2008 – The Power of Uplifting Others in Your Leadership Journey with The Serving Way’s Chris Thyberg

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1:05With us right now, it's Chris Theiberg. Chris, you are a leadership coach and you are the founder and principal coach with The Serving Way. Your website is theservingway.com. Chris, it's great to have you. Josh, it's really good to be with you. Thank you so much for the invitation. Absolutely. Well, I'm excited to learn. I mean, already just spending a little bit of time on your website. I love what you do. And I would love to hear a bit more about who you work with and the outcomes you help create. Okay. Well, let's begin there. And let's begin with the kinds of problems that the leaders I serve face.

1:45Because I don't want this dear audience to be about me so much as I want you to see yourself in this conversation. So I work with both emerging and experienced leaders. I work in all sectors, nonprofits, startups, big and small companies. And I think what characterizes where people are when they come to me is that they are at what I call their growing edge. A growing edge is the place where you realize that what got you to where you are, to quote Marshall Goldsmith, is not going to get you where you need to be. Actually, it's worse than that with many of my clients. There's this sinking feeling that actually what got them here is now holding them back.

2:48the characteristics and traits and competencies that got them promoted, especially if it's up into leadership from being a great solo performer or project manager, just like leading a team. Now they lead teams of teams. They worked for other people. Now they're starting their own business and the very things that got them promoted along the way and built their success. In fact, that we build our identities around are getting in their own way. So take somebody who has grown because they are an expert achiever. It means they're always the smartest person in the room. and they can always fix anything and have all the answers.

3:42Pretty good until we look up and say, wait a minute, we're leading in whitewater conditions. And I'm at the back of this crazy raft bouncing down the river

3:58and expert achieving alone is not going to do it. there's a great saying, if you're the smartest person in every room, you need to be in some better rooms. And great leaders know to surround themselves with people in various ways, way better than them, including more expert in certain ways and have having different kinds of ways and energies for achieving. So that's what a, that's what a growing edge is the place where, Oh my gosh, yeah i know i think what you're describing chris is is probably pretty common because i think about you know especially in my world i work with a lot of b2b professionals and i think a lot of them develop a passion for it could be branding it could be you know um leadership development like they're they're they're very good at the outcome and so then they get started they're doing some work and oh boy I'm gonna have to build a team here so then they kind of you know start building a team and then kind of like what you mentioned listen if you're if you're a spectacular technician being a CEO is not I mean there's maybe some crossover in the Venn diagram there I mean it's not hurtful necessarily but you're gonna have to I mean you're gonna have to really step up and become maybe what you haven't been for the past 20 years in your life.

5:30That is, and that's okay. And I want to share this in that, and I'd love to kind of hand this over to you. That's nothing to feel bad about. That's normal. Yes. Yes. I meet clients where they are and I go with them at their pace. And they really do come in, Josh, as you just said, almost with a sense of things like imposter syndrome. Or they pathologize this and say, something really must be lacking about me. Because as I said, it can be an identity crisis. Since five years of age, they've always built success in this way. XYZ. I named Expert Achiever, until they find that at 35, 45, 55, that doesn't cut it.

6:28But as you said, nothing wrong with you, dear leader. It's this distinction of the inner game and the outer game of leadership. The outer game is how we perform. It's the stuff people can see in what we say, what we do, how we show up, our competencies. Brilliant, beautiful clients come to me. They and their stakeholders are paying real money to see actual tangible, visible, measurable excellence, growth, performance, results, rate. So use a metaphor, consider those apps on the phone. They need to learn some models or methods or techniques. They need that more outward skills-based stuff. Absolutely.

7:34But at a growing edge, people begin to say, oh man, I actually need an operating system upgrade. I need to do the inside out work in how I think, how I make meaning, where I have limiting assumptions or beliefs that are just actually false, or at least no longer useful. And so it's much more that place of things we call like emotional, social, relational. I don't like the word intelligence. Let's use words like fluency, as in you can speak a lot of languages or agility. You can dance with a lot of different partners. Well, that you can kind of fake it by learning techniques to look a certain way.

8:27but the actual thing is authentic from the inside out, from who you are and how you are aware and you can manage your own emotional landscape and pick it up in other people. In fact, how you can sit in your body. When leaders say, I need to develop more leadership presence, often the question is, are you actually present to yourself? Can you find your body and calm it down and slow it down so that you can respond and not react? So I work with leaders in the headspace. Where's your meaning making a little wonky? The heart space, where's that kind of emotional stuff a little out of control or insensitive, dot, dot, dot.

9:23Where are you in your body, your ability to have a regulated nervous system? Because that nervous system stuff is infectious. If I'm wound up, you're going to get wound up. Anyone who raises a toddler knows this. If you lose it physically, they're going to lose it physically. So we need to keep it together. And that actually is infectious too. People start regulating themselves. And then in the dimension of spirit, whatever that means to you, it can be overtly religious. I work with all kinds of leaders from faith traditions. It can be not religious at all, but it's the place where purpose and values come from.

