LEADERSHIP | How to make progress on your toughest challenges. w/Julia Fabris McBride

0:00And now, Taking Care of Business, your hosts, Craig Moen and Shai Gilad. Welcome to Business Owners Radio, episode 228. Our guest today is Julia Fabris McBride. She is the interim president and CEO, as well as chief leadership development officer of the Kansas Leadership Center and is a certified coach. The Kansas Leadership Center is where more than 15 ,000 people from around the world have attended programs since 2007. She is the co-author of the new book, When Everyone Leads, How the Toughest Challenges Get Seen and Solved. Good morning, Julia. Welcome to Business Owners Radio. Thank you, Craig.

0:47Thank you, Shai. It's really great to be here. It's great to have you today and hope things aren't too cold and windy out in Kansas. Amazing weather patterns throughout the world and amazing business patterns throughout the world right now. So we focus on the business side. And anytime we have a new author or a prior author that has a new book out, we want to focus on it. And this one covers a topic that's very well attended in a lot of our episodes in the past. And I got to ask, what brought you to write this book? Well, for 15 years, my co-author, Ed O'Malley, and I have been running the Kansas Leadership Center.

1:29And we have reached more than 15 ,000 people with our work. And our work is to build cultures where everyone leads, to build cultures in businesses, in nonprofit organizations, faith communities, communities as a whole. And our real aspiration is that we will create cultures in our state of Kansas, in our country, and even the world where people can see and solve tough challenges and thrive together. So we've been teaching the ideas in When Everyone Leads, how the toughest challenges get seen and solved. And we wanted to put them in a book so that the reach of the ideas could be far beyond the people we can see in a classroom at our conference center in Wichita, Kansas, or even now in our virtual program.

2:30So really, we wanted to extend the reach of what we teach and share here at the Kansas Leadership Center. And a book is a great vehicle for that, provides a great capability to put a format to a topic and really expand on it. And the format that you have is excellent. And I like the title being Everyone Leads, But it leads me to a question is, what is leadership to you and how is that being redefined? Yeah, leadership is mobilizing people to make progress on tough challenges and thrive. It's putting the challenge at the center. And when we redefine leadership in the book, we're saying it's got to be challenge-centric, not person-centric.

3:19No one exercises leadership or practices leadership all the time. Not everyone can climb to the top of an organization and not everyone who climbs to the top of an organization exercises good leadership. We need everybody to have the skills and the will to see a challenge and seize their moments to make progress on that challenge. And when we all get doing that, we make more progress. And we've seen that in the companies and organizations that we work with, and our research backs it up, that when everyone leads, we make more progress on what matters most. In prior decades, there was a lot of focus within major companies to actually have an educational track or many, many sessions regarding leadership to grow leaders.

4:14And like you were mentioning, there has always been this element of you pick your top performer, you're going to make them the leader, whether they have the skills or not. So it's always mystery out there. And I'm looking today that leadership is not always taught within organizations. How can we change that? Where should we start? Well, I think as long as we think of teaching leadership as an add-on, it's going to be really hard for businesses, especially small growing businesses, to make time and dedicate resources to leadership training. I think it can be hard for companies to set aside time to do leadership training.

5:02That's why we always approach a session or an opportunity to work with a company as helping them make progress on their challenge during the time we spend with them. So we're actually helping people see what leadership looks like, see what the challenge is that they want to make progress on, diagnose that challenge in more nuanced ways and from more perspectives. And in the process, people gain capacities to ask better questions, to make more and tougher interpretations, and to experiment to move things forward. So I think it's hard to set aside time when you're thinking about leadership skills separate from challenges.

5:52But if we can think more of developing the capacity to make progress on what matters most, then it'll be easier for companies to dedicate the time to building capacity for that. Julia, I love this idea of framing leadership as an activity. I mean, I think that shift to me changes everything because it really shifts it, like you said, from the focus on the individual to the focus on how are you making progress or how are you trying to help others make progress? Yeah, exactly. I think, you know, there's a parallel in entrepreneurship, this idea of jobs to be done. I don't know if you're familiar with that framework.

6:34No, I'm not. Well, Clay Christensen is one of the leaders in that space and the late, great Clay Christensen, I should say. And, you know, the theory really talks about this idea that it's not so much that people have problems they're trying to solve. He likes to think of it as progress they're trying to make. He frames it from a standpoint of customers, right? Or people that you're trying to serve, that they're trying to make progress and they therefore hire different products or services to help them move forward. And I can't help but see this wonderful, beautiful parallel here to how you're thinking and how your organization is thinking about leadership.

