76 - Navigating Leadership Challenges and Building Resilience with Leader Shift Insights' Jennifer Eggers

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Jennifer Eggers, thank you for joining me with Listening on Leaders. You are the president of Leadership Insights, found at leadershipinsights.com. Um, we've been talking before we got on the show. You're just so much fun, I can't believe it. Thanks for joining me.

Thank you so much for having me. This is an honor to be here.

Great. So backstory— you have a pretty interesting backstory. I'll, um, you know, I interviewed you with Authority Magazine, and, and I just was so impressed with what you've done. That's why I wanted to have you on the podcast. Tell us a little bit about your career.

Gosh, it's been a colorful career, I'll give you that. So I started my career in Big Six consulting back when it was Big Six consulting, back in the day, 30 years ago or more than that maybe. But anyway, and then I had kind of a storied corporate career after that. So I left consulting and went in, I did leadership roles at Coke, AutoZone, not in that order, but HoneyZone, Honeywell, and Bank of America. And I realized I learned some things while I was working with some of those organizations and frankly, as a leader in those organizations. And really the two things that I saw were, number one, companies were spending millions of dollars on leadership development that wasn't driving a dime of revenue. And I was pretty darn sure that I could do that better. And then the other was that I had been a part of or led hundreds of restructuring projects. So whether it was merger integration with Arthur Andersen, restructuring finance organizations, or just, you know, I think at Bank of America, we structured our business 8 times in like the last 5 months I was there. It was absolutely ridiculous. And what I learned was that companies were doing these massive restructuring transformation, call it whatever you want, over and over again. And it wasn't driving any revenue. And all it was was really disrupting people. And the worst part was that great talent was leaving and you didn't even know they were leaving because the people they worked for changed so frequently. That they didn't even know they were good. And as I watched this happen, I thought, well, there's got to be a way to fix some of this. And so I started Leadership Insights in 2007, really as a way to fix those two things. And so there were— and after I evaluated hundreds of leadership programs, there were three that I found that— or I'm sorry, there were two that drove revenue. So I bought the rights to one of them, I became certified in the second, and I wrote the third. And so, you know, that's when we talk about leadership development. I mean, we are talking about stuff that actually makes a difference, makes an impact, drives results right now, today. And so, you know, and then the other thing I wanted to do is fix this restructuring mess. And so I hired a team and we built a process called RapidOD that we've been selling for years that, you know, really sells itself because it is a way to do restructuring that is super inclusive. It is fast, it is collaborative, and it is sustainable. And it drives strategy, which is, you know, those are the things you want in a restructuring. But what we do is try to do that so it doesn't— we don't have to do it over and over again. And so go ahead. You look like you're going to say something.

Yeah, well, that's really interesting. I assume it was a certification in adaptive leadership?

That was not the certification, but I do have a certification in adaptive leadership. I'm an advanced practitioner in adaptive leadership. Thank you for— Noticing that on my materials too. Yeah, I do a lot of that work as well. Well, that feeds into what I do today, which, you know, over the years the business has evolved, things have changed. We still certainly do RapidOD. We still offer the 3 original leadership workshops, which are really our capstone programs. It's our mastery series. But I also now have, you know, I spend probably most of my time coaching C-level executives. And so the adaptive leadership really comes into play there because we— there just aren't very many challenges that business leaders face anymore that are cut and dry, simple, black and white technical challenges.

That's right.

So, you know, the adaptive leadership is really critical.

Yeah, I got turned on to Hiwitz's work when I was studying for my— I went back to school mid-career to get my master's degree in peacemaking and conflict studies. And one of my professors said, here, read this. And it completely blew me away.

It's amazing. It's absolutely amazing. The power of that work is just incredible.

Yes. I use it all the time.

That's amazing. I don't hear very many people say that. But it was just an enormous— I want to say honor, but I mean really incredible experience to go to his advanced practitioner workshop. It was the first one that he had done. And I was the only one in the program that didn't come to this from Harvard.

Harvard.

So now that work has been taught to people who have taught it to people who have taught it to people. And so I came to it kind of a couple generations, uh, from Heifetz. And so to go back and spend time with him was just— it was unbelievable. Um, I got some coaching that was just off the charts.

