1536 – Being More Self-Aware with pLink’s Alexis Robin

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0:58with us right now it's alexis robin alexis you are the co-founder and chief experience officer at p link leadership you're found on the web at p link leadership yes it looks like plink leadership uh dot com alexis thank you so much for joining us thanks i'm excited to be here And what is P-Link? P-Link Leadership is an executive coaching and leadership development firm. And we are really bringing peace of mind to leaders through executive coaching, as well as leadership training and helping to improve courage and confidence in the workplace and reduce friction for organizations. Well, that all sounds like good.

1:41Who doesn't want that? Exactly. So what's getting in the way of those outcomes? or those, you know, those kind of those ideal environments? Yeah, mostly the people themselves. So as leaders, we often get in our own way. Often it's about our consciousness, our levels of consciousness and development and understanding. Sometimes it's imposter syndrome. Sometimes it is holding on to work that we should be delegating because we're afraid it won't go quite so well. Sometimes it is feeling like you want to fly under the radar and keep things easy. And sometimes it's not being comfortable speaking up about what really matters to you or a values conflict.

2:22So truly, it's an inside job for most leaders, but the patterns that we see across industry are pretty similar. Yeah. And who have you worked with historically, Alexis? We have worked with organizations that are late stage startups all the way through military, medical companies, insurance, finance, pretty much across the industry in terms of verticals, but also with large tech companies, always with leaders, though. And always our typical sweet spot is anywhere between like a senior manager and a C-suite. So leaders who've had some road under them, business owners who've owned their business for a while and are kind of, have gotten it going and now are figuring out like, how do I smooth this out?

3:09How do I, how do I do better? How do I get better results? Yeah. One of the things, you know, is kind of going through your website and, you know, particularly around the things that you believe, your kind of your mission, purpose, values. you stay, you know, positive leaders are highly self-aware. I think that if you were to, this is interesting, right? I think if you were to ask people, do you consider yourself to be pretty self-aware? I think nearly everyone would say yes to that, but is, are there ways of like gauging that? Yeah. I mean, every, it's often, it's funny. We used to measure people at the beginning and say like, score yourself on these competencies.

3:48And people would always score themselves really high. And then at the end of the program, the scores would be like just slightly higher or sometimes lower. And it's because they thought they were so aware, but then as they started to learn, they realized that, wow, there's so much more to learn. There's so much more I need to be considering. And so to answer your question, how do you gauge that people, positive leaders who are self-aware are consistently asking for feedback and not like in the formal 360 type, although that is a valuable way of doing it. But in terms of asking for feedback on a day-to-day, how am I doing?

4:24In that meeting, my intention was to support you. Did it feel supportive or did it feel like something else? And so being able to create a space where people feel comfortable and safe giving you feedback, especially if you're high up in the org, our feedback tends to diminish the higher our title is because people get afraid of giving us feedback. um wow they're where we need it the most yeah well yeah so how can we get better feedback about you know our because i as a leader i'm look i you know especially if it's constructive or negative i think we're all a little nervous but again there's no growth in the comfort zone like if i don't know what my blind spots or i don't know how i'm i'm coming across then you know or if i'm getting, oh yeah, everything's fine.

5:13You're doing great. You know, like that's not helpful, but I appreciate it. How do we create a culture or create a space where we can get that valuable info? I think the first thing is changing your mindset about feedback. We often think about feedback and we train feedback as giving it. So we think like, oh, I'm going to, I need to get good at giving feedback to my direct reports. And we don't talk a lot about how to get good at receiving feedback. So the number one thing is to think about feedback as a gift. It's one of the fastest ways to accelerate your growth. The other two ways to accelerate your growth are just to move through time and space and, or to have like a immersive experience somewhere.

5:57But being able to ask for feedback will help rocket you forward because it does eliminate your blind spots. So some practices for that. One is that if getting specific about what kind of feedback you want. So if I say to you, hey, gosh, at the end of this podcast, I'd really like your feedback on like one thing that you think I did well. And one thing you think I could do better the next time I'm on your show or the next time I'm on somebody else's show. And like, then I'm giving you something very specific. I'm asking you now. So at the end of our session, you'll have paid attention and you can give me something back versus just at the end of our session saying, Hey, like, so how'd I do, which is very vague.

6:36And you're probably going to say something nice. Like it was great. Thanks so much. And then I'm going to move on and be like, that was not very helpful. Like I'm not actually going to get better. I'm just going to think like, it was great. So it's a, so it's one of those things like asking for specifics. People often don't know what to say as well. They feel like they have to defend themselves right away in feedback. And so one of the things I, I offer is instead of defending yourself or saying why, just say, thank you. Thanks for that feedback. I'm going to think about that. I'll circle back with you tomorrow.

7:08And that - Even if you don't agree with it. Even if you don't. And most of the time it's like we get feedback. And even if you get really good at it, which I used to hate feedback and I had a real reputation for being prickly about getting it. And so then people would kind of like dance around me and like, oh, I kind of want to share something, you know, and I had to get over that because I wasn't able to scale my leadership in that way. And so getting to a place where you can just say, thank you for that. I'm going to think about it. Walk away. You can have your own self-righteous burst of thoughts and, you know, whatever in private.

