Leading Through Uncertainty | Kevin Eikenberry | Ep 215

Kevin Eikenberry  00:00

The world is not an either or world. The either Is it both and world. And so the big idea here is that we need to understand the tension between things, rather than saying we have to pick this or pick this. But how do we blend those things, manage the tension between those things to help us get better results?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:18

You actually have to change that norm, don't you in terms of the way that you approach it.

Kevin Eikenberry  00:22

I believe that I was put on this planet to help make the world a better place by helping leaders be more effective.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:36

Thanks for joining us on the Better Business, Better Life podcast. I'm your host, Debra Chantry-Taylor, and I'm passionate about helping entrepreneurs lead their ideal lives by creating better businesses, because, as I like to say, life is too bloody short.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:56

I'm a certified EOS implementer, FBA accredited family business advisor and a business owner myself with several business interests, I work with established business owners and their leadership teams to help them live their ideal entrepreneurial life using EOS, the Entrepreneur Operating System. I use this podcast to bring guests on to share practical tips and tools about how to use EOS in your business and your life to get more of what you want. Today's guest is a proud farm boy and owner of the family farm business. He's an accomplished author, with his latest book being about flexible leadership. He's a trainer, a keynote speaker, an experienced leader and remote hybrid work specialist. And he is also an established podcast host himself. Today he's going to share with you how to navigate uncertainty and lead with confidence, and in particular things like proximity bias, transaction versus interaction, how to be careful with your ego, keep in check your impatience and really have that big picture, flexible perspective. Kevin Eickenberry is the chief potential officer of the Kevin Eickenberry group. Welcome to the show, Kevin.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  02:03

Kevin, lovely to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining us.

Kevin Eikenberry  02:04

Debra, thanks for having me, even though it's different days for us. Saturday there was only Friday for me. I'm surprised here. Thank you for having me.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  02:13

Look absolute pleasure. Hey, look, we've had a little bit of a chat before you come on the podcast, obviously, but the listeners don't know anything about you. So why don't we start with, tell me about Kevin. Tell me about your journey to where you are today, and what you're most proud of on that journey as well. Be nice.

Kevin Eikenberry  02:27

So, so my name is Kevin Eickenberry. I've I'm a proud farm boy. I grew up on a farm in Michigan, which is actually, I think, part of the story. So if you take, if you take the arc of my story, I grew up on a farm, was involved in our family farm and family farm business from a very early age, and so that was the first taste I had of business and of leadership. I went to University, I went to work in a major corporation. I was there about eight years. I took the job, not wanting a job, honestly, in my first interview, told the guy who wanted to hire me, or was interviewing me, that I wasn't looking for a job. I'd written a business plan. He said, After the interview, I'd like you to do an interview with my boss. Will you do me a favour? I said, sure. He said, Don't open with I'm not looking for a job. So I promised I wouldn't do that, and I ended up going to work there. And I worked in sales and marketing at Chevron for many for several years, found my way into training and development there, and that's what I ended up leaving to start a company about. And of course, at first it was just as many times it's it was just Kevin, but now there's a good number of us spread out across the United States doing the work of helping leaders grow and helping to make the world a better place by helping leaders be more effective.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  03:43

I love it. That's a great story. And so a family business. I did a lot of work with family businesses.

Kevin Eikenberry  03:47

I know, that's one of the reasons. I mean, that is certainly part of my origin story, but I thought it was especially useful here.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  03:53

Yeah, so you didn't want to work in the family business then.

Kevin Eikenberry  03:56

Well, that was the plan. I mean, at one point, that was, that was the thought I own, the farm that I grew up on, some things changed. And, you know, it just wasn't the way things worked out. And that's and that's all good,

Debra Chantry-Taylor  04:08

Fair enough. Now I know that you have just written a book which is called Flexible Leadership, and I'm keen to understand where that book came from, like, what, what caused it at the air? There you go. They can't see it. Well, someone can see it if they're watching it on YouTube, I suppose. But yet. So it's a beautiful book. It's very simple. It's just called Flexible Leadership, navigate uncertainty and lead with confidence. Yeah, what brought you to even think about writing that book, and what is the purpose of the book?

Kevin Eikenberry  04:32

Well, I've, I've had the good fortune to write a number of books over the years, and this is the latest, and I do think this is my best work to date in terms of the work that I think can have the biggest impact for leaders around the world. And so the subtitle of the book, as you said, navigate uncertainty. So let's underline that word uncertainty. And I think we can honestly say Debra man, there's a lot of uncertainty in our world today. Geopolitical. Be socially, globally, in our businesses, around our businesses, with our customers, there's lots and lots of uncertainty. And I believe that the anecdote to that is flexibility, and we can unpack that if you want, but, but so the idea of this book is that if we just operate the way we always have, if we just lead the way we've come to believe we are supposed to or what some style tells us where we are, or just lead on autopilot, the odds of us being successful all the time are is not very high. Now we'll, we'll hit the right note sometimes, but we won't hit the right note all the times. And so what I want to do is help leaders improve their odds of success by surveying the world around them and having a way to say, Well, what, what might, or how might I flex away from, or at least consider approaches other than my natural reaction or response to help me and our team get better results.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  06:07

It's an interesting one, isn't it? Because we do, we have a natural response to a lot of things based on our upbringing, based on the things that we think should happen, just a whole lot, based on our experiences, based on our traumas.

