refrain from commenting, given the amount of polarity, the current education leadership causes. However, let’s get into what we’re talking about today, because really what we’re talking about today is leadership in , in today’s society. Everybody talks about leadership as though it’s a buzzword. It’s like, Oh, I’m going to be a leader, a leader. Is this a leader? Is that, but it’s really more than just a buzzword. So help set the stage for us Chris , what is leadership and why is it important?

Chris Lin: 3:27

Yeah. Leadership I’ll, I’ll, I’ll say it in three words that one of my previous managers told me leadership is influence. So it is not a position. It is not a title. It is not an authority, right. Leadership is the ability to influence others. When you think about leaders, traditionally, you’re thinking about managers, right? And you have someone who is managing over you or supervising over you, or you are doing that to others. And and so we’ve kind of melded those two things as one in the same. Now I will say that the future of work we’ll see a requirement of managers becoming better leaders. And there will be a a merge of those two because managers are going to be required to be good leaders . However, just because you individually or myself, we don’t manage other people. We are still leaders. We no matter what, there are people that we influence in the lives of work and our personal lives in our social circles. And even ourselves, we really have to be leaders to ourselves first and foremost in order to lead others. So being a leader is not about having a title. It is about having the skills to focus on people and the commitment to focus on people, to be able to just be a good person and help them succeed.

Kyle Hamer: 5:04

You know, it’s , it’s, it’s interesting because the great leaders that are at least the people that we idolize or we put on pedestals, they’ve all had a title, right. Cesar was a great leader and he was the the emperor of the Roman the Roman empire and Steve jobs was the founder and CEO of Apple or bill Gates. We can , we can go down through person after person, after person who, when we put them on a pedestal, there are some sort of title associated with it. Why do you think it’s so hard to think of leadership separate from titles in and leadership separate from management?

Chris Lin: 5:43

Yeah, I think that that’s that may have to do with just the way we’ve researched managements in the past. And we’ve looked at leaders and typically, because we look at the, that those people who do have those titles, the level of impact that they have across the organization and even across society then we tend to look at them from that standpoint, right? Because they have a very high level of impact rather than someone who has a smaller, smaller ripple . But again, your influence can impact one person. It can imply impact 10, it can impact a hundred. It doesn’t matter. You’re still leading those people. I think that those those two things, again, they, they, they get interchanged and, but they are, do not mean the same thing. And so when you look at other managers who are in quote unquote leadership positions, you can see good leaders and bad leaders. And I don’t necessarily subscribe to the term bad leader. I think that those are just managers, because those are people who are not focused on people. So for example, I , I worked for an airline when I was younger and the CEO at the time famously said to the pilots, when they were renegotiating, their contracts was, it doesn’t matter what we give you . You are a number you can be replaced. Now, would you call that person a leader? I would not. I have absolutely would not. I think that, that person’s a manager. I think that person is too focused on numbers to focus on the dollars. Right. and they clearly do not have a commitment to people. So again, when you look at leadership, they , they have a vision and they have an ability to really influence and impact the people that are around them in a good and positive way.

Kyle Hamer: 7:51

Is there ever a time when leadership has a negative or is it only positive reinforcement or result ? Cause it , it sounds like to me, just listening as your description of managers, that there might be a, a case to be made for generals in the military or just managers. They’re not actually leaders where individuals who found companies and have to make hard decisions that their managers not leaders. What’s the difference.

Chris Lin: 8:22

Yeah. I think that that’s a good call-out and I think we’ve talked about this before, right. Is when we’ve looked back through history, like you bring up Caesar , he was a tyrant, ended up being a tyrant. You look at other heads of, you know, of civilization like a Hitler Stalin. You know, those were clearly people who have leadership skills, but they didn’t necessarily actually make a positive impact. Right. They had the skills to be a good leader, but they, because they had a very strong ability to influence and create an impact, but they took it down a bad path, an evil path versus a positive one. So while I would say that they have leadership skills, I would not call them, you know, a leader, a good leader, at least.

Kyle Hamer: 9:20

So then if, if you wouldn’t call him a good leader and there may not fall into managers because they had much more power and influence, what are they, or more importantly, what are the characteristics that really make up a good leader? And the things that people that are listening should say, okay, well, first thing I had to work on is , is my ability to influence folks. And once I get influence, you know, what am I influencing people to do? What does that mean?

