This episode features an interview with Betsy Leatherman, Global President of Consulting Services at Leadership Circle. Betsy has 10 years of experience transforming executives and middle managers into exceptional leaders. In her current role, Betsy helps clients become more effective leaders so they can make decisions that engage and motivate members of their organizations and customers they serve. In this episode, Amanda and Betsy discuss leadership development, common mistakes leaders make during layoffs, and the two leadership orientations.
This episode features an interview with Betsy Leatherman, Global President of Consulting Services at Leadership Circle. Betsy has 10 years of experience transforming executives and middle managers into exceptional leaders. In her current role, Betsy helps clients become more effective leaders so they can make decisions that engage and motivate members of their organizations and customers they serve.
In this episode, Amanda and Betsy discuss leadership development, common mistakes leaders make during layoffs, and the two leadership orientations.
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“The rubber meets the road at the middle manager. Because, even if you've got a great leadership team that's highly developed, if they do not translate that through the way in which a middle manager shows up to a frontline employee, it doesn't matter. If you've got a great set of senior leaders, let's say, and then a set of middle managers that haven't been developed, it can actually be really, really challenging for the frontline employee. Because, they see one thing and they experience something so different, and immediately they'll lose trust. My perspective is if you start at a customer and then you move backwards in terms of importance, frontline employees are very important to be extraordinarily well-resourced. Their managers also have to be even better resourced, personally, to help them handle their complexities. When that occurs, all of a sudden it's at scale. You, as a leader, a senior leader in the organization, you're at scale because you're helping them to be better and you're getting their perspective and vantage point that you might otherwise not be offered.” – Betsy Leatherman
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Episode Timestamps:
*(01:59): Betsy dives into leadership development
*(08:35): Segment: Story Time
*(10:23): Why Betsy created a career in leadership development
*(17:17): Segment: Getting Tactical
*(25:16): Betsy explains the two leadership orientations
*(34:24): Segment: Ripped From The Headlines
*(34:54): Common mistakes leaders make during layoffs
*(40:46): Segment: Asking For a Friend
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Links:
Learn more about Leadership Circle
Connect with Betsy on LinkedIn
Follow Betsy on X (formerly Twitter)
Connect with Amanda on LinkedIn
Amanda Berry: Betsy, thank you so much for joining me today.
Betsy Leatherman: You are very welcome. Thanks for having me.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, I'm really excited to talk to you about all things leadership and leadership development. So I was reading an article you wrote, it's titled, Looking for Great Leaders: Invest in New Leaders. And one of the things that I was thinking over and over that I've seen companies do is they cherry pick people who they think they want in leadership positions and everyone else doesn't get that training.
Amanda Berry: And, you know, in my mind, I was thinking that's, it's a big miss because you're losing the opportunity to train them to have better skills that they can use while they lead themselves. And it also kind of sets the tone, like we want them to be leaders and not you guys, or we're picking them and not you, because everyone will benefit from that kind of development.
Amanda Berry: So what is your reaction to when companies don't train everyone to be leaders?
Betsy Leatherman: Yeah, I, well, I think it's a huge mistake to be honest. I think What I have experienced and what I know is that every person has the capacity and capability to be a great leader, every single person. And so when people get cherry picked, and they often do that for efficiency of spend reasons, like, Oh, we have this limited budget, so we can't take everyone in.
Betsy Leatherman: But the reality is that the age is upon us of the democratization of leadership, meaning. Everyone should have the opportunity to develop and be developed. And I actually think that is the responsibility of the company that they're with. To look out across the masses and see what is the way in which we can bring everyone forward because they all benefit from when that happens.
Betsy Leatherman: And when we democratize the development, it becomes for everyone and then it also becomes for life. And I think that's a really important thing to note. There's not like, You develop and you get to a certain plateau, and there you are, you're good. It's ongoing over and over because complexity continues to rise for people, and so they need that skill set, mindset, and tool set as they continue throughout their career.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, because for me, being a good leader isn't just about results, right? It's about these qualities, these human components to being a leader. We're hearing about it, empathy, and that's when that comes up, like what's the key component of a good leader, and it's Empathy, and people need help developing those qualities, even people who stand out as being a good leader.
Amanda Berry: So would you talk about why companies should invest in leaders and basically everyone?
Betsy Leatherman: Yeah. So what I know from the data that we have, we have the world's largest database on leader behavior. And what I know is our most effective leaders. And the ones that get the best business results are the ones that differentiate on relationship.
Betsy Leatherman: So, whether it be carrying connection, fostering team play, being a collaborator, or mentoring and developing others, however that relationship orientation shows up, those are the ones in our database that excel over the top and then they get better business results. Now that's not everyone's natural state.