Kevin Eikenberry  06:21

100&. And all of that's real. And I'm not asking people or encouraging people to forget all that. What I'm suggesting is, well, let's take the simplest example. The simple example is someone comes to your office, literally or metaphorically, and asks you a question, what's your advice? Once like, what do we need to do here? What direction should we take? And if in your head, your first thought is, it depends? Well, what does it depend on? And that range of things that it depends on will lead you to consider doing something that might not be what you would have done instantly, or your first inclination or your natural response. So the idea is to recognise that? Well, maybe the way I would normally do this will work, but maybe if I flex, if I take a slightly different approach, if I try something differently, we might get a better result.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  07:15

I like it. It depends.

Kevin Eikenberry  07:16

It depends.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  07:19

Yeah, okay.

Kevin Eikenberry  07:20

Where’s your brain? The world is not an either or world. The either is in both and world. And so the big idea here is that we are we need to understand the tension between things, rather than saying we have to pick this or pick this. But how do we blend those things, manage the tension between those things to help us get better results.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  07:40

Yeah, I like it. Okay. And so tell me a bit more about this, this, I mean, the uncertainty, I guess I'm sort of thinking about the we have got so much uncertainty going on in the world right now, haven't we, I think, more than we've ever, ever had. And I think it started back when COVID hit. I think that was when the world really started to change quite significantly. But, and we all thought I kind of, I had a client who's like, oh, you know, COVID. How long will it last? More? Oh, a couple of weeks will be fine. And then two years later, in New Zealand, we're still kind of fit. Well, actually, many, many years later, we're still putting the effects of it. And then on top of that, there's all sorts of other things going on in the world, and I think it's a really challenging time.

Kevin Eikenberry  08:19

100%. I had clients who literally large, large clients, multinational companies, that said, okay, you know, in the US, it was about, it was really, literally about, almost exactly five years ago for me, as you and I are having this conversation, and they, they put out notes. Said we'll be back to the office in two weeks. And then they said we'll be back in Memorial Day, which in the US, end of May. Then they said, well, we'll be back Independence Day, Fourth of July? Well, no, we'll be back first of September. Well, no, it'll be Christmas, right? And, of course, it was maybe another Christmas, at least later after that. So you're right. We try to figure out how to make it clear. We try to, we try to, we try to say, we're going to rationalise this and figure it out. But I think you hit a really important point there that the world of work and the way people see work, fundamentally and forever changed in the days and weeks after our governments around the world said, you get to send people home and work from home, like the way people think about work, the way people define work has changed, and for us as leaders, we may want to say, Well, yeah, no big deal. We're just going to go back to the way it was, that that world doesn't exist anymore. I'm not trying to be overly dramatic here. I'm being realistic here, that the clear, sort of understandable best practice. Sort of world that we lived in isn't the world in many ways that we live in anymore. It just isn't.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  09:48

You're absolutely right, and I've seen a lot of leaders struggling with it because, and you know, I've got a few grey hairs myself, when there's always been a certain way of working, and then all of a sudden that whole way changed. And I remember in COVID. So we had a very, very strong lockdown here in New Zealand. That, I think, one of the strongest ones in the world. I remember when we first kind of got locked down. I've always had my own business, or for a long, long time, had my own business, and so I was there jumping on Zoom calls and chatting to people and just kind of keeping connected. My husband worked for a corporate and the biggest thing that happened in that time was that they obviously all had to work from home, but because the equipment wasn't kind of set up for them to really work from home. They had to have zoom calls or team Microsoft Teams meetings without any video, because they weren't the infrastructure couldn't cope with the bandwidth of all this video, and they weren't quite sure how to deal with it. And so it was a really challenging time to suddenly go from not only having to work from home but never actually seeing anybody on a screen in person, whatever it might be. And so that was, in itself, was challenging and obviously, but it also changed the way we had to think about business. Because I know, for personally, now, I used to travel all around Auckland to catch up for a coffee with somebody to do it, have a quick kind of catch up. You'd spend half an hour travelling there, 15 minutes finding a car park to spend 20-30 minutes with a person. And now I kind of go, let's do a zoom call, and we can change that the way that is done. But in a larger business, there's been much, much bigger impacts, hasn't there?

