Scaling Leadership: Making Coaching Accessible at Every Level | Kristin Lytle | 595

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today my guest is Kristin Lytle, and she's got a really cool bio, and I'm gonna go backwards. So it says she's an avid reader, mediocre musician, dog lover, kayaker, biker, Francophile, and all things nerdy you'd expect from a former academic decathlete. So she's also the CEO of a group called The Leader's Edge and has had an extensive stint in corporate America. But I want to— thought I'd work that one backwards. So, uh, welcome aboard today.

Thank you, thank you. And I wouldn't put it out there if I wasn't willing to share it, right?

Exactly, exactly. So Tell me about your journey. How did you get here as a thought leader?

Sure. So there's a number of different points in careers and such, but I would say as far as thought leader, I'm going to start actually from the back as well of— to be perfectly candid, I'm the second of four. I had the typical older sister who's incredibly book smart, incredibly sharp, and by comparison, I thought I wasn't that smart for many, many years. And it took a little while to figure that out for my own self. I remember I was at Kohler Company and went through their cognitive testing as part of a potential assessment, and I was convinced I was going to bomb the whole thing. And I'm like, oh my gosh, certain things are in the 90s. Whoa, smart. I have capabilities. That being said, I was— I've always been able to think to myself and look back at times in my life where I didn't speak up. I didn't put myself forward because I always thought I wasn't smart enough or I thought I wouldn't figure something out. And ever since then, I've been very passionate about how do I articulate things? How do I bring these abstract ideas to people in a way that they can understand it, in a way they can quickly apply it to their lives so that they themselves are not holding themselves back from their full potential? Because when I think about it, there's one or two instances I can think of a time in school when I thought I didn't get something completely, right? Got a tutor. He explained it slightly differently. I'm like, oh, that's it? Oh my gosh, I get it. That's easy now. And so I think that's where it really started, was this idea of I never want for someone to hold themselves back because they think they don't get something, or they think it's— they're not smart enough to get it. So I find ways to articulate so that people can advocate for themselves and accelerate their own development.

So What does that look like in terms of the business? So who pays you to do what then? Because I get the, I love the backstory. And I think there are probably a lot of in similar situations at any moment in time in the corporate arena, whether it's birth order or being surrounded by people that are really impressive or smart or a little bit of imposter syndrome kicks in. But So what's the, the problem that you're solving for whom?

What we're solving is we're helping organizations to ensure they're not wasting potential inside of their organization. So we have various solutions that help individuals do that to ensure leaders are, are unlocking their full potential. So we have executive coaching as well as we have different leadership development programs. But as you and I spoke in a previous conversation, I love your model of is something a practice versus a business.

Right.

And I would say right now at Leader's Edge, we are very much so, um, on the verge of, of going from a practice and, and to you, and I'll let you rephrase that to make sure I don't, don't mess that one up. But I would say that we're on the verge of going into a business because where we are headed is this idea of how can we help more people on a more scalable version versus having it be simply as valuable and as potent of a tool as executive coaching is.

Right.

It's not accessible for everybody.

Yeah. So let's, let's talk about that from my perspective, and there's not an exact science to this, but a practice ultimately is you or someone needs to be in the room or in the Zoom for the ideas to be exchanged and therefore dollars to be exchanged and therefore impact to be had. Right? And they're paying for the expertise, but they're also paying you to deliver it. You know, so that's, that's a practice and a practice. It's not that it's good or bad. It is a limiting business in terms of how, how much you can grow. It's X number of revenue, X dollars of revenue times a unit of time or something. Right? And it's limited. A business is really where clients are paying you in multiple ways, whether that's licensing, whether that's for tools, whether that's whatever it might be. And ultimately what it's doing is democratizing the intellectual property so that more people inside that organization, 'cause like you said, executive coaching is great. If I'm the CEO of a 30,000-person company, I couldn't even fathom getting a coach for it. It's not, it's not even at the top 50, top 100, maybe 200, 300. But what about the other 99%, right? So talk about how you're cracking that problem.

So, so here's what I would say at the root of it is, And I think most people would agree with this. We need more high-integrity leaders in positions of power across all facets of society, business, profit, nonprofit. And I fully advocate for, you know, ethical policies and screening and things like Sarbanes-Oxley for ethical components, but somehow they still manage to slip in, right? And so my thought is, how can we change that? And my idea is let's crowd 'em out. Let's go. Let's ensure there aren't seats open at the table for lower-integrity leaders, whether it's ethical or just garden-variety jerks that make everyone else's life terrible.