7:40And then you think about it and most nine times out of 10, I'm like, yeah, they're right. I did do that. I do need to get better at that. You know, even if my first response was like, who do they think they are telling me something? And we're not talking about necessarily like facts or the way that it is or universal truth here. It's just experiences. My experience of that was X. And that doesn't make it right or wrong. It's just for whatever reason, that's the way they interpreted that. And I'm like, oh, okay, I didn't realize I come across that way. Yeah, 100%. And I think that's a key part of the mindset that you're keying into is that it's the story we make up about it.

8:20Right? So if you give me feedback, and I think that's the truth about me, you know, and then I get all worked up about it, then I'm not going to be in a place where I can receive it. Whereas if I think like, that's Josh's truth about me in that moment. And what do I want to do with that data? Do I want to do something with it? Or do I want to not? And, you know, from there, I can have a healthy relationship and a healthy mindset about it. And as leaders, if we are modeling being gracious and grateful about receiving feedback, then we create a culture of feedback in our organizations where people feel safe to give it.

8:56And then they also feel okay about receiving it. So then when I have feedback to give to someone else, I can say like, hey, I've got something to share with you. Would that be okay? When would you like to talk about that? And then we have a very healthy, creative conversation instead of it feeling not so great. Yeah. Alexis, tell me about like your organization or, you know, how P-Link, like who is P-Link and what are you doing on a day-to-day basis and kind of the operations of the company itself? Yeah, so we're a small firm. We are just under 20 employees and co-founded by myself and my partner and dear friend Gretchen Pisano, who's our CEO.

9:40We're bi-coastal. She lives in Maryland. I live out in California. And then we have an awesome team of executive coaches and facilitators. And so on, as well as a support operations team who we do all of our own design in-house, we do all of our own production in-house. And so really are passionate about helping leaders to be better in the world. And on a day-to-day, that can look like our coaches doing one-to-one coaching with a senior team, can look like us facilitating a leadership lab with a group of 16 people from a global company where you've got somebody in Africa and somebody in the UK and somebody in New York, and, you know, we're all together in a virtual setting, learning and group coaching together.

10:25It can look like meeting with our designers who are putting together beautiful materials to be able to bring our work to life. Yeah. And so, yeah. And that's what's going on behind the curtain. Yeah. How do you, and obviously I'm sure you get really good word of mouth. both you've been doing this for a while, making big impact. But what are the, you know, kind of the, I don't know, how do you grow a company like this? Yeah, it's a good question. For years, we've been in business 10 years now. We're celebrating actually our 10th anniversary will be this summer. Congrats. Thank you. Thank you. We're proud of that.

11:03And we've done a lot of it with referrals. So a lot of our clients, they either leave their company, they go to become a CEO somewhere else. And then they call and say, we need you come in. And, you know, and then we'll work with companies for three to five years to kind of help turn around a company to help bring the leadership levels up. Sometimes we work with companies who are doing great, and they just want to do even better. And so that's a huge part of it. And then really, it's about asking people who we know, like, who else do you know who could benefit from this? It's, it's not easy, because a lot of times our clients are not, they have legal things that, so we don't use their names.

11:43We try to protect their confidentiality that creates safety for them to be able to really share everything going on and not worry. It's going to become a, you know, a banner on a website somewhere. And that makes it a little harder, but, but basically doing really good work in the world and staying in right relationship with our clients has paid a lot of dividends. We're now at a place whereas we want to scale. I've been watching some of your stuff, really trying to figure out like, okay, how do we start attracting people who don't know who we are and who know that they need us, but like they just haven't heard of us yet.

12:17And that's a, that's a nut to crack for sure. Yeah. You're the author of the book, Leap of Faith, Cultivating Your Brave Heart. Tell me more about that. So that is a deliberately short book that I put together myself, self-authored, and really about some of the lessons that I had learned in life about being courageous in leadership. It's one of my, courage is one of my top values and how I move through the world. And so being able to share that with somebody, the goal was like, if you're on a flight for an hour, you could get front to back, you know, it doesn't need to be 400 pages. It could be short and sweet because we're all busy.

12:58And so, so that's what that one's about. Yeah. And you are a podcaster. So good news for our podcast listening friend here. Here's what you do. Just do a search for this, the bright side, life and leadership. Did I get that right? You did. Yeah. Yeah. So I've been podcasting for over 10 years. It started as a live radio show. Yeah, you too. Yeah. So I know, right? Once you get that bug, it's hard to stop. So tell me more about the podcast. So the podcast also deliberately short between 10 and 15 minutes segments that are meant to be leadership, how to's leadership mindset shifts, certain things around how to motivate people, how to hold people accountable while building trust.

13:50Usually I'll be in a coaching session and an executive will say to me, like, how do you like, I want to hold my people accountable, but I don't want to break their trust or I, you know, I want them to still like me. And like, how do I do that in a way that, that helps me to increase trust and earn their trust, but also helps me to hold them accountable to the deliverables that we've agreed to. And so most of my podcasts are about something that has happened in a coaching session that I feel like, you know what, people need to know this. Or most recently somebody said to me, I really suck at delegating.