Kevin Eikenberry  11:10

100%. And as leaders, and I think you know, many of those of you who are listening to us have built your business, and it's maybe it's your family business, and so your identity is wrapped up in it, and I think that that makes the challenges even larger for you, right? Because you know you, you made it successful. You know what that looked like, but the world that you made it successful in isn't exactly, not completely different, but it's not exactly the same as it was before. It's both and not either, or. It's not like well it was, and then we're gonna back there. And so it really, I believe, requires us as leaders to think more deeply, to be willing to flex, which means be willing to set aside my identity, my natural response, my learned response, my experience, to say what will really serve us now. And that means sometimes, and that doesn't mean that we have to grind the halt, everything to a halt, and think about that in every single moment. That's why I like this idea of it depends. If you immediately think, well, it kind of would depend on this, this or this. Well, then let's think about that a little bit more before we just move.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  12:27

And so I’m going to come back to that in a moment, because I know that we have a tool that I use with clients to actually help them reduce that stuff. But I was thinking this actually took me back to I did a legal paper as part of my MBA many, many years ago, and I thought legal was black and white. And I just thought there was, I was either or, like, there's black and white, that there's a law that says it's this, and therefore it and after doing my legal paper, it's a million Shades of Grey. And even with all those boundaries, all those regulations, all that legal jug, it's still, actually, it depends, it really depends on a whole range of things. And so the world is a million Shades of Grey, isn't it? Rather than black and white.

Kevin Eikenberry  13:03

It really is and and I realise that in us saying that we're making the world even more complex, right? And one of the reasons why that we tend to want it to be or wish it could be either or, is that's easier. And the other thing is, we have this really amazing skill as humans to recognise patterns, right? And once we hit recognise a pattern, then we lock in, aha, that's how you do that. That's it, and that's wonderful. Except once we lock in, we stop looking at anything else, and we stop considering other options, because now we have an this looks like this. If every if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, kind of thing, right?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  13:54

Yeah, no, that is interesting actually. Again, I'm gonna go for a bit of a tangent here. But, you know, recognising patterns and then locking things in is different a human thing. I wonder what that's like for AI, because AI is also taught to recognise patterns and kind of lock things in. But does AI develop faster than us as humans, or does it actually become more rigid? I don't know, thoughts on that?

Kevin Eikenberry  14:13

Well. I'm not the expert in AI, but I will say this, and we're using it a lot in our business and with our clients, but I would say this, the way to help AI help you better is get better at helping AI, which means better prompts, right? So I mean, and AI is more than generative AI and more than prompts, but, but the key, the prompt thing, is a really important piece, right? Like you can ask it what you thought was the same question, get very different answers. It's recognising patterns based on what you're actually asking it. So as we get better skilled at the asking of it, we have a better chance of getting better results. That will be more valuable.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  14:54

So AI is training us to be better, better problem solvers.

Kevin Eikenberry  14:58

I would hope, although I think a. Lot of people are assuming that it's taking us to us to the lowest common denominator. But I actually believe that if you believe in the 80-20 rule, which is fractal, which means, if you take the 20% there's another 80-20 there, and if you take that 5% there's an 80 other 80-20 there, that that, while there may be lots of folks who will use AI and it will become like the lowest common denominator, there's a big opportunity for us to set ourselves apart, create more time as a result of how we intelligently use AI, so that we can then make better choices. I mean, some of you listening spending a lot of time in your business. If you can figure out how to use AI to get extract some time back out, then you can work on your business and on your life, and you can have the thing that maybe you want most, and that's time, time and freedom.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  15:56

Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So let's just take a scenario. So somebody does walk into your office and they've got a problem, and they, you know, they come in and they chat to you about it. As a leader, how do you recommend people approach this? I mean, having that, having the brain power to kind of think about it depends as the first step. But, yeah, tell me more.

Kevin Eikenberry  16:16

Well it depends. But let's start here. Let's start here. Let's, let's do, let me just play that out. Someone walks into the office, and I can tell you, and Debra, I'll bet you'll agree, and I'll bet most of you listening are watching too that for many of us, what we'll do. Someone comes in with a question, we give them an answer. We type that monkey and guess what, and, oh, and by the way, when they leave, we'll we think, Well, why did they interrupt us? Why did they keep interrupting us? Because then they come in with another question, and we give them another answer, and guess what we're doing, we're teaching them how to work with us, which means, aha. The way I'm supposed to do this with Kevin is bring him questions, he gives me answers, and I leave. I may or may not like that, but that's how this works. And oh, by the way, that's easier than me thinking and quicker. It also may lead me not, not as the employee. It also may lead me to be, to have less ownership, be less engaged in a bunch of other stuff, right? So is there ever a time when someone comes into your office as a leader and you give them an answer, yes, there is, especially if the context is super clear, if the best practice is absolutely known, if the cause and effect is understood, if you truly know it, then the fastest, most efficient thing to do is to give them an answer.