So is it—

how about we actually—

a tissue rejection if we just don't do that here, right? If it— if the vast majority don't subscribe to that way of thinking and somebody comes in to sort of— what is it— the, the, you know, poison the well, or pick an analogy. I'm like, I think tissue reject Yes, that is what we want.

And I very much so liken that to when someone's setting up a safety culture. Yeah, you think about a safety culture. Can you walk past something that could be a trip hazard and ignore it? No. So that's the sort of culture you want to set up. You can't walk past a behavior. And it goes back to these— again, this is what I tend to do, this is what my coaches tend to do, this is what we do in our programming— is we find simple analogies that resonate with people so they can turn these insights into action. So I was just really about the behaviors.

So, so when you're coaching, you've actually expanded coaching beyond you where you have a coaching business and you've got other people coaching. But part of the things that, that are great about that is the data, both quant and qual, that the coaches are getting every day from their conversations and their sessions with folks. Now, oftentimes there aren't systems and processes in place to get them to communicate with each other and say, ooh, this is the pattern I'm seeing now. People are scared about this or people are worried about that or people are stressing about that, whatever. But how have you sort of brought in the patterns or the top stuff, if you will, that people are struggling with, with coaching to make the decision to say, ah, those are the problems I'm going to solve and the more scalable things and make those investments twofold.

Number one, in a business, in our business, even though they are independent contractors, we do have quarterly at minimum coaches roundtables to talk about precisely this. What's going on? What are you seeing? As well as I bring in experts in various spaces. So it's a win-win for the coaches. The other thing is that in all candor, you have to keep your eye on studies. Those are often a little bit lagging. You also have to be listening to clients as you're talking with them about their needs. What's happening in your organization? What's the solution that you are needing? Where in your pipeline are you having leaks? You know, leaky pipeline for that, or are there blockages or whatever? And what are you hearing? And often what we're starting to hear is a lot of lack of feedback, okay, in organizations because leaders are overtaxed, right? You know, they're, they're in different positions. They're— more is being asked of them than ever before, and there's probably less support than ever before. Feedback—

lack of feedback could be— there's lots of reasons. It could be the lack of time excuse, or it could be the culture, right? Or it could be it's just not necessarily fun. Of all the things I get to do today, to sit down and tell you you disappointed me is not the most— my most favorite thing to do, right?

As well as it depends on how, how honest we are with ourselves. There's a lot of leaders who will say, you know, I'm a nice person. I don't want to— I don't want to be rough on them. You know, this is a one-time thing. And in reality, what so many leaders are actually doing is saying, I don't want to make myself uncomfortable. Yeah, but we hide behind the excuse of I'm a nice person or, you know, like that's— I'm just not that really that rough and, you know, rough feedback sort of person. But like looking deeper at this. And so that is where a lot of our solutions come in, is our job is to help people see what we call like the comma but.

Yeah, yeah.

Kristen's really great, comma but. Like what would be said after that? Because everyone has one. And if you're— it really hurts you if you're not aware of what that is.

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Mm-hmm. Absolutely. So we look at what is consistent slash universal, and are there things that are very consistent across industry, across parts of the country, across regions, functions, all those sorts of things that we know people are probably likely being challenged with. So influence is a classic example. So how can we offer in our programming as well as a more scalable option as we're going towards in the future, What the heck even is influence? I mean, how many times have we heard, well, they're really great, comma, but I'm not sure how influential they are. And so even helping our, our participants in our leadership programs or in a scalable version understand what is often meant by influence, how do you break that down, and how do you leverage it in plain language? Because that is so critically important versus hiding behind HR, so, so that's really the issue.

What I'm asking is what are the modalities that you're going to put your intellectual property and your thought leadership in so that more people can benefit from it inside the client organizations?

Absolutely. So what we are looking to do is a combination factor of video slash online learning with discussion groups with some sort of executive coaching because What we know first and foremost is, yes, we can scale. Yeah. And, and those are things. But at the same time, people need to— let's put it this way, I would love it if I could read a book on fitness and be able to run a marathon. Like, I would adore that. That doesn't work. And so what people often need is some form of community, some form of person ask questions, some sort of like psychological safety within a group in order to try all these behaviors in real life. And so it will be a combination of that. We're doing a few experiments this summer to see what's going to be working for the participants on that more scaled version. What we do today in our leadership development programs is a much more hands-on version of that where people are part of a larger group session and then they're part of either small group coaching or one-on-one coaching to again say, here's what I tried, here's what I worked on, because we recognize it's again, it's not just intellectual knowledge. It has to be incorporated into your behaviors, into your habits for it to have the impact.