Betsy Leatherman: And also I will tell you this, as people grow through their careers, they haven't always gotten results in that way. Oftentimes people have gotten great results by pushing forward, being really driven, or kind of controlling of what's going on. Or maybe even they attacked something with their head and so they were more cerebral and they excelled at doing that as an individual contributor.
Betsy Leatherman: Or they had kind of a heart based approach where they looked at everything that was happening and figured out exactly how to align. However, when they take that solemn vow of leadership and they take other people's lives into their hands in terms of how I lead, how I help, all of a sudden that shift, that change requires them to do something different with that same energy.
Betsy Leatherman: It's like, how do you take and harvest the gift of those things, but then put it in a new way. And the five things that we see in total are relationship, relationship, focus, self awareness. Do they have a high level of understanding what's happening for themselves? Authenticity, how authentic can they be about what's going on?
Betsy Leatherman: Systems awareness, can they see the whole system? And then achieving. Of those five, the differentiator in the end is relationship.
Amanda Berry: I wonder if companies have this list of those five things. I mean, you're saying from your database that ends up being what makes up a successful leader, but I think Me and a lot of listeners out here can say, Oh, I've had leaders that don't have three of those.
Betsy Leatherman: Totally. Yeah. So companies often have kind of like leadership qualities or lists that they said, these are the things we espouse or we ask our leaders to espouse to be. So lots of companies have that, or they might have values that are similar and kind of fall into those categories. If they don't, most of the time, um, at least now, back to your first question, even the new leaders are asking for that.
Betsy Leatherman: And they're saying like, what are the leadership standards we hold ourselves to? Whether that's at a team level or at an individual contributor level, what are the things that we need to be thinking about in terms of leadership? Because those should be part of the fabric, part of the culture of the organization.
Betsy Leatherman: What I've always said and experienced in many organizations, if you don't do that on purpose, It will happen for you. And they're not always the values that you really want to ascribe to that just kind of happen not on purpose.
Amanda Berry: For people who are listening with their HR, internal comms even, and they're helping companies stand up a leadership development program, what are some do's and don'ts into making people good leaders?
Betsy Leatherman: I think the most important thing is to understand that the leadership development agenda needs to tie in to the strategic agenda. So it's not two separate things. And sometimes people get so kind of focused on, we've got to do this leadership development program, or we have to take this level of leaders to a new level in terms of the way in which they handle complexity.
Betsy Leatherman: But all of that is, So that we can, and I think as long as they're asking themselves the question, like so that we can what we want to take them to a new level of complexity so that they may handle the market demands and challenges that are being placed in front of that level of leadership. Okay. So then what?
Betsy Leatherman: So that they may encounter those situations and know how to handle them better so they get better results. And then, all of a sudden, when you do that, you realize how important that leadership development is and what that really means for the whole program in its entirety. And that'll get people's attention.
Betsy Leatherman: I think sometimes people start off more on, Well, what do we want our leaders to do? What do we want our leaders to that there is significant strategic impact. And succession impact, how that ultimately impacts who gets promoted and who can step into the next role and who's trained to do that.
Amanda Berry: All right, let's back up for a few minutes and talk more about you.
Amanda Berry: I want to start understanding what you do. So let's move into our segment story time.
Amanda Berry: You're the GlobalPpresident of Consulting Services at Leadership Circle. What is Leadership Circle and what do you do there?
Betsy Leatherman: At Leadership Circle, we exist to evolve the conscious practice of leadership. For leaders across the globe. We believe that when leaders are more conscious, they will steward the planet in a better way.
Betsy Leatherman: And so that's why we exist. Um, we have products, resources, tools, development training that leaders can use to improve their level of consciousness as they face really leaders. And kind of two parts to our business. We have 18 principals inside the business that go direct to leaders to help them. And then we have 11, 000 certified practitioners that have their own businesses, but utilize our tools and our database inside of the work that they do.
Betsy Leatherman: So it's kind of fun. We basically think of us as like the, we serve the leader development market through either our own principals or through these 11, 000 certified practitioners and support them in the growth of their business.
Amanda Berry: How long does a training like that generally take with a leader?
Betsy Leatherman: You know, it depends on the organization and the appetite that they have.
Betsy Leatherman: I'm working a program right now for a large pharmaceutical organization. It's a five day immersion program. So we take them Monday through Friday. We immerse them in new concepts. They've actually been building on this for years. So they're eight years in, and this is their kind of third round as leaders go through.