Kevin Eikenberry  17:33

But I would suggest that many times when someone comes in and asks the question, your first response should not be an answer, but a question, a question like one of these, like, well, what have you already tried? Or what have you considered? Or what would you do if I were on vacation? Or what is your recommendation, or what do you think? Like any one of those, or a combination of those questions changes the dynamic number one, you're going to learn something new because they're going to have a perspective. And even if you used to do their job, guess what? The world has changed, which means the job has changed, which means they have a perspective you can't have. And especially as a business owner like you, definitely look at the world differently than they do. So my answer by asking them to tell say what they're thinking. You're going to learn something almost guaranteed. You may not like what you learn, but you're learning something.

You may learn some really useful stuff that pulls back your blinders and helps you see stuff you couldn't have possibly seen. So you're going to learn some stuff. You're going to you're going to get new options. You're going to engage that person. You're going to build accountability and ownership of that person. And if you end up doing one of the things they suggest, well, how has that changed the dynamic significant right now? So if we think about this as a way to flex on the one end, sometimes it is makes sense for us to answer, and sometimes it makes more sense for us to ask. I would call that a flexor. We call it the asking, answering flexor. And so where, which direction do I lean? And I would say that lots of leaders lean toward answering more often than they might. And so I've just give you this scenario, what you might consider differently, that which might seem unusual, might seem uncomfortable, might not be natural, might seem like it takes too long, and yet, in many ways, might get you far better result. In the short end.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  19:34

I think you’re right, because, I mean, they're taking accountability ownership for it, but as you said, it can also open your eyes up to things that, as a business owner, you may not have seen but I'm going to just my butt here is so you ask them, you know, what do you think about that? Or how would you hand out? They go, I don't know.

Kevin Eikenberry  19:48

So then I say, that's fair. And so now it depends again, like, if this is really an urgent thing, then we should just solve it, right? But like, Okay, I that's fair that you don't know, and quite. Honestly, I could say, You know what? Because normally I haven't asked you, I've just told you, I'd like you to go back and think about it, and when you're ready, let's talk about it. I really want your input. I'd really like your perspective. And at first they might roll their eyes, and at first they might go, my boss is so difficult, but not for long, because what we're doing now is we're starting to retrain them, because you probably have done the other thing 74 times. So when the first time you suggest you ask rather than answer, they're going to say, well, I don't know, because they have been they're not expecting that. That's not the game. The game is, bring a question, get an answer. So by when you changing it, that doesn't mean, well, this doesn't the asking doesn't work. It means you have to work through it, and you have to this is a chance you would encourage them. This is a development opportunity for them. And of course, not in every moment. Sometimes the thing is little, sometimes the thing is urgent, it depends. Sometimes we need to answer it, not always, but always.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  20:59

That's what's gonna say yeah, okay, perfect. And you have to do it regularly, right? Because if you don't do it, if they've had 74 times where they've had given the answer, that's become the norm, you actually have to change that norm, don't you, in terms of the way that you approach it.

Kevin Eikenberry  21:14

And you know what? You can blame Debra and Kevin. You can say, Hey, I know that's not what I normally do, but I just listen to this podcast, and I think this makes sense. I really want your input, and so I know this isn't what I've normally done.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  21:25

I do find it fascinating, because, as you know, I'm an EOS implementer, and when I work with the leadership teams, we encourage them to kind of try and solve problems together. One of the tools that we use is the IDS, where you identify, discuss and solve. And when I sit and observe level 10 meetings with some of my clients, leadership teams, you know, as humans, we naturally, we want to solve it. We just want to go straight into you get given an issue, it's all I can solve that, and here's my answer. And so the whole process that we teach them is about taking a lot more time to ask a lot more questions up front, to really identify what the real issue is. Because often what somebody comes to you with as an issue, there's something way deeper beneath it.

Kevin Eikenberry  22:00

And as the leader, like me, you know your company, you're signing the paychecks, many of you right. And even if you're not, you're their boss, or you're the boss's boss. And so when you use that IDs process, or any similar process, here's the thing, the sooner you talk, the less likely they will. So you have to, you have to, maybe you frame the conversation, maybe you ask the initial question. Then you've got to keep asking and not start talking. And then when they give an idea, you can't say, oh, yeah, I agree. No, it's got to be, it's their idea. And in your head, you can say, Okay, I matched up with them in terms of, like, I I didn't miss that. And you can feel better about that in your own head, but you want to let them keep ownership of those very, very trip point. And that's the kind of thing that will get. Will build the psychological safety for them to continue to share. And you will, you will, over time, change the way the game is played. You have to talk. You have to ask more and assert less. You have to talk less and talk later. The sooner you start talking as the boss, the less likely others are going to I certainly know just even if it's high levels of trust, like it just is, it's the nature of group dynamics, but we just have to be really careful about that.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  23:23

I noticed when I'm facilitating with leadership teams, I always try and ask that the boss or the owner to actually go last for that exact reason. Because, you know, even though we say that, Oh, there's no hierarchy here, the reality is, you are the boss. You are the if you said the person who signs the paychecks, there's a different dynamic going on, whether we like it or not.