Really, really phenomenal. I mean, the whole— because when you were— the reason that you got me triggered thinking about that was you're talking about companies doing a whole bunch of restructurings over a 5-month period, and the first thing that comes to my mind is saying that's work-avoidant behavior.

It was absolutely work avoidance behavior. I mean, not only that, we're dealing with— this is a classic case of dealing with technical, technical issues when we're really facing an adaptive challenge and we're treating it like a technical problem.

That's classic.

It's classic. And I see it in my coaching 8 days a week. I mean, it's, it's constant. And it's something that I think we can help leaders— if we can help leaders understand that when they are really focused on technical challenges or technical problems and solving these technical things, what they're really doing is avoiding looking at the big picture.

That's right.

I mean, it's like, it's like me when I go clean my office when I'm too stressed to do anything else. It's the same thing.

That's right. I, I, I was involved, I was civically engaged here in Central California for quite a few years, and I took the adaptive leadership principles and applied it to what we call steward leadership.

Oh, sure.

Teaching, teaching civic leaders how to become steward leaders in the community. Saying that your, the technical skills you use in your manufacturing organization will not work for solving homelessness, it will not work for solving immigration, it will not work for drug addiction and mental health and this and, you know, dual diagnosis and all these problems we have. I said, we've got to come up with a completely different way of looking at this. Yeah, I developed a list of criteria. This is what a steward leader looks like. These are this.

And that's fantastic.

It was really, it was really interesting, uh, really interesting application. And of course the whole thing collapsed because of work-avoidant behavior. People just were unwilling to wrap their heads around the complexity of the problem. And so they ran from it.

Well, and you know, it's interesting, kind of maybe a spin on that. When I think about coaching leaders who are moving up to the C-suite, I think one of the hardest challenges they have is the challenge of becoming a steward of the organization.

Yes.

They are no longer being paid to be the best marketing person or the best finance person or the best salesperson they can be, right? They are now responsible to be a steward of the organization. They have to see the big picture. They have to understand how the parts come together, which levers they can pull. And sometimes those levers actually hurt their, their function, like their— the area where they came from. And this notion of becoming a steward is a huge issue for C-level executives.

And it's a difficult one, as you pointed out in your interview, because it takes— it's a completely different set of skills and a way of thinking when you move to that level. You're no longer doing, now you're coaching people to do. And it's just a completely different set of skill sets. And I don't think a lot of companies appreciate that. The other thing, while you got me on it, since this is so interesting, I think it's my experience that most companies don't see any ROI on leadership development, and so they tend not to invest in leadership development because they think it's a waste of money.

Yeah, I think in many cases that's becoming a trend, but I, I would say I think there's a reason for that in many cases.

And you know, like, out there, there's a lot of junk out there.

Oh, 99% of it is junk. I mean, having literally sat through and reviewed hundreds of these things I would say 98% of it is junk.

Yeah.

And I mean, I, I'm a little ashamed to be in the field, quite honestly. But what I will say is that part of the reason it's junk is that we do these cases from somewhere else. If you can't find enough problems to work on in your own organization, you are doing something wrong. You know, like, and we don't— when we deliver training, we do our leadership workshops, we ask our clients to come in with their hardest challenge. Bring me the hardest thing you've got that you've applied your best thinking to and you haven't been able to solve, and that's what we'll make progress on in the program. Yeah, because anything else is—

I agree.

Yeah, right. And that's the thing, I mean, I don't, I don't do fluff.

No, I, I'm with you.

I mean, you probably figured that out in my article, right?

You know, when I, I have the same approach, you know, clients come to me, they want to build up— I teach a process known as, um, structured listening, strategic listening. And I say, which— bring us— bring me your worst client situation.

There you go.

And, and we— I completely show them that there's a whole different way of listening that you've got to learn in order to make this work, right? Your eyes get like this. I can't do that. I say, yeah, you can. You know, if I can do it, you can do it, right?

Absolutely.

So what, what is it that gets you excited in the morning?