Betsy Leatherman: I have other organizations that people might only have a half day session, or they might be in a year long program. It's really what is most appropriate for that organization and what the leaders can handle based off the pace of their business, really.
Amanda Berry: How did you get to this? Like, how did you decide you wanted to be, uh, have a career in leadership development?
Amanda Berry: Because it's important.
Betsy Leatherman: Oh, great question. So my background, my educational background is psychology and behavioral neuroscience. And I always, I love watching how people's minds work and how they develop. I went to the University of Minnesota. The University of Minnesota is a developmental based psychology program.
Betsy Leatherman: So essentially you look at an adult through the lens of everything that's ever happened to them, this journey they've been on. At the time, I didn't know it was really similar to leadership development. And in fact, when I started my career after school, I did primarily marketing and just so happened to have my first
Betsy Leatherman: role at a division of the Aon Corporation, where we focused on culture. And what I found out real quick was that if you want to have a great culture, You need great leaders and the way that my education and that tied together was just, it was phenomenal. It was really, really fun too. It's incredible work to get to sit with a leader and do that work.
Betsy Leatherman: After I left Aon, I started a marketing firm and some of the folks that I had met at that company asked me to do some projects with them and do kind of the marketing side, the communications and engagement side. And sold that business and then actually as a stay at home mom for five years with my boys.
Betsy Leatherman: And about five years in, I got a call from some of the folks I had worked with at Aeon and they said, Hey, are you ready to come back to work? And I said, no, no, I'm never working again. I'm just going to raise boys and this'll be it. And they said, well, let us just tell you about what we're doing. And we met and they told me about what they were doing.
Betsy Leatherman: And it was like, Everything in my career from day one at school all the way through the marketing organization all kind of put together into one role. And so I decided to step in that was 10 years ago. So I measure everything in little boy years. So the little boys were five and seven when I started and they're 15 and 17 now.
Amanda Berry: Wow. That's awesome.Congratulations. Nice to see everything come together like that.
Betsy Leatherman: It's a treat. And I mean, it's amazing to get to kind of have two roles. I get to run the consulting side of the organization, which is great. I mean, it's like, how can I serve this incredible audience of people who are making huge impact in the world?
Betsy Leatherman: What's the best way I can serve them and help them? That's one part of my job. And then the other part of my job, I actually get to do the work. So I actually get to sit with leaders and hear what they're wrestling with and listen to the way in which they process things, which, you know, So many changes that have happened in the world in the last several years and to watch leaders and sit beside them and see how they process and help them to do that, it actually feels like very sacred space.
Betsy Leatherman: So it's a pretty unbelievable job.
Amanda Berry: Now, what have you noticed out of the past few years? Some big changes and you've been doing it like 10 years or more. What have you been noticing since the pandemic or during the pandemic?
Betsy Leatherman: Yeah. So the pandemic, the pandemic was complexity at a level that none of us had ever imagined.
Betsy Leatherman: Really, or most of us, I should say. We hadn't necessarily thought we could be put into lockdown and that our businesses would fundamentally change and that parts of our business may dry up literally overnight while other parts of the faucet turned on. That was shocking to people. People also utilizing telecommunications now in this way is so normal, but back then it wasn't.
Betsy Leatherman: And so for people to have to turn so quickly on a dime. The good news is they figured it out and their heads have made sense of that. The reality is, is that the trauma remains in their body. I, this past year, I've been doing a pretty significant study on polyvagal theory, that your body basically holds on to those experiences,
Betsy Leatherman: even though your mind has processed it. So, so one of the beliefs about the body and mind is that your body holds the experience and the thinking about the experience is actually a secondary process. You actually make sense of it later. So even if our minds have made sense of that, the reality is, is that the trauma of that still resides in our body.
Betsy Leatherman: So then you come out of a pandemic, people are trying to figure out how to work in a hybrid style. We have a mass So, um, we've had this exodus event from business in total and we can't find the right employee. So now it's like, Oh my gosh, now we've got this hiring situation. Then all of a sudden you hit inflation and a potential recession.
Betsy Leatherman: And what I've seen with leaders is that this ongoing rise of complexity has been really challenging. And people are. Really getting tired out and you've actually seen some examples of it when you'll see a leader kind of spout off in a message to the company, like suck it up, get back in. You're fine.
Betsy Leatherman: That's actually a trauma based response now. Remember before when I talked about the kind of ways in which people as individual contributors step forth, if you step forth in the controlling way, that's a controlling response. You're trying to grab a hold of something and make sense of it so that you can survive in it.