7:12if it becomes about helping people make progress, well, then how do we do that? Now it's tangible. Now it's something we can wrap our arms around. Yes. Yeah. So we can help people see the challenge more clearly and start to see what's their piece of it. Who can they influence and how can they move whatever that challenge is forward? Maybe in little ways, if there's somebody, you know, if they're say new to the company or in a frontline position, there are things that they can see that somebody in middle management or in the executive suite can't see. So what data can they bring and what experiments can they try to serve customers better, for instance?

7:59Yeah, absolutely. And I love that your book is really sort of a call to action. Because once we stop thinking about leadership as just this position or as an authority figure or as something that's only attainable by the few, then we have a little dilemma, don't we? We have to almost opt out of taking part in this journey. And that would suggest that we don't care about making progress at all. Yes. Yeah. Once you adopt that definition of leadership as an activity, that's about the challenge that the company cares about, then And yeah, if I don't start with me and engage other people to try to move that challenge forward, I am.

8:40I'm opting out. I love that shine. Yeah. And I love the stories about the work that you guys have actually done by putting this methodology in action. And so I'd love to hear more about your approach, especially from a community standpoint. Yeah. Here in Kansas, we serve thousands of people a year and we're lucky to be funded by the the Kansas Health Foundation to a large extent to be able to offer scholarships to organizations that might not otherwise, certainly not otherwise, would be able to send 20, 30, 40, 60 people to leadership development programs. We work with faith communities. We work with nonprofits, large and small.

9:30We work with lots of people from the education space, as well as businesses and government agencies. We've done some great work with Kansas Department of Corrections, for instance, where people throughout the organization are coming through our programs. And then they're applying those ideas around challenges like retention. and I've heard them talk about getting the kind of respect for officers and employees in corrections that other departments and law enforcement agencies have. So retention and employee engagement is a challenge at the center of their work. I've also seen Department of Corrections work on a challenge related to partnering with the healthcare industry so that people who are coming out of prison have more opportunities for work in that industry.

10:32So real challenges that impact people in our community. So that's just one example of the kind of work that we do where we're training people at all levels. And during that training, they're applying the skills they're learning and the will they're building to think about leadership as an activity that's available to anyone, anytime, anywhere. And they're thinking, I can apply that to this challenge in my work. And I can apply this to the people that I care about who've served their time in prison and are moving out. And we want to help them become contributing members of society. I'm so grateful that you are doing that kind of work.

11:18I have a wonderful colleague of mine, Alyssa Lovegrove, leads a pivot initiative at Georgetown University. And that mission is all about helping people make progress, helping specifically returning citizens try to find a path towards progress. And it's ripe with opportunity. And it's so wonderful that you're using this type of a framework and using it in such an expansive way to help make that happen. Yeah. So on the other side, we're working with small businesses and we're working with big global tech companies and people are seeing, and we're seeing in our research that when people adopt this idea that leadership is an activity and it starts with me, it starts with me and then I must engage others.

12:02When people adopt that idea, they become more engaged in their work and the systems become more flexible, open, equitable, and able to make change. Well, Julia, I'm excited about this idea of thinking about leadership as an activity versus just this position or this lofty thing. So where can I start to put something into practice? Yeah, I think the first thing you can do is you can start having conversations with people in your company about what concerns them the most and what's their boldest aspiration. And you can ask them then a third question, what makes progress hard in that gap? And by asking those three questions, what concerns you the most?

12:57What are your boldest aspirations for our company? And what makes progress hard? Once you ask that third question, you start to get at what are the challenges? What are the challenges in our company that are maybe stopping us from achieving our aspirations? So you start to home in on what the challenges are there. And then just keep asking questions. Ask powerful questions, the kind of open-ended questions that you don't know the answers to. Ask questions about those challenges. And those questions get other people thinking. They're energizing to other people if you're truly asking curious, open-ended questions.

13:44So, that would be the first thing. The second thing is be willing to, again, in a curious and optimistic way, make tougher interpretations. Be willing to talk about what might be going wrong, what values might be in conflict, who stands to lose what if we actually make progress on those challenges and move towards our aspirations. And then try little experiments. Think about that gap between the concerns and the aspirations and try little things to see if you can make some progress on moving things forward. And then if you're the owner or the boss or the CFO of the company, do whatever you can to make leadership less risky for others.

14:42And I think that means creating spaces where people can ask curious questions and noticing when people try things to make progress on what matters most and whether what they try succeeds or fails, have their back and even celebrate them for trying. So I think that those are the four things. Ask open-ended questions, make tougher interpretations, try small experiments to move things forward. And if you have even a little bit of authority in the company, make leadership less risky for others. Darrell Bock Julia, it gives me a great visual of the dynamics you're putting in place and some of the positive environments.