Chris Lin: 9:48

How do you assess that? Yeah. So when you have an ability to influence people, that that means you have a certain degree of competency with negotiating, with persuasion, right? With, with vision, being able to convey those stories and that vision, the next thing is getting people to actually act on those things, right? And so when we look at how leaders and , and individuals can actually move the needle, as we say, or as a lot of people say, that’s where that , that money is. And that’s where the money is and , and organizations is getting people to move the needle. So can you not only influence the individuals to get on board with what you’re saying or the direction that you’re heading, but can you actually get them to do the work in alignment with your vision and the purpose for a , another example I’d like to use is an organization I was working out that was very, very, had a very strong mission and a very strong purpose. And it was a healthcare organization and their number one value was put patients first. Now that might seem, you know, like common sense or like a duh for a healthcare organization. But when you look at other health healthcare companies, let’s say insurance companies will use them as the bad guy, because they’re an easy scapegoat. Do they actually put patients first more likely than not? The answer you will hear is no , you hear about costs going up, right. You hear about claims being denied for something that should be routine or something that is critical to someone’s care. Right? But this organization I was at was fundamentally focused on that notion and that value of putting patients first. So when you have this vision of continually improving patients’ lives, and you always say, no matter what decision we make in our organization, we are going to have the patient in mind and ask ourselves, is this the best thing for the patient? And right. We often debate ideas, you know, services, products, whatever it might be at the end of the day, we are going to do whatever is best for the patient. And so that vision that our leadership had allowed us to be empowered, to take action and actually make an impact. And like I said, move the needle.

Kyle Hamer: 12:44

So, I mean, when you’re, when you’re talking about that, though, when you in a healthcare organization, when you have different personalities, you have things that need to get done and you’re in a leadership position. It can’t all be butterflies and rainbows. If we’re dealing with somebody’s life or somebody’s health, how do we assimilate or how do we pick a different leadership style or a way in which to get the right thing done, to do what’s best for the patient, even if there are 50 or 60 different opinions on what the right thing is for the patient.

Chris Lin: 13:19

Yeah. That’s a really good that’s a really good question. One of the things, the strategies that we, you know, I like to use is to , if there’s flexibility within the organization or the team, if there is a possibility to test one or two or three possible outcomes, we see this a lot in silicone here in Silicon Valley, right? When you test different programs and the way they work behind the scenes to see what works best, right. AB testing, and you have a very clear outcome at the , at the end, you figure out what you’re trying to measure or what the expected goal is and see which one hits that goal first or better or whatever it might be. So if you have that flexibility, I would say, do that testing. If you do not have that flexibility, I still say, you need to have the adaptability and flexibility within your organization to make mistakes and to try things out. So if you can only do one thing at a time, and I’ve worked at a much older organization that really could only put forth one thing at a time, they still would test it and go into it with this mindset that this is temporary. And they let their teams know saying this is temporary, or we’re going to try this out. If it doesn’t work, we will. And it doesn’t achieve what we’re hoping for it to achieve. Then we will go back and try something else. So again, you have to allow for that flexibility and that, that, that movement within your organization to be able to try new things. And again back to your original question, it, when you are debating those ideas, you do need to get everyone on board. That is one of the keys to successful leadership. When you look at the work of of Patrick Lencioni, and you look at, you read his , if you’ve read his book five dysfunctions of a team, you have to have trust. You have to have accountability in order to get results. And so in order to get those results, you have to have the trust within the team to actually be able to openly debate and agree on the next step. Even if you don’t necessarily agree with that that method or that, that way of moving, you have to get behind it. You have to get your team behind it. So they don’t come back later and say, you know, they don’t try to sabotage what was being implemented or tested

Kyle Hamer: 16:07

So, I mean, if this is, if , if this has been written about, and this has been talked about, and this is stuff that we can, we can glean, why do you think so many organizations struggle with finding leadership and , and finding good leaders instead of just managers or instead of knuckleheads? Like why, why is this a challenge for organizations?