10:06So again, just to wrap up, the growing edge is the place where we see to get great sticky improvements in the outer game. We have to lead ourselves well first and then lead from within with others. We have to do the operating system work because the inner game always drives and either limits or catapults the external game. So I'll pause there. I just riffing off your thing that says, hey, dear leader, you're not broken. We're not going to fix you. in fact, a good coach, the last thing I would do is offer fix-it solutions. A great coach comes in with the assumption, Josh, you are already capable, creative, resourceful, and whole.

11:09You just haven't tapped it all yet. It's in there. It's in there. It's in there. Your website, I want to get to this because I want to talk about how you work with folks and what that looks like. Your website, Chris, is theservingway.com. Do you mind just kind of addressing the brand and then kind of maybe talk about what coaching looks like and how you work with great leaders? Thank you. Perfect. So The Serving Way as a name is very, very deliberate. The serving part comes from my own experience of leadership. And I've been in this game for 30 plus years growing up as a leader, working for other leaders.

11:57First in the higher education space, Carnegie Mellon, Penn State, including the business college at Penn State. And then for another 16 years with an international educational, faith-based nonprofit, highly ecumenical, a welcoming big tent. And in all those places, I noticed, Josh, which leaders caused me to sit up a little straighter and my shoulders were a little broader. And I volunteered for the hard stuff, to go back to what I said, knowing I would need to increase my subject matter expertise, my achievement rate, the outer game, my competencies? Yes. But also knowing I'm going to have to grow up my capacities, my deep generative core.

12:59And I trusted those leaders because I saw that they used their rightful power and authority. And let's not kid ourselves. Leadership is about power. That's okay. It's whether we're jerks about it, or in fact, we empower other people. And those leaders, I knew that they were using their rightful power with me and for me. And here's the kicker. They weren't afraid that my power would grow up in me. And so I said, what's that thing that distinguishes that kind of leader from the ones where I just, I felt squashed. And I knew they were using their power for themselves, and I was only as good to them as what they could get out of me.

13:50Well, so maybe 20, 25 years ago, I discovered Robert Greenleaf, who pioneered and coined the phrase servant leadership. He called servant as leader. And it's super important that he didn't say the leader as servant. He said the servant as leader. And he said the instinct is first to serve. And then we step up to the call to lead. And in that phrase, servant-leadership, the hyphen is everything. How we hold that together. Because serving leadership gets a rap of being sort of soft, kumbaya, like we don't care about results as long as our relationships are really happy. And the leader says, let me serve you pizza on Fridays.

14:47Okay, kind of. But actually, we all want to be on a winning team. Yeah. I want to get meaningful stuff done. We all want to grow in our own wisdom and courage and vision and power. That's what we crave. A serving leader says, yeah, my test, Josh, is if you're my follower, are you growing up in all those ways? The test of a great leader is the quality of the followers. And so leaders cultivate and curate the conditions under which those entrusted to their stewardship can get really, really great. So serving is not soft and squishy. There's an African proverb, when the way is clear and safe in daylight, the leader is in the back carrying the bags.

15:56When it's dark and dangerous at night, the leader is out front with a torch. The serving leader does not say, I will bubble wrap you and protect you, because that's serving their own ego and treating others like children. Yes, right. We might not all get out of this alive. This is really complex, hard stuff. There might be layoffs. We might have to radically reposition our business. But I'm going out front. I'm going to take it in the head. When we succeed, you get all the credit. When we stumble, take the blame. That's admirable, the way that you've explained that. Chris, and I just want to just out of sake of time here, I know we have about a minute left.

16:45Your website, theservingway.com, I think anyone listening who's hearing you share what you've shared and they want more Chris, where can they get more Chris? Well, at theservingway.com and find me on LinkedIn with my name, Chris Theiberg. The Calendly link will be in the show notes. And I love having exploratory calls. They are not sales calls. You will experience what it is like to coach with me. And I do in our limited time, Josh, want to give people a taste of what to expect from coaching with me. So first, it's radical listening. Second, I am a con artist. OK, that sounds creepy. But what it means is I'm curious, open and nonjudgmental.

17:35This is about you. This is about a trusted relationship. And the third metaphor of what you'll experience with me as a coach, even from that very initial exploration, which is all about you and you being the hero of your own journey. Well, I'll put it this way. My clients are pregnant with the next great leaders they are about to become. It's not my baby. I can't have it for you. but I'm a really good midwife. And so please let's have a chat. If we work together, fantastic. If we don't, I've had a wonderful conversation with a brilliant human being and I walk away happy. Yeah. Chris Theiberg, I will echo, you are a phenomenal LinkedIn follow.

18:29And again, you can get to that link in the show notes and you can also go to this website. It is theservingway.com. You can click on the yellow button. It says free discovery call and you can grab some time with Chris. Chris Thieberg, it's been wonderful. Again, you're a leadership coach and again, the founder of and principal coach of The Serving Way. Chris, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Josh, so much. My pleasure.

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