Kevin Eikenberry  23:41

And listen, that power dynamic is not all bad, right? Some people want to frame that. I'm not saying you're not, certainly not saying that, Debra, but some people in the world would say, Well, you know, we need to smush that down, and that's got to go away. No, it doesn't need to go away, but we, but we can be way more intelligent about how we manage it, and the way, and the way, and what Debra and I are talking about now is the way to manage that much better.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  24:04

Perfect, Hey, I noticed, you know, we're talking about this whole uncertain world, and one of the biggest things, and we mentioned this right at the beginning, is this whole kind of hybrid workplace environment, and I think it makes it more challenging for leaders that than what they used to because in the old days Yeah, before COVID. Is that, though, is that the right terminology? Now, you know, you everybody was in the office, and the boss sat in the corner office, and we had some hierarchy, and we, you know, we wanted to talk to somebody. We walked into their office, and off we went. And we were constantly in contact. We were constantly chatting around the water cooler, whatever it might be. And now, all of a sudden, a lot of our team may not necessarily be in the office. Sometimes not at all, because we've got things like remote teams in the Philippines, Bangladesh, whatever it might be. Sometimes it's people choosing to do a hybrid version of working from home office for several days and being in the office for several days. It's changed leadership, hasn't it?

Kevin Eikenberry  24:53

It has. Here's the thing in in the book that I co-wrote before it before. Of the pandemic called The Long Distance Leader. The first rule that we identified in that book was that think leadership first location second. In other words, not everything about leadership has changed, but the stuff that's changed is really important, and that's where, and that's where we need to focus here. So Debra, there's a couple things I would comment on there. I just had a conversation with someone about this very topic yesterday. Number one, we have to if you've got some of your team in and some of your team not in, the first thing you have to recognise is there's this thing called proximity bias. The people that are around us are going to get more of our attention, good and bad, right? If we have a project who are going to give it to the person we can see down the hall, again, good or bad, maybe that's the right person. Maybe it's the wrong person, but we're setting up a dichotomy with our folks who aren't in the office, around proximity bias. So that's one thing we have to keep we have to be aware of that.

Kevin Eikenberry  25:59

The second thing that I would suggest we have to do is we have to know the difference between transaction and interaction and when we're when we were early in COVID or during COVID, a lot of times, here's what happened. Someone would reach out to you as the boss, either on the phone or on teams or however, and they would say the equivalent of, Hey, boss, I know you're really busy. I don't mean to interrupt, but I have a question, and then we could have our whole thing about the question thing, but fundamentally, we transact the business, and then the call is over. We just transacted business. We have to do that. But when we're in the office, at least some of the time, we do more than just transact. We interact. But when we're at distance, unless we intentionally work on it, we won't get the interaction. We'll just get the work in the weather is what I call it, right? Talk about the work in the weather, nothing else, and that doesn't get us down the road, and some of that is happening naturally around the water cooler. I'm glad you used that phrase, right? So in our organisation, my team is almost entirely remote, and was before the pain, and so we don't use teams, Microsoft Teams. We use Slack for our instant messaging. It's the same thing. Many of you may use it as well. We have a channel, and most any of those tools have the equivalent of channels, and we have a channel that's literally called Water Cooler. And we have another channel called general.

Now, General is stuff related to the work in some way, maybe a little bit that. We say that broadly, but it's still work related. Water Cooler, not work really. And so people put, put gifts in there. People put stuff about birthdays in there. People share pictures from their weekend in there. People put a dad joke in there, like the stuff that you do in the office. We put in the water curriculum, and it's one now and now as a leader, that's not enough. It's Oh no, I've got my interaction thing handled. So my advice to you. So just to give you context, there are 15 of us on our team currently, and they don't all report to me directly. But again, my name's on the door, right? So my goal is every day that I will have interactions with at least four people. Now your number might be different based on the nature of your organisation, right? But my here's my point. It's not like I hope to have interactions with four people. It's like part of my job. It's not like if I, if I, if I have time, I'm going to do that. It's like one of the top things of my day. Every day, I've got to make sure I do that. It might not be on the phone or on Zoom. It might be the way I interact with them in an instant message. It might be that, but the point is that that people feel connected to me and I feel connected to them, it's building our relationship. It's building trust. It's making communication more effective. It's the kinds of things that, while didn't automatically happen at the office, were somewhat more likely to happen in the office. There's a lot of leaders that need to be doing this, even if you're in the office. If you're in the office, but if, but we have to be more intentional about it when people aren't down the hall.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  29:08

I love it, so it's kind of one of your must do tasks every day is to ensure that you're actually.