Gosh, you know, I think, um, I think what really gets me excited when I wake up in the morning is the ability to really help somebody else be more successful than they were the day before. Right? I deal with executives all day long that are trying to be better. They're trying to be champions. You know, I was a champion water ski coach. I'm still a champion water ski coach. I was a champion water skier. And I really enjoy helping people become champions. And so, when I deal with business people, I very much think of it that way. I mean, I, you know, the athletic side, I think, comes into that as well in that How do we take these people that, what, you know, that they're in a, they're usually in a spot where what got you here won't get you there.

Right.

So how do we help them really become the best person they can be for the situation they're in today? And that's the, you know, and that's the exciting thing. I think the other thing that gets me excited is the ability to blur the line between consulting and coaching. And that's something that, you know, 30 years in consulting, 30 years, you know, in corporate, bridging the gap between consulting and corporate, and really, you know, working in the field has given me a breadth of experience that if I'm, you know, and the coaching purists, right, they won't like this at all, but if I am sitting with, if I'm sitting with a president of a business and he says to me, I'm struggling with X, and I've done that 11 times, I'm not going to sit there and watch him struggle and ask him about his feelings. I'm going to roll up my sleeves, dive in, we're going deep, and we're going to figure out how to, how to do whatever they need to do. And I, and I want to be a part of that. So, you know, I think that's the exciting thing for me is, you know, being, having gotten to a point in my career where I'm actually able to do that has been the most fun.

Oh, that's great. Yeah, I, I don't have a lot of good things to say about a lot of people who are coaching.

Neither do I.

You know, I mean, I try to keep my mouth shut. I do too. But, you know, I'm so politically incorrect, you know, whatever comes out. But I just don't— first of all, I don't think that a lot of people who go into coaching have the breadth of experience that you're talking about. And a lot of them don't have deep education either. And I think that One or the other is really mandated for you to be effective at what you do if you're going to be coaching somebody. Yeah, same thing with consulting. Um, you've got to either have deep experience or education or both to be effective, to be able to see the problems in ways that other people can't see it. And I just don't think there are a lot of people out there that, that have it. And that's why so many, so many people who go into coaching are just struggling because they're they simply can't find a way to be effective.

Yeah, I think that's very true. And it's especially relevant to these consortiums they have now that, you know, I have several Fortune 500 clients that, you know, they sign up with some coaching consortium and they have this, you know, library of junior coaches that they can call that, you know, these people are well-intended and they know how to ask good questions. You know, and they go in, but that's all they can do.

That's right.

And so they end up in a political mess. And, you know, maybe they're glorified therapists, I'm not really sure, but they certainly aren't adding the value of someone that's been in the executive shoes, been there before, been there, done that, or seen it done, you know, by other clients, and can say, hey, you know, I was in a situation that's very similar to this, and, you know, kind of here's how we dealt with it. Or, boy, I've set up 15 COEs in the past. You've got to set up a COE. Here's my blueprint for doing that.

Right.

And I think, you know, and certainly there's an element of like, I also want to know how who you are as a person drives who you are as a leader. Because I think your personality really drives your behaviors. And there's a purist element of coaching that doesn't go away. But we've got to be able to take that and add more value. Then, and really just get beyond the weather, if you will. Like, we gotta get beyond talking about the superficial.

What do you think it is that's unique about you that you bring to the client's table?

I just, I mean, I think the biggest thing is my experience. I mean, it's 30 years of having been there, done that, seen it, whether it was in operations, whether it was in consulting, you know, with the big firms, or whether it was literally in corporate roles myself. I think it's just, you know, the biggest thing is my experience and my ability to help a client see around corners and anticipate what's going to happen before they get there. So, you know, they can kind of get ahead. The other thing is we've tried to turn a lot of the knowledge that's in my head into toolkits. So, you know, how can I help a client? You know, I do a lot of new leader simulation or integration, you know, onboarding kind of thing. So if we have a new leader, they come into an organization and they're drinking from the fire hose. I mean, they've got to absorb a ton of information at the same time as they need to demonstrate visible leadership really quickly and build credibility and respect and get to know a ton of people. That is a lot to manage. So we've got, you know, I've got a phenomenal onboarding toolkit that a leader can take soup to nuts, record what they're learning. They've got a place to keep it all. It's all in one place. It serves as a resource long after their onboarding is over. You know, they don't forget things, they can have strategic conversations, it helps them manage the conversation. So it's not a lot of just chatty meet and greet nonsense, we're actually accomplishing something and really set them up for success. And so, you know, but I wouldn't have been able to do that if I hadn't done it for literally for years. Right. I think it's experience.