Chris Lin: 16:29

That’s a great, great question and something I’m constantly asking myself. And when it comes down to it, they are focused on the bottom line, or they’re focused on clients. They’re not focused on people. Again, leadership is about people. You don’t become a leader. If you don’t want to deal with people, if you don’t want to deal with people, don’t be a leader or don’t be in a position to be a leader because leadership is all about other people. And so we have this old school mentality that is still persistence across our society, where if someone is a good top performer, we move them into a management position, right? Sales is often the culprit of this. And so I’ll use them as an example. And they’re also an easy, tangible way to explain this analogy. You have someone who constantly hit their , hits, their sales targets, or exceeds them. And they have great client feedback all the time. The clients love them. However, usually those salespeople don’t always have the best rapport within the team internally, but because they’re a high top sales performer, they say, well, you’re great at what you do. Let’s move you into a management position, a leadership position. So you can teach and lead a team to do it, to do it as well. And they instantly move that person into that position without considering a, is that person actually a good leader? Do they have the good, do they have the correct people skills to implement and teach and grow and develop others? And two , did they actually get the investment from the organization to develop those skills again? A lot of times it’s, Oh, you’re a great, you’re a great performer. You’re, you’re a great employee. Let’s move you into this supervisory role and not give you any development. And so that’s, that’s another reason why, you know, we , we don’t see a lot of great leaders or managers. And the other thing I will say is I , I don’t remember the exact number, but it’s a very low number of when you look at strengths finder, there is a very low percentage. I think it’s in the single digits of individuals who are naturally wired to be good managers. And so when you look at, look at it from that standpoint, I had a large population over 90% of the population are not naturally going to be good managers. So you have to focus on, okay, well, if there , if most of the population is not focused or not inclined to be a manager, we have to give them the skills. And if you’re going to give them management skills, you also need to give them leadership skills. And so again, that’s when they kind of conflate and then they merge the terms, but you have to absolutely be focused on investing in your people to be able to lead. And again, even people who, in your organizations who don’t have managerial responsibilities, they should still take leadership skills courses. You still need to develop those, those skills because they work with other people. And again, when you look, think about the notion that leadership is influence, they need to be able to work with others and lead others, even if they don’t have an authority over them. So again, right, focus on developing your people and make sure that the people that you do promote and, and lift up through the organization and who are climbing the ladder, have a commitment and desire to actually want to lead.

Kyle Hamer: 20:38

It’s the, the, you know, the, the study you just brought up was done in 2015 by Gallup . And it shows that 82% of the time companies choose the person to put into management. And that really only one in 10 have the natural skills to do to manage. But you’ve made the distinction between management leadership, that leadership is influence. Why would I want to influence, or why would I want to have leadership skills? Why would I want to develop that if I wasn’t ever going to move into, to management? Like what would be the, what would be the point in being a leader inside my organization, if I’m not going to get compensated for it, or B have to ever manage people, that’s not something I want, why would I, why would I develop those skills? Yeah. Well,

Chris Lin: 21:30

You, you, again, do you work with other people? Like, I would say 99% of the people who are in a job have to work with someone else, right? You have to have those skills to work with others. And when you look at something like negotiation, that is a leadership skill, because you are going to disagree on something at some point, right? Even if it’s just, even if you’re just permanently worked with one other person, you need to be able to persuade and communicate and negotiate with that person. You need to have the conflict management skills to be able to deal with conflict as it arises. Those are all leadership skills. I’ll give an example. From my own experience, I was at an organization where I was the only person in the talent development department. I was the talent development department. I had no one below me. I only had my manager who was an executive on the executive team. Now I’m not clearly not in a management position, but I had to have leadership skills to be able to influence others and get work done. This was an organization of a few hundred people, and I needed to create learning programs for those, for all of the different departments. The only way you can create those learning programs at a good enough pace is to have the skills, to be able to influence other people, to get them to do work. That normally I would, I would do not saying I didn’t do work, But, I, if I could, again, if I worked on those programs by myself, it would take me years to get everything done. And by the time I finished, everything would be obsolete and I would have to start all over. So if I can, again, influence, you know, 10 20 people and get them to move things and make an impact from there, then things move much quicker. They can work together and they can, I can help create connections across the line, right? Something that at that organization was an issue was, was they had multiple offices and they all did the same work, but each office had a different way of working. And sometimes even within those offices, the teams within those offices had different ways of working. So we had to create alignment. We needed to align on a process. And so, as we develop learning for these or for this organization, we had to agree on what was the best way or the best way for the client and best way for our team to do our work. And so the only way I could do that was by getting those people together and helping them negotiate and figure out what was the best path forward to complete these projects. And from that standpoint, I would say that that is a leadership skill. That is me leading those individuals to be able to get the work done.