Kevin Eikenberry  29:12

It's on my list every day.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  29:15

Beautiful. very nice. Okay, another, another challenge that I see happening, and I maybe it kind of relates back to that proximity biases. But I think sometimes it's more than that. Is that you have, you do have a hierarchical structure within an organisation that they have to have. If you've got a large organisation, you've got to know who reports into who and what their accountabilities are, and those sort of things. But often you'll see that somebody will kind of go to their media will call it a boss, the person they are they are responsible to, and they get an answer that they don't necessarily like, and they go around the we call an end run, where they go around, then they go to the boss, go to Kevin. Kevin will give you what I want, and we shackled for answers, just like we were at the moment, versus dad, exactly how I describe it. So we call them end runs. Where it's like you don't get the answer you want. So you go around the back and you do and then run to this. So the big boss and often, as owners, the visionaries that I work with, you know, they're people pleasers, and so they often, you know, say yes to things. Maybe they're not shouldn't be saying yes to but how do we as leaders, as a whole, both from the top level and the next level down, how do we stop those kind of behaviours? Or should we? I don't know. It's a question to ask

Kevin Eikenberry  30:23

Well it depends. The first thing I would say is, if someone came around, I mean, our organisation isn't so large that I don't think that that has a huge impact, as big impact here as it would for many of you or for most of our clients, right? And one of the things that I encourage leaders to do, when someone comes around says, so what? So? So let's say Debra, you work for me, and Joe is the person who came around you to me. So my first question to Joe might be, so have you and Debra talked about this? And what did she say? And I'm not I'm not picking on Joe. I'm just trying to make sure that there's alignment here, right? And there's sometimes when maybe I listen, I'm pretty confident I'm going to be in alignment with whatever Debra has to say. And if that's not working for you, then maybe there's a chance for the three of us to have a conversation, maybe, right? I think, I think we ought to be open to saying that, but I don't think we should say that every time, because we don't want to create a bunch of three way conversations, you know, 17 times a day.

But I do think that that being flexible may mean that that's the case, right? Like and the other thing, it's possible that Joe's coming to me because he's concerned about what Debra is sharing, from a legal perspective and ethical perspective, like, it's not always just, you know, doing an end run to get an answer. I like sometimes there's other reasons. So I always like to start with, so what did you already hear from them? Or what was the nature of that conversation? Have you had that conversation? It's the same thing I do when someone comes to me and says, you know, the two people that work for me, and one of them, and they're in conflict, and one of them comes to me, says, You need to go fix Debra. Like, will you have you and Debra talked about this, because, like, this isn't about me, this is about you and Debra. This is a business problem. Have you and Debra talked about, well, no, well then I'm not going to be involved in this until you and Debra have talked about, I'm happy to help you think about how you have that conversation. With Debra. But this doesn't belong to me yet. Right now, if you and Debra can't ever figure it out from a conflict escalation, there's a point place for me. But again, if every time someone comes to me with that problem, and then I go talk to Debra, guess what everyone's going to do come to me? Of course they will, because that is definitely easier, right? So I think the way to deal with in the end, at the end of the day, the way to deal with the end around is to is to just check in, is that what they're doing and not in judgement, right? I mean, hopefully the way, the intonation that I used in asking the question wasn't accusatory, but was curious.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  33:04

That was exactly the word I just wrote down, not in judgement, but in curiosity. I think the more curious we can be in general as leaders, the better leaders we are. Is that fair?

Kevin Eikenberry  33:13

And you know what? We can't possibly be flexible if we're not curious, because otherwise, you know the thought and I believe it's originally a Buddhist thought, that that, as for the for the expert, the options are few. For the beginning beginner, there are many. So like, as we become expert, or as we feel like we have all the answers, then we no longer look at any place anymore. And so there's no reason to be curious, because we already know. And so once we get to that place, that the chances that we will flex go down dramatically, so that so the connection between being flexible and being curious, to your point, I think are significant and important.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  33:56

Love it. Okay. So no, get into curiosity, not in judgement. That's a perfect thing to look at. What do you like in the three biggest challenges are for leaders these days?

Kevin Eikenberry  34:05

When people ask you, what's the one thing? What are the three things? It's always really hard, because it depends. Not everyone are the same, but let me so. So I'll just, I'll say what I observe and what I observe in myself. First one is, we've got to be really careful with our ego. Like there's nothing wrong with having an ego, right, but it can get in our way. And a lot of things we've talked about today are ways that it can get in our way. So I think that's a big challenge. I think impatience is a challenge in in a time of uncertainty, one of two things seems to happen. We either tend to try to ignore it and plough through it, or we become immobilised by it. And I'm guessing that most of the people listening are in the first. Camp, not the second and sometimes we need to be more thoughtful. And I'm not saying we should take six months and analyse to, you know, and have analysis paralysis. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is to step back and get a different perspective, right. And the third one. And we could make a long list of challenges, but here's the third one, and I think maybe especially for those of you who are listening, I feel like we are kindred spirits in some ways. And so I would say that we have to make sure that we're keeping a big picture perspective. I often call it, leaders need to have the bird's eye view, because our team members have a worm's eye view.