Right. Your book is all about resiliency, which I'm a big fan of. Tell us about the book and what you mean by resiliency.

Yeah, resilience is really being elevated and energized by going through tough things, right? So you go through a challenge. Are we coming out of it exhausted and beat down and burned out? Are we coming out of it energized and elevated, ready and prepared for the next one? And resilience in my mind is really what you do, it's the internal work that you do to allow yourself to be energized and elevated by the situations you're in. And it allows you to be very intentional about how you react and think through those situations. And so the unique thing about the book is that what I learned, and we started writing the book back in 2015. And so at that point, there were literally 2 articles about resilience that were written that we could find. And I mean, there was nothing, nobody was talking about it. I kept saying, whoa, this is a big deal. This is a big deal. People need to listen, you know? And nobody was talking about it. And I really believed that it was the number one skill for leaders. And I, you know, today I don't think anybody would argue with me, but, you know, in 2015, they looked at me like I was nuts. But I think the biggest thing is that what I learned is that the characteristics of resilient people and organizations are the same. And so what I realized when I learned that was, and that was in one of the original articles that I read, but, and that was research by Diane Kotu, out of Harvard. But one of the, one of the things about that is if I can teach somebody how to be resilient, and you can, resilience can be taught, which is absolutely amazing. That was the next thing that got me excited. If I can teach someone how to be more resilient individually, then I can take those same exact methods of teaching that and apply them to organizations. And now it was worth writing a book about. You know, now it's got, suddenly it's got power because suddenly it's not You know, there are probably 100 cancer survivors, people that have climbed Mount Everest, been hit by a truck, been through tough times. They could write a great book about resilience, be very entertaining, and everybody would say, boy, that's a good book. But you wouldn't learn how to be resilient.

It's the how.

It's the how. And what we have in this book is a framework for how you can learn how to be more resilient and you can teach your team and your organization to be more resilient. And that to me was the power of it. And I've actually, this started as a keynote. It then became a workshop, then it became a book. I've had people go through the workshop and I called a CEO and this doesn't happen very often, but you know, you call a CEO a couple weeks after, maybe a month after they go through a workshop and you go, hey, you know, what are the changes that happened in your organization as a result of the workshop? And it's hard to have the guts to have that conversation in many, many cases. But I remember a CEO saying to me, Jennifer, ours, as a result of 15 leaders going through this program, our entire company has more courage.

I love that.

I can't make that up. Like, you know, that's why I do what I do.

I love it. That's great. Yeah, it's interesting how you go from, from an idea to practice to teaching it to writing about it. That's how my fourth book was developed. Yes.

Oh, awesome.

Yeah. And actually, the book— I actually wrote the book as a result of requests, multiple requests I was receiving from my students that are incarcerated. I'm the co-founder of the Prisoner Peace Project, and we train incarcerated people how to be mediators and peacemakers to stop violence. And they were asking for the book, a book that they could share with their families, because the families were seeing the transformations occurring with them.

That's an incredible That's how— project to start with. Yeah.

Yeah. It has been an amazing journey.

I bet. I bet.

So this podcast is Listening with Leaders. I am all about listening. Tell me about the importance of listening in your work.