Kyle Hamer: 24:40

When you think about the, the effort there, and I’m just, I’m just trying to, I’m trying to drive through here. Cause there’s, there’s a couple of things, at least from my perspective that I’ve heard, as it relates to leadership that I don’t know is as we’ve, we’ve gotten into today, but there really are both positive and negative leadership styles. Like you can be a leader you can be like Hitler installing in these guys and you can be 100% coercive. And as a course of person, what you’re doing is , is you’re trying to get somebody to do something because it benefits you or you’re, you’re manipulating the situation, but it’s a leadership style that , that is very negative in its outcomes and where it heads there’s leadership styles around being a pace setter where you’re like, look, I’m just going to work. Ridiculously might be like the Michael Jordan was the first person in the gym, last person out. And if anybody else doesn’t work at that level, that are not, they’re not a leader they’re not capable. Whereas, you know, a lot of what I feel like you’ve been talking about are more along the democratic Kayla’s get consensus and work together, which is a positive leadership style, or maybe even the coaching, which is, Hey, I see these things and we’re developing. And again, as a , is a positive style, Wouldn’t a good leader. Be able to use both positive and negative leadership styles interchangeably to , to drive an outcome or to drive an organization forward where like, in the situation, like where you were talking about, you had to use democratic and coaching to kind of help coach people through improving this process. Versus if you were coming in trying to do change management and the company was about to go out of business, you might have to just flat out dictate and coercive and be maybe authoritarian in the leadership style where it’s like, no, it’s this way or else. Yeah . And , and , and it’s mostly negative and what’s coming across, but it it’s actually positively influencing where the organization is headed or positively influencing the relationships. Isn’t there, isn’t there a time for both.

Chris Lin: 26:47

Yeah. That’s a good call-out . And so what I’ll say is first you actually perfectly described my strengths, my top strength, which is inclusion, right. I I’m a very inclusive leader or a person in general just naturally. So that’s a very good call out on your part and observation is that again for me, I want to have alignment and have this more democratic process when I lead. And and then once we, once we can find alignment, then we act and we get, we get stuff done. Right.

Kyle Hamer: 27:25

Yeah. And , and yeah, and what I, what I would say is, as we call that as the, the at least the based on the categories that I’m aware of there , and there may be more, but I would call that an affiliative or an affiliative leadership style where your , your focus is really around creating harmony, building strong, emotional bonds. You know, you’re gonna your , your statement that sums you up as people come first. Yep . You’re really good at empathy, building relationships, getting consensus strongly done with communication, and that leads naturally into democratic of getting consensus and people voting and participating or in coaching. Cause you’re, you’re empathetic, but that’s not the only way to get things done. Right.

Chris Lin: 28:08

Yeah. And again, when you look at something like StrengthsFinder, there are 32 strengths and you’re not going to have all 32, you have one or two that are your default , and then you have a top, you know, they say a top five, right. That you , you rely on. But so back to your point, when you look at something where let’s say you have an organization or a team that is just kind of floundering or kind of going down the toilet and you need to make some decisive action or have decisive action. And as you say, like this authoritarian kind of , of way, I would say, yeah, you absolutely can use those. You can have those approaches. The thing that I would say is the reason that some of those things are NEC considered negative and they don’t have to be negative is the way that they are perceived. And I will say, right, my style is not always perceived positively. Right? And so someone might look at my style of leadership and say, Chris is a bad leader. He takes, why ? Like, why is he talking to everyone? Why can’t he just make a decision? Right. Someone might perceive that as poor leadership. However, that may not be poor leadership. You might have to use your other strengths or other areas where you, you need to again, make decision. And so when you have those more direct as you say, direct decisive leaders, the thing that I would say is, and that’s key for any leader is to communicate. You have to communicate, you know, Hey, we need to make this decision. We are going to move this route because ABC XYZ, whatever, when you communicate with your team, when you communicate with those, that again, that you’re influencing or that are being impacted by your decisions, having transparency and giving the answers to why you’re doing what you’re doing is very important because that’s how you get buy-in. And again, again, that kind of comes back to my, you know, democratic, inclusive side of things where we need to have alignment, but it’s a, Hey, get on, get on board. This is what’s happening, right. We’re, we’re turning the ship this way, instead of that way. And the way we were going, we’re going left. Instead of right now, this is why you need to get on board . Right. And having that decisive nature, but also being transparent and communicative allows people to say, okay, like , let’s go. Or, Hey, I don’t know. And you know , I have doubts about this. I don’t like this decision. You still need to allow those people to air out their laundry, to get them on board . Because again, you might have employees in your , in your organization who might be a rebellious faction within the, within the empire. And they say, you know what, screw this. I’m going to sabotage it or no, I’m going to go as slow as I can. You need to get those people on board, no matter what you need people to do the work, to execute your vision. So you have to get those people on board. And that starts with communication.