Betsy Leatherman: That's not a leadership based response. A leadership based response would come from relating. It would come from authenticity. It would come from the desire to achieve still, but it would do that in a way. That is engaging of people and holding them in the space that they're in so that they can be enabled to do what they need to do and get the results as they want to get.
Betsy Leatherman: What we're finding is some leaders are doing that really well and some are absolutely exhausted by the prospect of continuing to have to do that.
Amanda Berry: I know we've seen some videos of that exact reaction. There's been CEOs come on and say, you know, suck it up. We got to get through this. What should CEOs have done in lieu of that?
Betsy Leatherman: So a couple of different things. The first is I think they still need to maintain the vision they have. So sometimes we as leaders get caught up in this belief that I have to like let go of my vision of getting everybody back into the office. and just acquiesce. Like, yep, you don't have to come to work anymore.
Betsy Leatherman: But even if I really believe that you ought to, you have to let go that there's a polarity that either you're in the office or you're out, right? You have to let go of that and find a more transformational third way. There's an author named Brian Emerson. He talks about taking polarities like that and finding a transformational third way to actually be.
Betsy Leatherman: And I think that's what CEOs need to figure out. They need to understand why in this case about coming back in the office. Why don't people want to come back in? What is the benefit of them being at home? And then what's the benefit of being at the office? And how can you together create a solution that everyone is in support of?
Betsy Leatherman: I would hesitate to believe that there are many people in an organization that actually don't want to get results. They do. Humans by nature want to get things done. They want to get results. Now, if you happen to have a group of people or individuals that don't want to get results, that's a different conversation.
Betsy Leatherman: That's a performance based conversation. But in mass, if they're getting a different result from something, the idea and concept of sitting down and understanding and asking them, why don't you want to come into the office? How can we make this better? How can this be a benefit to you? And understanding that is far more valuable than just saying, Hey, everybody get back in.
Betsy Leatherman: You got to do it now.
Amanda Berry: Let's move into our next segment, getting tactical.
Amanda Berry: From your experience, where does leadership development usually sit in an organization?
Betsy Leatherman: Depends on the size of the organization. Generally, the executive leadership team should have a vision and perspective on leadership development. Depending on the size, though, they might outsource that in terms of execution to an actual organizational development or leadership development function.
Betsy Leatherman: If they do not, it is absolutely the role of the leaders in the organization to figure out how they grow more leaders. And so, hopefully, an organization might have an expert around that that they can turn to and say, given your expertise, can you help us do this in the best way that links to our business?
Betsy Leatherman: But some organizations don't have that. And so, really, it needs to be study and execution by leaders in the organization. They need to hold that because development inside of an organization fundamentally relates to the achievement of strategy. And if it doesn't, then you actually end up having some problems around, why are you doing it anyway?
Amanda Berry: Yeah, so many times I see HR owns this, it's like a secondary function of HR. What are your thoughts on that?
Betsy Leatherman: I think that that is very useful and helpful as long as those HR people are equipped to have that conversation as a partner, as a team with the leader and bring that perspective. And I actually, I think that's a great function for HR to hold as long as they have the training development and support to do that.
Betsy Leatherman: If they do not, and you take kind of a traditional HR person and put them into that role, they might be able to hold the leadership development lens. But not also link it to the strategic business case, which I think is really the crux of leadership development, sticking and being extraordinarily valuable for the organization.
Betsy Leatherman: Yeah.
Amanda Berry: So when I think of leaders, so when we talk about leaders, I think that real high level executive, I mean, then there's the middle management part and then individual contributors, but I know from being an internal comms, the middle managers are very important in the relationship between employees and leaders, right?
Amanda Berry: Especially if they're like a hands on, front line, desk less worker, they're generally working with their manager. That's how they're getting information, that's how they're building their ideas, and basically... Learning what's new in the company, all of that stuff. What are the benefits in training that middle manager level to be good leaders?
Betsy Leatherman: They are vast. So the rubber meets the road at the middle manager, because even if you've got a great leadership team that's highly developed, if they do not translate that through the way in which a middle manager shows up to a frontline employee, it doesn't matter. And actually, if you've got a great set of senior leaders, let's say.
Betsy Leatherman: And then a set of middle managers that haven't been developed. It can actually be really, really challenging for the frontline employee because they see one thing and they experienced something so different and immediately they'll lose trust. Which they should, right? If I hear senior leaders saying this and my manager is actually doing the exact opposite of that, how can I trust that that's going to be true for me?
Betsy Leatherman: And so making sure that that middle manager with a vantage point that they have are well resourced in terms of how to handle complexity and handle situations with employees, not only will it achieve good results in terms of the business. Side, right? They'll get better business results. They will also enable that frontline employee more.