Well, I mean, you can't coach effectively, first of all, without listening. So I mean, number one, it's important for me personally. So that's, you know, that's a huge thing. And it's interesting because I think I grew up in a family where if you didn't interrupt, you didn't get to talk. So listening is not particularly easy for me, but it is something that I've had to really master as a coach. You know, but more importantly, I think at the most senior levels, what's interesting to me is that most executives are rarely told the truth. So they have to listen very differently and set very different expectations if they really want to understand what's going on in their organization. And that was something I learned early, early on in my career. I remember I was at Arthur Andersen. It was like my second client. They put me in front of this CFO. And it's interesting, there's never been a point in my career where I wasn't coaching, but as a 24-year-old in front of a CFO of some big, you know, company was like, whoa. And I have— can only imagine what they were thinking. But I remember going in to tell this man that he had no idea what was going on in the organization. And he didn't because nobody was telling him the truth. And I was definitely the bearer of bad news, right? So it didn't go well the first time I had to do that. But what I realized is that once an executive faces it and they realize that they don't know the truth, and then they realize what the truth is, all of a sudden you have an incredible amount of credibility and frankly, an incredible amount of power that can be used for good or for evil, right, in that situation. And so I think for me, it was— that was kind of the spark that made me think, you know, I want to help these people figure out how to get the truth in a way that they don't have to get this big shock of their lives when I show up, right? How do we train them? How do we equip them? To set the expectation that people are going to share and they're going to drive candid conversations in a way that people are safe, that they're listening. And I don't know that there is really a safe corporate conversation, like corporate safety is kind of funny to me, but I do think we can train, we can help executives set expectations to where people know that they're expected to have the candid conversation, discuss the difficult issues, because if we're not We can't get these issues on the table, they can't be solved, right?

My experience is that most people avoid difficult conversations, including because they're too afraid of emotional explosions. And so what I teach, I teach people how to take difficult conversations and make them transformative. But the secret is in emotions. Yeah, understanding what emotions are, how they work, understanding that we're 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Yeah, things are purely emotional beings and that they're self-protective. And the whole problem with the difficult conversation is that we're all self-protective. And so what you have to do is learn how to move from a non-invasive listening conversation and slowly make it more invasive as trust is built. And, and there's a whole process for doing that.

That's really, that's really neat. And when you say this self-protective thing, so Chris Argerich did a lot of great research around communication that blocks learning. And one of, you know, one of the things that came out of Ardris's research, which was about the traps and derailers that people fall into when they get in a difficult conversation, and one of them is they try to maximize comfort and minimize negative emotion.

That's right.

And that's self-preservation piece.

And the other problem that happens is they get triggered. Now the emotional circuits in the brain are overwhelming the prefrontal cortex. No longer think, and they move back to 6-year-old reactivity, right?

And that's the other thing, jumps in, you're in fight or flight, you can't— I mean, yeah, all of those things are going to derail, right, any kind of effective communication.

So that— so there's no, there's no wonder why leaders are lied to, because nobody wants, nobody wants to deal with that, engage in the difficult conversation. So what I train people to do is how to, how to, how to have that difficult conversation and do it to create psychological safety. Because, I mean, there was that great Google study 2 years ago that showed that the one thing that separated Google's top-performing teams from everybody else was psychological safety in the group.

Yeah.

And so how do you, as a leader, how do you create that? And, and that's what I teach.

Interesting. No, I would love to hear more about that at some point. I would love to interview you on some of the stuff that you're talking about. This is great stuff.

Um, one more question and I'll And we'll wrap it up. What is one thing about you— I'm afraid to ask this question of you. What's one thing about you, Jennifer, that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

Oh my goodness. That's a tough one. There's probably a lot you would never know. So let's see. I'm trying to figure out which is safe to share.

No, totally safe.

No, you would not know. You would not know that I have been a marine engine mechanic.

I would not know that. A marine engine mechanic.

There are very few people that would know that. No, I used to work on, uh, ski boat engines, so not diesel, but that makes sense. Yeah, I was, I was a judge and a driver, um, and I, I made myself useful at many a ski lake by being the one who knew how to work on the boat when it failed. Wow.

You were really into that, weren't you?

I was. I was. I still am into that, actually.

I've never got much into water skiing. I'm an alpine skier myself.

Oh, sure. Yeah. No, I was top 50 in the country. I was pretty, I was pretty competitive in water skiing, but you know, everything's changed. I was out of the sport for 20 years and I got back into it about a year ago. And like boats have changed, skis have changed. I mean, it's coaching is the same, but it is, gosh, it's, it's really a different world at this point.

Well, amazing. This has been an amazing conversation, Jennifer. Thank you so much for joining me.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast. Doug Noll, D-O-U-G-N-O-L-L.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. Suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.