Kyle Hamer: 31:21

It’s interesting because if you look at it , let’s take the political landscape and you know, everybody , like, don’t talk about politics on your podcast. And we’re not talking about politics as much as leaders today. But if you look at the difference between say president Trump and where we sit at this moment, where , you know, regardless of the outcome of the election president elect Biden, you really do have a dichotomy of leadership styles. Right? Trump is a very direct coercive. He’s really not democratic. He’s looking for people who, what is it? I think he’s been caught saying, I like people who don’t get caught. I like people that aren’t prisoners of war. I like, you know, he makes these really divisive statements and the statements for some people hold a lot of influence because they agree with they, they have consensus behind, Oh, I like somebody who’s direct. I like that. There’s no, there’s no filter. I don’t get political weasel words. This is great. I understand where I sit with this person. This is somebody that I will let lead me. Conversely, you look at Biden and he’s a bit more of a consensus builder. He might be more democratic or affiliative in his approach. He appears to have more empathy. He appears to get more buy-in and as he makes decisions to move things forward, and it’s, it’s very divisive in our country of red vs blue one way versus the other. But a lot of it boils down to leadership style. Why do you think that it’s so challenging for people inside of organizations to lean into what their natural tendencies are? What, what things should be for leadership and not be seen as a juror, because they’re able to make a decision really, really fast, or to be seen as a consensus builder. And can’t actually lead when they’re spending their time empathizing and making sure everybody’s on board before they move the ship forward. Why is it so difficult,

Chris Lin: 33:21

Difficult from what the , the leadership stance , the leader standpoint, or the employee standpoint,

Kyle Hamer: 33:27

Who wants to be seen as a leader to feel like they’re actually leading. Cause they’re, they’re in this spot where leaders at times can need to be divisive and decision-making, and just move forward. Regardless. Doesn’t matter, no person left behind, but they’re all dead. So we’re moving on or, well, let’s, let’s pick up all the bodies and let’s bring them all together, but it may mean we all get killed in the, in the process. Well, I won’t know who I am. Why , why would I need to have influence? Why would I need to speak up? Why I just want to sit over here and do my job?

Chris Lin: 33:57

Well, again, you’re you , if you want to do your job, you still have to be able to , to have those skills to lead again, if you are the type who likes to, you know, sit at your desk or, you know, right now at home, lock yourself away in your office and get work again, you still have interactions with other people and maybe it’s just you and your boss. You still have to lead your boss. You still have to find a way to, to communicate with them. And again, communication is a key leadership skill, right? You still need to have a way to persuade them or negotiate or debate them. Again. Those are all, those are all things that leaders use as far as your question, w in, you know, why, why do we why should someone really focus on worrying about the type of leader they are or how they’re going to be a leader? That’s what, you know, there’s a difference between thinking what other people say, thinking about what they think and and being hampered by what other people think there’s a difference between being aware of what’s being said and, and, and what, and allowing that to affect you. Right? Just because again, I’ll use myself as an example, just because I liked the democratic approach and the consensus approach. And people might say, I think I don’t make, come to decisions quick enough. That doesn’t necessarily mean I can’t use my other skills. I can’t use my other strengths. If my boss were to say, Hey, Chris, we really, really like this deadline got moved up . We need you to crank this out in the next week tomorrow, whatever it might be, I will shift gears and I can utilize other strengths just because, just because you have a default strength or a default way of working doesn’t necessarily mean that’s your only way of working, you know, going back to the tech company I was at whenever we were implementing, learning new learning, we had about at best, at one point a 48 hour headstart, 48 hours on what on to dev develop to create design develop, and then implement new training 48 hours. And I had to, because, you know, the product and engineering teams would say, Hey, we updated this thing or we have a new process. Here you go. And then for me, I’m like, Oh, I got to teach our team, right. A department of 100 people, you know one VP, two directors, six managers, and countless supervisors. And I need to get all of those managers on board to understand what is happening in 48 hours. So again, can I work fast? Yeah, absolutely. I can. And, and it’s, and that becomes less of a, Hey, what do you think about this as a, Hey, I need you to know about these things that are coming, and this is what is going to happen. So again, you don’t have to just because do you have a default doesn’t mean it’s your only way of working or leading?