Betsy Leatherman: And from a leader development perspective, one of the things that I think is really important to see, if you're an executive leader and you look down at your middle management organization or look out at middle management and then look out one layer deeper, what you see is that there are people with different vantage points than you.
Betsy Leatherman: that you cannot take. So they see customer experiences different. They see the service delivery or even the product delivery at a level that you probably don't have access to. And so making sure that all of those people are well resourced to handle the complexity that they're facing only benefits the leadership team.
Betsy Leatherman: It only makes getting results that much easier. And so my perspective is if you started a customer and then you move backwards in terms of importance being frontline employees are very important to be extraordinarily well resourced. Their managers also have to be even better resourced in personally to help them handle their complexities.
Betsy Leatherman: And then when that occurs, all of a sudden it's at scale. You as a leader, a senior leader in the organization, you're at scale because you're helping them to be better and you're getting their perspective and vantage point that you might otherwise not be offered.
Amanda Berry: Thinking about this idea of training and being able to get that done, especially if like hands off or hybrid work culture, how are you seeing it leadership circle and that people are being trained?
Amanda Berry: Is it mostly through technology?
Betsy Leatherman: Depending again on the size of the organization and the topic of the training, we know and believe and have seen the benefits of like a lead tech platform. How do you use technology to enable leadership development? That needs to be put together with some hands on, face to face, kind of, the human, more human elements.
Betsy Leatherman: But the way in which those two work together not only helps to get it to more people, because it's obviously a more efficient way to distribute information, but there's also a whole group of learners that would rather learn. Quietly by themselves versus in a large group. And so you can get it to many more people.
Betsy Leatherman: What we are experiencing and testing and have in market now are technology tools to enable development at the individual and group level. And we're working on what is the role of AI and helping advance those people and reach even more. And we think that that is absolutely the future. And so we know that, I mean, in our instances and applications now, we're using AI to help people advance.
Betsy Leatherman: We know that's even going to be more so in the future.
Amanda Berry: What does that look like to have AI help with leadership development?
Betsy Leatherman: Here's a couple of ways. Let's pretend you and I are on a team and let's say there's 20 of us. And we can actually engage with questions in preparation. Let's say we're going to have an offsite.
Betsy Leatherman: We can engage with each other. We can engage individually and we can engage as a group utilizing technology. And I might be able to ask a question of the group. And the AI can actually read the group's feedback and give me a perspective. So you'd set it up, let's say we're headed to this off site. What do you think are the three most important strategic factors that we need to address as a team?
Betsy Leatherman: And as I put my input in, on the back end, AI is taking everybody else's input and feeding it back and saying, Oh, half of your colleagues would agree with you. And another third, they actually say this is more important. And so what's really nice about that is that in advance, I can be thinking about what it is that I might need to talk through at the meeting with everyone versus showing up at the meeting and trying to establish that as we're all sitting together.
Betsy Leatherman: So what that ultimately does is it ends up accelerating the team, right? We can start a conversation and have it for weeks or months in advance. And then when we get together, we can say, Hey, One of the things that we know we need to talk about is what are really the strategic things that we need a creative solution for.
Betsy Leatherman: And we know that half of us think this and half think that. Let's have that discussion. Well, that's quite accelerated from just figuring it out that day. You might also need tools and resources to be prepared for that discussion. And you can do that if you know it in advance. That's one way.
Amanda Berry: I want to talk about an article you were featured in, in Forbes.
Amanda Berry: The title of it is Three Keys to Shift Your Leadership Mindset. In that, you discuss two different kinds of leadership orientations. There's problem reacting and outcome creating. Can you break down the difference of those for us?
Betsy Leatherman: For sure. So, problem reacting is all about containing anxiety. So, a problem occurs at work, I get an email or a message or something happens, I get a phone call, worse yet, a problem occurs.
Betsy Leatherman: And I immediately react. I react in one of those ways that I talked about before. It could be a controlling way, it could be a protecting way, or it might be a complying way, but I react. When my reaction comes, the fear that that problem brought starts to go down. So I can take a deep breath. Problem's gone.
Betsy Leatherman: My reaction can wane a little. Fear is gone. Okay, we're good. Problem has gotten smaller yet again, and we go on like this for a while until, uh, oh, another one comes back. Another one comes up or the same one because my reaction started to go down. And this pattern creates this kind of oscillating loop of there's a problem.
Betsy Leatherman: I've got a solution. There's a problem. I've got a solution. And ultimately for leaders, what occurs is you get this anxiety response every time that the phone rings or every time you see a message about that. Oh, here's the problem back again. I'm going to have to address it. That's a problem reacting.