And I'm not suggesting that our team members are worms, but let me understand me where we're praying, if you are, if you're a bird, and you're looking at a forest and you see this particular maple tree, right? Like you see it from this perspective, if I'm a worm in front of that maple tree, same tree. I see it extraordinarily differently. I see it as a challenge. I see it as my entire world. I see it as the only thing. I see it as all of my work. I see it as my biggest obstacle. I see it as all of those things, perhaps, and yet that same tree, it's the same tree that the bird sees. And as leaders, we have to lift our eyes because we have to help our teams lift their eyes, because it's only then, with that bigger picture view that we can all see the landscape well enough to navigate it successfully together, to move in the direction of the goals that we have. And so that would be my third challenge, lift our eyes, get a higher level perspective, and keep that perspective. Don't get stuck at the worm's eye view.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  36:53

So I think we've already talked a little bit about the ego, so staying curious can kind of help with that ego and not getting caught in the expert trap of thinking you have all the answers. Impatience is probably one of my downfalls as a leader. If I'm really honest, as you can tell, I talk fast. I think fast. I get really impatient very quickly. I don't think I ever become immobilised, but I might sometimes become a bit of a bulldozer in terms of just, you know, we're going to just push through and get on with I've been called, being called a bulldozer a couple of times in my very early career. So tips for overcoming impatience.

Kevin Eikenberry  37:27

Take a breath. Get a have ways to get feedback, whether it's whether it's impatience or anything else that you might want to work on if having someone that you can that can say, hey, you're there again, right? They can sort of stop you in the moment and give you feedback, right? What Debra might be doing for some of you, for example, or could be doing for some for some of you. So have a way to get another perspective and feedback. Take a breath and remember that urgent and important are not the same thing.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  38:07

Let’s dive into that a little bit more, because I think that often leaders do get, like, caught up in the urgent stuff, because that's the fighting fires, right? That's the stuff that we kind of go we've got to get this sorted. So tell us a little bit about your deaf I mean, I've got my version of your definition of urgent versus important.

Kevin Eikenberry  38:23

Well, if we're fighting fires, so if we're fighting fires, we are not thinking about fire prevention, right? Fire prevention is important. Fire Fighting is urgent. But we treat an awful lot of stuff like fires that aren't really fires, and we pick up the hose a lot of times when we could, when someone else could have the hose, right? If someone else is holding the hose, then we can start thinking about, how do we prevent we seem to have fires there a lot. There's a lot of urgency there, like, what do we need to do differently? What do we need to be thinking about from a process perspective? What do I this? Is this higher level view of the world, right? So that's what I would say, that, that it's easy to get caught up in the urgent. And one of the reasons it's easy is because you you're good at it. You haven't gotten where you are because without being good at it. But the other reason is, and a psychological reason, I think, is that it's a tangible thing. Like, Yep, see what we did. We did that thing, like I said at the beginning, that I grew up on a farm, and we're coming up on spring in the then in the northern hemisphere, and so I'm just about at a time.

One of the two of the times are in the year that I miss the farm the most, and one of them is planting, and one of them is harvest. And here's why. Well, there's lots of reasons why, but here's the biggest reason why, in relationship to this conversation. If I go in the field on a tractor with a piece of with an implant behind me, when I leave, I can see what happened like it's tangible. And when we are putting out fires, we can see what we did as leaders. The further up you are in the organisation, more of the more of your work is less tangible and. So often, oh, that's a tangible thing. Let me go do that, see what I actually did. And so psychologically, we get sucked in there, not only because we're good at it and but because that's how we have identified ourselves, but also because that stuff is tangible. We can get our arms around it. We can see it. And I would suggest that we have to overcome that urge sometimes, and look for, look for seeing that tangible thing in the development of our team.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  40:33

Yeah, okay, that's a good point. Also, I think the important stuff, it can be seen, but it's longer term, right? So that's Dan Sullivan talks about always measuring backwards. And I think sometimes, as visionaries, as leaders, as business owners, we're always pushing forwards. Are pushing forwards, pushing forwards and we don't take the time to reflect back and kind of go, hey, where was I 12 months ago? Where were we 12 months ago? And where are we now? And when you and we force teams to do that through the EOS process every 90 days, we look back and go, Hey, how did we do? And then you can start some of the important stuff, the impact it's actually had, and what effect it's having on the business. But a lot of businesses don't, don't do that.

Kevin Eikenberry  41:09

And you can't look back without the bird's eye view, and you can't and you can't look back, or you won't look back if you're staying in the urgent because that will over, that will just overwhelm all the other stuff. So that higher level view, that visionary view, the bird's eye view, whatever you want to call it, does two things. And the other thing you said, I want to comment on which I love you said, pushing forward, pushing forward, pushing forward. And I would say we shouldn't be pushing for we should be looking forward Trent, because if we're pushing, then we're we should be the team. Should. We should be doing that. We should be moving forward together based on us looking forward, not just pushing. Pushing is not necessarily our best metaphor.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  41:52