Kyle Hamer: 37:29

Well, in the, in the example you’re , you’re giving here. It seems to me like leadership and effectiveness could be a bit interchanged, but it also seems like maybe your , your tech company was a bit uneducated in what it actually takes to, to develop proper training, proper development, proper education, proper communication channels. And so that could be a really difficult Hill to climb, even if you’re effective at leading through and getting stuff done quickly. There’s only so many times you’re going to do that before. You’re like, all right, enough, I can’t really, but you did the last 35 times. So somebody that’s in that situation, how do you, how do you lead up? How do you, how do you begin to make influence so that you can say, look, this is insane. 48 hours is enough. How do I make these changes?

Chris Lin: 38:18

Yeah . So, so from there, it’s about looking at what are the issues that might come out of it. So in this case, whenever the engineering team pushed forward a, an update to our patient care team, they often saw, helped us to get spike for 24, 48 hours until people figured it out. And that caused a lot of turmoil for our help desk team back on the engineering side. So ,

Kyle Hamer: 38:49

Okay . Wait, the help desk, people that you had to train in 48 hours, you deployed something they weren’t fully trained and then the customers were coming in asking for help.

Chris Lin: 38:57

No, it was more our internal team. Right. We would implement the training and then if they didn’t remember it, because it was a very quick like, Hey, you need to do this. Or oftentimes, you know , the engineering team might forget to tell us about something and never. And so, and this is no knock on them, right? It’s just that we have different ways of working and we have different processes. They, you know, so they would all of a sudden say like, why the heck do we have a 300% spike in tickets from our own internal team? They can’t, you know, why can’t they do their jobs? And for me, it’s it was about, Hey, connecting the dots, you have this problem, we have this problem. Are they connected and finding why they’re connected and figuring out a solution that helps everybody. Right. So in the end, we actually ended up implementing a system where we, myself and that at the time we actually grew to a team of three, we ended up seeing, Hey, you know, we now have the product roadmap, you know, one to two months out. So we can start preparing for those changes much more far in advance. But, and in order to do that, then we were able to see a drop in tickets because we knew what was happening. The leaders and our patient care team knew what were happening. And then we were able to share that information forward. And then we also have some backup knowledge management processes that, that I put in place as well. But again, it’s about when you look at leadership, it’s about influencing those people and saying, Hey, we noticed that you have this problem in help desk tickets. And it happens to be right after you deploy something. And when you deploy something, we don’t usually get that much of a notice. So maybe let’s fix that. Like maybe you give us more of a heads up. We can create the proper training, or we can know everything that is happening in this deployment. And then we can create the necessary articles and knowledge management pieces to let our team know. And then again, lo and behold, those tickets dropped to, I think, about 15%. So again, you’re, you’re looking, you’re talking about working with other people you’re going to have, if you’re working with any other people, you’re going to have to lead them at some point.

Kyle Hamer: 41:39

So what do you, what do you S what do you say, or how do you see the world as it relates to somebody that’s inside of an environment that like, I’m, I feel stuck. I feel frustrated. I don’t feel like I can leave . I don’t feel like I have influence. How do you, how do you help those people find their leadership, find their influence?

Chris Lin: 42:01

Yeah. That’s a great question. Start with yourself in those, in those cases, I would say, well, what are the things that you can control? What are the things that you can do to grow and learn? And if you can start finding those, those ways, you can start finding different areas that you can either begin to have influence on, or you might, you know, the follow-up question I always get is, well, what if nothing happens from there? Well, maybe you need to start looking at other areas to, to work. And so, and I know that that’s not easy right now, especially in 2020. So it’s about, can you grind it out? Can you get, can you get it done? Can you live with it? Is that something that you are able to cope with momentarily until you find something better? But again, if you can, if you’re really stuck in a situation where a manager is just absolutely not taking any coaching from you, not willing to learn, and I’ve been there before, you , you, then you start looking at well where other areas that I do have control in that I can influence. There’s always something that someone can control, even if it’s very small and then working on those and growing that, growing that little area , that area to be to be bigger and bigger. And then eventually you’ll, you’ll find a way. And again, the , the most often way I tell people to lead is to take care of yourself. Self care is very important. Physical, mental, emotional state, spiritual state. You might not have a religion, but everyone has spirituality. Everyone believes in something. So believe in yourself, right? Take care of yourself. You have to take care of yourself as you, if you want to be able to you cannot pour from an empty cup. That’s, that’s the saying, I go, I go back to this . You cannot pour from an empty cup. So take care of yourself. First second is don’t stop learning. You absolutely have to keep learning and growing, right? If you have a garden and stuff stops growing, guess what? It’s dead. Don’t die inside. Keep growing, keep learning, keep, keep finding little nuggets to take, to be a better version of yourself than you were yesterday.