Betsy Leatherman: Anxiety containing. On the other side, based off of a whole bunch of research, but also the belief that problems never really go away. There's just a bigger vision that we get pulled to. When a problem comes up, instead of moving to this reactive response, what we want leaders to move toward is more like, what's your purpose or what's your vision?
Betsy Leatherman: Well, what's the way in which you want this fixed? So that what you do is not about reacting to the problem. but actually creating steps to get closer to your vision. Then as you create steps to get closer to that vision, the problem doesn't actually go away because now you're starting to integrate it in what you're trying to do that's more long term.
Betsy Leatherman: And you begin to get passionate about that outcome. Instead of just trying to eliminate anxiety or eliminate fear, you actually unleash passion. And everybody knows once passion is unleashed, the energy is so high and strong, you might actually start being in search of problems. You may get curious of wanting to know what's out there so that you can address it in terms of the longer term vision going forward.
Betsy Leatherman: So instead of being this pattern that's up and down, it becomes much more achieving in nature. Now you might have little ups and downs in there, but they tend to be much closer together because you're going for something that's much deeper from a place of purpose to a place of vision. So those are the kind of the differences of the two models.
Amanda Berry: Can you give me an example? I feel like I have worked in places where that problem reacting is the way to go. And I don't know if you have one that we could say like, well, this is how you would react with problem reacting. This is how you should react with outcome creating.
Betsy Leatherman: Yeah, sure. Why don't I take artificial intelligence as an example, because it's kind of a hot topic.
Betsy Leatherman: It's making a lot of complexity in leaders worlds right now. So actually I'll give you a personal example of where I found myself literally starting to do problem reacting. So I was in a meeting where our technology team was talking with me about some of the enhancements that we have coming based off of AI and what that was going to take.
Betsy Leatherman: And so What became reality for me in that moment was that there were people who knew much, much more about AI and had a much broader and built up perspective around how that would influence our business than me. So, That became a problem for me, right? Because in that instance, I'm supposed to be guiding and helping and leading.
Betsy Leatherman: And in fact, what I'm finding is like, I don't actually know everything about this subject. So my automatic reactive response, and it's really typical for me, was this kind of driven, I've got to learn everything immediately. about AI. And so that the problem of that would go away. And so I was like, started literally starting to write down, okay, find resources, read everything, stay up late to figure it all out.
Betsy Leatherman: And then you've got to do your other work too. But I'm, I'm literally starting to do that. And so after about a day of that, I was like, this is actually so big. I can't get that far. Fast, right? Like I can't do that on my own. And while the problem started to go away a little in our next day of meetings, I knew a little bit more, I could contribute a little bit more.
Betsy Leatherman: So I was feeling a little bit better. We go the next day and they have a whole new level of understanding. And I'm like, okay, I've got to think about something different. And what I realized was I was in this anxiety containing reactive loop. So instead, and what I did was utilize my connection system. I thought, well, they know more than I do about this.
Betsy Leatherman: So what I need to do is get really curious about what they know. I could reach out to customers, too. I happen to coach several people who are looking at their organization and how their organization responds with AI. So I'm like, well, I could ask them, what are the ways you think about this? How are you achieving this with your business?
Betsy Leatherman: And all of a sudden, instead of it just being what I could do, like in an overnight reading, right? I actually got to leverage All of these people around me, what they had already thought about, they knew so much more. And then I could Put my role as a leader connecting the system to itself and all of a sudden the way I was able to contribute was so much more significant and it was right on path with my purpose and my vision.
Betsy Leatherman: And so instead of being afraid of this topic of AI. I'm super curious now and I'm super curious about what other people think, how my customers have experienced that, how I might better enable leaders, practitioners, or principals. And it's, it's a curious, fun space for me. And so I want it more. So I'm literally like, anybody tell me anything about AI.
Betsy Leatherman: Tell me what you think. Tell me what you think, because I want to hear what they've got so that I might be able to piece that together in some way to help someone else. You can almost feel the difference when I even tell the two stories.
Amanda Berry: I can, yeah. Even the way you're like sitting there, I can feel your anxiety, and then you're like, I'm so curious, like it's totally different vibe I'm getting.
Betsy Leatherman: Well, and can you imagine the outcome, the product outcome, how different that would be from like, okay, I'm just going to try and take this and figure it out and do all these things. The difference of what might come from that versus I'm going to connect to all these experts around the world, see what they think and see if I can kind of pull this together and hand it to the experts and be like, what else could we use to service our practitioners and our leaders and our principals in a better way?