I think that's well, very well picked up. Yeah, and it's true. I guess I was thinking more along the lines of, people are they're on the hamster wheel. It's like when, when we get to here, then we'll be great when we get to here. And I've seen it with leaders. I've seen it myself. It's like because we're always looking at what the future looks like and where we want to be, we often just don't take the time to kind of look back and see we've come from. I use an analogy recently in an article I wrote. I've got a session room here in Auckland. I've got a session over in Melbourne, and I'm very fortunate the session room over in Melbourne got a beautiful outdoor area, as does the Auckland one. But it's got a lot more planting there. And when I first moved into that session room, there was all these weeds. So I spent a couple of days pulling out weeds everywhere. And then, of course, I went back two or three weeks later, and they'd had rain, they'd had some of the weeds had grown again, so I pulled them all out again, and then I went, This is business as usual. This is the fighting fires. If I just keep pulling out these weeds, I'll be doing it forever, and what I need to do is actually make this garden more palatable for somewhere I only visit once every two or three weeks. I need to put some irrigation system, and I need to put some anti weed mat stuff in. I need to put some rocks on top so that actually the thing will water itself. It will grow itself, and no weeds will grow. That's the important stuff, because if you get that right, I know it's a very simple analogy, but if you get that right, I haven't looked at the weeding anymore because it's sword.

Kevin Eikenberry  43:05

100%. And while we're reading, we can't be putting in rocks. You can't do those both at once, right? And so you have to say, hmm, I need some matte. Hmm, I need some rocks and, and now I've got to invest the time on and I can't do that on top of the weeds, so I've got a weed, and then I've got to invest the time through the next thing too.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  43:29

Yep. That’s good. Okay, perfect. Gosh, we are. We're definitely kindred spirits. We've got lots of things in common. I think it just in terms of, I suppose we're I just love to see people really having aha moments, and really being able to make a difference. And it is all about leadership. You know, it's about leadership and then holding your people accountable to doing things. But we could talk forever. What I'd love to do those is kind of finish up with three kind of top tips that we can give to the listeners, where they can go, Okay, this is great. What can I do right now? What can I do right now that would fundamentally make a difference?

Kevin Eikenberry  43:58

Well, I'm going to suggest three things in relationship to flexible leadership. And the first one is, recognise that flexibility is valuable as a leader. Second, take time to look at the context of your situation. Answer the it depends question in the book. We go into a lot more depth here. But fundamentally, what's my have an intention that flexibility will help me in my business, take, take a moment to look at the context of the situation so I can then consider other options and then use what we call flexors, which we've identified, we've talked about a little bit, which is the idea of, how might I flex given that context. So my three pieces of advice are, be willing to and open to and have intention around flexibility being useful to us, especially in times of uncertainty. Second, to look a little more carefully at the context of the situation that we're in and use that as a map to decide how we might want to. Flex, and how I might want to help my team flex beautiful.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  45:04

And of course, your book goes into a lot more detail around this. So if they want to get hold of a copy of the book, where would they find it? Is it? Has it actually released yet? I wasn't sure.

Kevin Eikenberry  45:13

Well as probably by the time people are hearing this, the answer is yes, but at the moment, you and I are having this conversation, no March the 25th in the US. So March the 26th for some of you, the book will be available, and you can learn more by going to flexibleleadershipbook.com. That'll point you. But you know, wherever it is that you buy books, you'll likely be able to find it flexible leadership, navigate uncertainty and lead with confidence. You know, Debra, I believe that I was put in this planet to help make the world a better place by helping leaders be more effective, and this book is part of that mission. And so if this conversation has been helpful to people, and if this book would be helpful to people, That'd make me really happy, and I think it would help make you happy too.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  46:01

Absolutely and I can, I can feel your passion, and I love it, and I've really enjoyed our conversation. I've taken um, screens of notes here, as I always do, and some things that I will definitely have a look at as well. I think that some of the key things that I've taken from it is, you know, that proximity bias can be a real issue, which is a challenge for long distance leader, making sure we actually do are open to it depends. There's not always an immediate answer. And having being open to looking beyond it, particularly as we get more experienced and more expert, I think we're bringing more blinkers into it, the transaction versus interaction. You know that? I think one of the things that hybrid working does is it makes a business a lot more transactional. And so your intention around having those interactions was perfect for me. And, you know, be careful with your ego, keep your impatience kind of in check, if you like, and always take that bird's eye view, because it can be very easy to get stuck in the worm's eye view, which means that things can look a lot different to how they could potentially be the other things I took from it, but um, thank you very much for sharing your wisdom. I'm looking forward, so I'm going to pre-order my copy of the book right now. I should look forward to listening to that, and I hope that we can also stay in contact.

Kevin Eikenberry  47:12

It would be my pleasure. And thanks so much for having me, and for all of you who are listening, I hope that you got some value here. But more than that, hey, this was interesting, what I really hope you do is take some action. So whether it's one of the things that Debra just said, or whatever you had in your head, the only way this is really ultimately useful to you is if you act on something. And I hope that that's what you'd be in.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  47:32

Thank you. I agree a whole lot of Kevin, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Kevin Eikenberry  47:37

Thanks.