Kyle Hamer: 44:31

I, you know, I was going to say final thoughts, but I think you kind of just gave them to us. I mean, from a coming full circle here, when we think about leadership is more than a buzzword . I mean, what you just talked about right there in those, those couple points is really why leadership is more than a buzzword , right? It’s it’s not just something that we read in a book. It’s not just something that we post on on LinkedIn, or we get accolades for it . The front of the company meeting it’s

Chris Lin: 45:03

Action . Yep . Yeah, absolutely.

Kyle Hamer: 45:08

Chris, if somebody wants to get ahold of you or, or wants to know more about your podcast or becoming a better leader, how do they do that?

Chris Lin: 45:16

Yeah, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn URL is lead with Chris. You can also follow me on Instagram lead with Chris, or you can follow the leading people first podcast also on LinkedIn and Instagram, just leading people. First, the podcast is available everywhere. You get podcasts, Apple, Google, and Stitcher , Amazon, the whole gamut. So take a listen and connect with me and let’s continue the conversation.

Kyle Hamer: 45:45

That’s fantastic. So last question of the day two questions left . Second to last question. Is there anything that you would like to share with us that I didn’t cover yet?

Chris Lin: 45:57

I mean, I , I think the I’ve said it already take care of yourselves, especially this year. You , you , we are in such a state of exhaustion for multiple reasons. And so it’s very important to take care of yourself and I can speak personally and I’ll share a very quick story is the days that I don’t practice my ma to my mindfulness practices, which are, which I do throughout the day quick two to five minute little practices throughout the day when I have a chance, I’m a very cranky person at the end of the day, if I don’t do this, because I’m not at a sense of peace and presence. So take care of yourself , whatever, whatever that means for you. You know, if that means doing a quick workout, or if that means going and drinking more water or, you know, whatever it is, take care of yourself and really allow yourself to recharge. We are the emotions. We’re all feeling are all valid right now, whatever they might be overwhelmed, the sense of overwhelming depression, anxiety, whatever it is, they’re all valid. And that’s not to say that, you know , that’s not a general statement that , I mean, you have, those are all valid reasons and emotions. So take care of yourself and make sure that you can just, again again, if you take care of yourself, you’ll be able to take care of others better.

Kyle Hamer: 47:26

Yeah . If you could be any animal, what you be and why ?

Chris Lin: 47:30

Oh, man. Making me think. I mean, my, the , the default animal that I go to is my favorite animal, which is, which are honors because they’re cute and cuddly, but they are also ferocious. I’ve actually gotten attacked by an Otter in the wildlife before I was, I was surfing. And I thought I was gonna die. I got hammered by a wave, came up for, came up for air. And this little black thing popped out of the water. I’m like, Oh my God, I’m about to die. I don’t know what that is . Is that dead ? I thought it was death. I literally thought it was like death coming for me. And it turned around, it was an Otter . I’m like, Oh, it’s so cute. And it like charged at me and used me to like pull itself back underwater , but you can be cute and cuddly, but ferocious at the same time. So yeah. And you’d get to swim. Yeah. Do all sorts of things. Be admired by millions of people. Yeah.

Kyle Hamer: 48:34

That’s super awesome. That’s , that’s a great answer. I don’t think I’ve ever had that one. So, Hey, Chris wanted to thank you so much for coming on and sharing your insights and leadership. Helping create additional perspective for those of us that are on our own, our own journeys for leadership. So thank you so much for being a guest today.

Chris Lin: 48:51

Yeah. Kyle, thank you so much for having me. It was, it was a lot of fun.

Kyle Hamer: 48:56

You’ve been listening to the summit podcast, Chris Lynn , Kyle Haimer and yeah, we’ve, we’ve just covered why leadership is more than a buzzword and if you’re starting at the end, rewind, go back to the front. There’s some good stuff there. If you are at the end, make sure you like follow, subscribe and share because the message here today, can’t just end with you. It needs to be paid for it. I’m your host, Kyle Hemer, you’ve been listening to the summit podcast and until next week, keep on keeping on.