14:26I tried to delegate and it went totally sideways and they didn't do well. And I said, well, tell me about what you did. And we coached on it. And I realized that a lot of the leaders are making the same mistakes, right? Delegating to people and then just walking away, never checking back in, never make, not making sure that the instructions got delivered effectively, which is even more important now that we have so many people remote and not sitting in an office where you could just like look around the corner, knock on the door and say, Hey, like, I just want to check in with you. Now I have clients who say, well, you know, then I have to get on their calendar and I don't know how busy they are.

15:02And it's like this whole thing where it used to be so easy to just pop into someone's office. Hey, can I clarify this one thing? Now it feels harder. So we have to be really conscious about how we delegate. And so that came up. So I said, okay, let's do a podcast on it. Let's talk about it. Let's get it out there. Yeah. Alexis, the website, again, is plinkleadership.com. We get feedback. A lot of people will find our podcast when, well, they're searching for you. And so now they wanted to learn more about you. Maybe they want your podcasters. They probably found your podcast first, but, you know, and so they're curious now about kind of the next steps.

15:44Like, okay, I like Alexis. This sounds really good. I'm kind of optimistic. Like what would be kind of maybe those next steps? Maybe I don't know if there's some epic content or, you know, maybe that next step in engagement together. Yeah, the first thing I would say is we have a great free download on our website. So just right on the homepage at the very top, super easy to find, peelingleadership.com. That is the eight practices, eight positive leadership practices that are going to help you differentiate you in 2023. three. And so if you go in there, there's a whole checklist, we've operationalized the behavior.

16:20So you can look and say like, okay, here's the positive leadership practice. Am I doing these three behaviors? And it's a great way to just look at your own leadership and say, you know, oh, I'm nailing it here, here, here, here. And then like, oh, wow. Yeah. I haven't done that. Actually. I should probably turn a little bit of attention there. So that's just a free download. People can hop in there and see a little bit more about what we mean by positive leadership and, and what that looks like in action, because I think that's really helpful, more helpful than kind of just giving a definition, if you will, but to say like, here's what it looks like if you're actually doing it.

16:55And so that's really the first way. And then if people want to engage with us in a deeper way, really it's, you know, we're working to reduce friction in organizations and accelerate positive change by training leaders and teams. And so that's leading to things like effective retention of employees. It's leading to better relationships with clients, better outcomes on teams. And so working with us in that way, or working with us as a coaching client, getting some more peace of mind so that you can show up more confidently and courageously in your current role. And if you're, I know a lot of your listeners are also business, small business owners and, um, and business owners that maybe you don't have, um, maybe you don't have a, a place to do huge trainings or bring somebody to do a whole thing.

17:50And for, for those folks, we've had a lot of our clients who really wanted, um, to continue working with us, but weren't with their big companies anymore. So we created the Peelink plus, which is a membership community. And so that's for people who want to drive their own development and want to do it on their, at their own pace. And so it's a, it's a way to get some live training and some self-directed training each month and, and also connect with other leaders because leadership and entrepreneurship can be pretty lonely at time. And so, yeah. Yeah. One, one last thing I wanted to ask you about.

18:25Okay. Oh, did I cut you off? I'm so sorry. No, go ahead. So again, that's all at plinkleadership.com. One thing I really love on your about page, I'm so going to copy this um you have some q and a's with alexis and uh and you and i love the same music uh what is one of your favorite metallica songs oh you know we just bought the black album we got a record player last year and so my one of my favorite songs is seek and destroy which you listen to the lyrics is like that baseline the baseline is so good to run to but um we just bought the Black Album my husband was like found it at Target he's like look I found it and I thought oh great you know and I forgot how much I liked all the songs on there even though they got criticized because I always made got too mainstream yeah yeah it's a little departure but I I still really loved it and that and so we were just listening to it the other day and yeah I am the gatekeep on Metallica even if you only like the new stuff yeah anyone can be a Metallica fan in my book.

19:32So yeah, I ride the lightning is just absolutely that. And I saw the injustice for all tour. So this is when Newstead had just joined the band replacing Cliff Burton. And so there's a battle Creek, Michigan, and that was my very first big concert. And of course they have like the lady justice who like crumbles and smashes balls apart all over. Boy, as I think I'm maybe it was like 16 years old at the time. That was a transformative moment for me. Totally, totally. I think I was 18 when I saw my first Metallica concert in San Diego and it was just so good. And then years went by and my husband and I actually saw them open for the stones in San Francisco.

20:21Oh my gosh. Yeah. That was hands down. What a show that must have been. The audience had been just enormous. Metallica and the Stones together. Alexis, thank you so much. It's been fun. And again, your website, plinkleadership.com. Of course, you're the chief experience officer and the co-founder and also host of the podcast, The Bright Side, Life and Leadership. Thank you so much, Alexis, for joining us. Thanks, Josh.

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