15:31One of the realities in groups or teams, if you will, is the wrestling match a little bit on who's leading and leadership. And what have you seen and what's taking place in a lot of your curriculum and with your clients that you've been chatting with? I think some of what we see is it's really hard for people in positions of authority to turn away from the allure of the quick fix. I mean, a lot of these tough challenges are cultural, right? A company needs to become more innovative or it needs to become more inclusive or more flexible or more open to lots of people experimenting. and those of us who have worked our way up or have paid our dues, we've been rewarded along the way for being able to fix things.

16:27So, it can be, and I speak from some personal experience here, it can be hard to slow down and communicate enough that other people understand and can give input into the character of the biggest challenges. So there's a lot of pressure on people with a lot of responsibility in companies and organizations to fix things. And it takes conscious effort to slow down and include more people and ask more questions and get curious yourself about what it really is going to take to make meaningful change. Yeah, as a business owner and looking at the teams I have, it's not always clear that I know exactly what's going on and what needs to change and so forth.

17:20So, you know, kind of leadership starting at the top of what things should I be doing as the business owner to make sure that this climate of open leadership, so to speak, is my term. Yeah, I love that. How do I inspire that? Yeah, Craig, I'd go back to those questions that I mentioned, and we talk about the gap. So have conversations where you ask, and this can be in a group setting, it can also be one-on-one, where you literally say, when you think about the future of our company, what concerns you the most? Because leadership doesn't happen without a sense of dissatisfaction. And you, who might be the business owner, you can give people permission to talk about what they're dissatisfied with.

18:12And then you want to couple it with the optimistic energy of when you think about the future of our company, what's your biggest aspiration? So have those conversations with people. Give people permission and space to have those conversations. And then throw in that third question again, what makes progress difficult in the gap between our concerns and our aspirations? And that starts to give people direction about what they can actually work on. It tells us a lot about leading from the top and leading from within. There's so many organizations that may have amazing leaders in their ranks, but they'll never be discovered.

19:01So this open environment of leadership that you're bringing forward here really has some strength to draw out and give everybody a chance to really become a good leader, not only of themselves, but potentially of others. I like the book has a large segment of it in which leadership from your position that you're in, in that by leading within group dynamics and leading as a group is going after a problem or a gap that they're trying to fix, allowing every member to take ownership for their own leadership, to act in a leadership role of themselves and helping others achieve their positions and contributions to solving the problem.

19:50The thing I'd add, Craig and Shai, is that leadership is risky. Once you start asking questions and making interpretations and trying small experiments, you're putting yourself out there. And on the one hand, you're putting yourself out there to be discovered as somebody who has potential for more and more success. You're also putting yourself out there as someone who cares and can be shot down and can also make mistakes. So I think the thing that I would say is wherever you are in a hierarchy or in your relation to a challenge in your community or your company, have informal or formal coaches and confidants that you can talk to about this stuff.

20:42Because once you say, I care about this challenge, there's the potential for heartbreak and there's potential for mistakes. And it's a long game, this idea of leadership as an activity. We need more people in our communities and in our country exercising leadership to make progress on what matters most. And if we need everyone leading, we also need everyone willing to lend a coach-like ear to help us be successful and stay in the game. Well, Julia, thank you so much for being on the show today. It's been a great insight and we really appreciate your time. Thank you, Craig. Thanks, Shai. It's been a real pleasure to be here.

21:26And I would like to offer to everybody to visit us online at kansasleadershipcenter.org. And also our book hits the shelves and hits Amazon and Barnes & Noble and your local bookstore on January 31st, 2023. And it's When Everyone Leads, How Tough Challenges Get Seen and Solved by Ed O'Malley and Julia Fabris McBride. And we would appreciate knowing that you have that book in your hand. And if you like it, please leave us a review. Our guest today has been Julia Fabris McBride, co-author of the new book, When Everyone Leads, How the Toughest Challenges Get Seen and Solved. You can learn more about Julia as well as find links to her new book and content all on our website at businessownersradio.com.

22:21Thank you for joining us on Business Owners Radio. We hope you enjoyed today's show. As always, you can read more about each episode along with links and offers in the show notes on our website, businessownersradio.com. We want to hear your feedback. please leave comments on this show or suggestions for upcoming episodes tell your fellow business owners about the show and of course you would love the stars and comments on itunes till next time keep taking care of business