And that peer component is really, really important because not that, you know, a good coach is not gonna get snookered, but when you're in a one-on-one with a coach, they're hearing everything from your perspective. Now, they might do 360s and there, there's other tools, et cetera, et cetera. But it's your, you know, it's the blind man and the elephant, right? It's your view of the situation, of the scenario, of the disagreement we had yesterday, whatever it is, right? But when you're in a group, A, you can't fool the whole group, but it's really, you know, one of the only models that has been proven to drive behavioral change that's sustainable.

Exactly.

AA or any, any of those type of groups to whatever it is, giving better feedback or, or whatever the case, case is, right?

And someone that we've— I've seen this happen with groups I was coaching where someone said, next week I have this thing, I'm going to be asking for the promotion, or I'm asking for the raise, I'm going to be courageous for the first time, all these things. And then we come back a few weeks later and everyone's like, how did the conversation go? So the person can't be like, oh, I just kind of chickened out.

So accountability, right? If you bring up—

Exactly. Yeah.

And I'm going to talk to my direct report about the thing that's driving me crazy, blah, blah, blah. You can't duck that where that might have been on your to-do list for 3 weeks. But if you know Tuesday at 2:00 is the session, you're like, I got to get this done, right? So that's powerful, right?

And here's the thing. All this comes down to across the board, and I think this is what makes us a little bit different in probably why I've gotten feedback over years, you're just a little different with your leadership style, is that I, I very much so believe in fundamentals with excellence. There's a lot of great models out there. They might articulate things in different ways for different people, but it really comes down to a couple real key basics like follow-through, like having the tough conversation, like being willing to say the unpopular thing or whatever the case might be, and then actually following through with it On a consistent basis. Intensity. Yeah. So think about it a minute.

'Cause there, there isn't an anti-excellence movement that I know of that says good enough is okay.

Right?

Like everybody strives to be excellent, one would hope. Right? Or in, in successful organizations. However, the, you know, the flip side of that, we have other things that get added to the mix, like psychological safety, which sometimes in organizations we're moving too much in that direction, right? Like, okay, well, I can't give you good honest feedback because would that make you feel psychologically unsafe? No, that's not true, right? So how do you, how do you jive the, these two things that really shouldn't be in conflict, but you could sort of write it off to yourself and say, well, I'm, you know, she's fragile, so I'm not going to, mm-hmm. Never.

Again, it's as leaders, as thought leaders, we always have to ask ourselves, am I making an excuse? Because really what comes down to across the two things of feedback psychological safety, what's the core of that? Yeah, trust.

Yeah.

And if someone can't trust that they know where they stand inside of an organization, if someone can't trust that, oh, if I feel like I'm doing a good job but then I get a surprise at end of year with the performance rating I get, what does that do? And so it's looking at what, instead of the label, what's at the core, what's the intent, and are we driving towards that? And that's what I very much so mean by that fundamentals with excellence. A lot of these things are just different wrappers on the same intent. And of course, there's, there's going to be changes and enhancements of like how we're thinking about leadership, of being less, you know, top-down all the time and whatnot. But a lot of the core stuff stays the same. And if we stuck to that versus letting ourselves get pulled by a new shiny object of here's this new model, here's this new model, right? That's where I think we would see big differences in engagement and helping people unlock their potential.

Cool. So what are— as we start to wrap up for the day, what are the couple of things that you've learned or are learning or thinking about in this transition phase of practice to a business?

Number one, and this is something I've known for a bit, but trying to help organizations, is that people allocation is just as important as financial allocation.

Mm-hmm.

Where you put your top talent, where you're investing in your talent, is just like where you're putting your, your dollars as far as a financial plan. And so helping organizations to really understand that. That being said, when it comes to it, I think the biggest lesson I've learned is how much fear is driving most people's actions when it comes to leadership behaviors, right? So if I, if I go from like a practical to like a here's the meta of what I would say I have learned in the last year, in particular the last 6 months, yeah, is how much fear, fear of judgment, fear of looking like a fool, fear of not knowing enough, or whatever the case might be. But it's this fear of judgment is often driving a lot of people's leadership behaviors more than even they might realize.

Love it. Love it. This has been great. Appreciate your time and good luck on the journey. Thank you, Chris.

Great. Thank you so much.

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