Betsy Leatherman: That's a going to be a way better product than anything I'm going to come up with. So that's a one that is near and dear and very recent to me.
Amanda Berry: It's almost like when you hear a problem, you need to like, Stop. And like take an assessment of yourself.
Betsy Leatherman: Yes, right away. As a matter of fact, when I was at Anne, we used to use the phrase, stop, challenge, choose.
Betsy Leatherman: Stop, take three deep breaths. From my neuroscience days, when you do that, when you take those three deep breaths, it actually allows you to utilize the executive function of your brain. If you don't do that, you're probably responding for more like a fight or fight. Place and stop. Challenge what you're thinking.
Betsy Leatherman: Is this the best way to go about this? Does this make the most sense? And then choose the path that you want. I was just telling a leader the other day, I've implemented something similar to that. The second, and I've, I've gotten really, really good with knowing when anxiety is coming up in my body at all, really good at listening.
Betsy Leatherman: So I get, mine's like a motor in my belly. As soon as I feel that motor, I stop and I count backwards from seven. So, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, feels like a really long time all of a sudden, then I relax my jaw, my shoulders and my neck. I find that I hold a lot of stress here, a lot of my reactive stress is here. And as soon as I do that and let go of it, I'm in a totally different response place.
Betsy Leatherman: So now I can utilize that executive functioning and say, okay, what do you really want to do with this right now? Versus I just need to react or respond.
Amanda Berry: It feels like sometimes when you respond, when you react, you can make a lot of mistakes and miss things.
Betsy Leatherman: Yeah. And you also don't get everybody else's perspective, which inherently, if you're not utilizing all of those vantage points throughout the organization and actually bigger than the organization, if you're not utilizing the ecosystem that is around you, including customers, including competitors, including partners, then Really, as a leader, are you getting a full perspective on what you need to do to take advantage of the opportunity that's been placed in front of you so that you might bring something even better to the market?
Betsy Leatherman: And I think if you're not thinking in an ecosystem way and like, what could the ecosystem tell me about this? What systemically is out there? I don't think you're utilizing everything properly.
Amanda Berry: Let's move into our next segment, Ripped From The Headlines.
Amanda Berry: From my perspective, one of the biggest impacts or dings that happens to leadership is around layoffs, right? When leaders have to lay off a group of folks, it hurts trust and all sorts of feelings within employees. And there's been quite a few in the past year, year and a half.
Amanda Berry: From your perspective, working with leaders, what are some common mistakes leaders make when they do like mass layoffs?
Betsy Leatherman: I think one of the most common mistakes is to believe that it is supposed to be. Easy or quick or not hard. And I would suggest that if any leader finds layoffs easy, quick, or not hard, they ought to take a really good look in the mirror and see if leadership is for them.
Betsy Leatherman: And that's not to say that they don't have to be done. Sometimes organizations have grown too fast. Sometimes their results no longer support having a particular group or a particular audience. But the reality is, if you have to let anybody go, it needs to be done with a solemn, Val, that you took your leadership role with, and you need to understand that you are fundamentally addressing someone's safety.
Betsy Leatherman: And I think when you take it with the seriousness that it really is, and you also know that even though you're doing this on behalf of an organization, The way in which you handle that becomes about who you are as a leader and who you are as a person. Then, some really basic rules apply. To the extent that you can be there for the person in the moment that they are in, at a one on one level, I think that is advantageous.
Betsy Leatherman: Unfortunately, that is not always possible, especially with the mass layoff situations. And so taking the perspective and understanding, I'm about to deliver information that could fundamentally reach someone at the deepest level of their identity and holding it with that level of seriousness and appropriateness in terms of how it is communicated, I think is the most important thing leaders can do.
Betsy Leatherman: Um, Transcribed Reaching out and making sure that they have resources available to them when they may be truly stripped of knowing what do I even do next is really important. But I think for all humans, one of the core most basic elements of identity is how do I make a living? Like, even if you try not to be defined by your job and all of those things, the reality is that there are elements of your identity that what you do every day is part of who you are.
Betsy Leatherman: And so, when people go through a mass layoff situation, understanding that's actually what you're dealing with and connecting to, understanding the depth of how far that goes into personality and character structure is really important.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, absolutely. You know, the other big part of this beyond layoffs that we've been seeing in the past year and a half is this burnout and fatigue that employees are feeling.
Amanda Berry: Why do you think there's so much fatigue employees are feeling right now?
Betsy Leatherman: I think it's because complexity continues to get brought higher and higher for them. And I think a lot of people are working to solve those intellectually and not necessarily realize that we're coming out of the pandemic and coming out of the time when you couldn't find employees.
Betsy Leatherman: And then we're coming out of now inflation and potentials for recession. As we come out of all of that, again, those Experiences are resonant in people's bodies, so one new layer of complexity and people are like, I just don't have any more capacity to handle this. One of the things I often say to my friends as we talk about different people and situations, they have someone who's responding in a way that is unwarranted or other than positive or neutral.
Betsy Leatherman: I often like to say, I don't think they're very well resourced. I don't think they're resourced to handle the moment that they're in. And so the question becomes, how can I help resource them? Um, whether that's me providing that or somebody else, how can we help someone be more, better resourced? I think employee fatigue is a lot about that.
Betsy Leatherman: I think that employees need resources to understand how to handle the complexity that they are in. And that is at every single level of an organization. There is not one leader that I have met yet. That has said to me, well, I think I'm done with my leadership development journey. In fact, the leaders that score most creative, if not integral, those with the highest level of effectiveness are the ones that say to me, please give me more resources.
Betsy Leatherman: Please help me understand what I can do better. What are my employees saying about me? And they'll have glowing 360s, right? And they're like, well, that's great. And I'm so how it's helpful to see that. So I know myself as an asset inside the system. But what could I do to be more utile to people? What could I do to be more helpful?
Betsy Leatherman: It's a constant urge. And I think as people get more and more fatigued, those are the type of leaders that we need to step in and help people make sure they have the right resources to handle whatever's coming their way.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. This, this really ties back to what you said earlier about. When you're outcome creating, you go look for problems.
Amanda Berry: That's what it sounds like I'm hearing for that later, like, give me more. I want to keep learning rather than hide from, you know, where your weaknesses are. They're like, no, I want to keep going. So look for those problems.
Betsy Leatherman: That's right. And actually, you know, I love when I do a 360 review with a leader and they take it in and they're like, okay, great.
Betsy Leatherman: Let's get to work on these things. As soon as I get these completed, can we go find more? Can we go find out more of what I could do? That's a really different approach than people that might get that feedback and be like, Oh my gosh, I can't believe this. I didn't know. feel bad, or I'm not happy about it, right?
Betsy Leatherman: So it's just a totally different orientation. And that's okay. Either of those responses are actually just fine. They just tell me where a leader is in a developmental cycle so that I can help them get to the next place. But yes, when they're at that more outcome creating, they're hungry for information and knowledge, really hungry for what they might do better.
Amanda Berry: Let's get into our last segment, asking for a friend.
Amanda Berry: What advice would you give to those looking to improve their leadership development? And that could be at any level, right? Individual contributor wants to have better leader skills so maybe that they can move up or even just a leader. What advice would you give people?
Betsy Leatherman: Well, step one would be start.
Betsy Leatherman: Oftentimes we have this idea and like, I want to try something different or I want to be something more and it's hard to get started. So I would say start is the number one thing. And they might say, well, how do you start? What do you do? I would ask for feedback. I would say to people around you, if you don't know, Hey, what is it that I could do to be more effective?
Betsy Leatherman: So, what as a teammate, as your direct report? What can I do? What can you do to be helpful for me that you're not getting today? And then they'll say something and then it's like, okay, how do I do that? How do I develop that? What are the resources, skills, and tools to be able to do that? One of the things that I'm...
Betsy Leatherman: Honestly, sometimes overwhelmed by, but always incredibly impressed is the amount of information that's available on the internet around how do I develop as a leader? How many possible podcasts I can listen to? How many books are available? Leaders talking about what has worked with them. Some of my favorite books are books about leaders who have gone into a big job with lots of complexity
Betsy Leatherman: and failed. I mean, I love hearing about it. As a matter of fact, there's a very famous leader who wrote a book and I read it and I was so intrigued with his failure. I emailed him and I said, I want to sit down. I want to talk with you. I want to learn more. I want to learn everything. And he was like, absolutely, I'll tell you everything.
Betsy Leatherman: Why don't we meet? And so we had lunch and he did, he went through everything and. And as I was encountering new things, global expansion, things that he had worked through and not done well in his perspective, to hear his thoughts and ideas about what I might do, it was unbelievable. Now, when I tell people about who the leader is and that we reached out and that they responded, it was like in 22 minutes.
Betsy Leatherman: They're like, how did that happen? I have no idea to be honest with you. But what I do know is that I reached out for connection and they responded. So I would say the other thing is. Use the resources around you, whether that's email to reach out to an author and say, Hey, I'd love to talk more about this or other people within your organization.
Betsy Leatherman: They have lots of input that they can give. And also I think it makes people feel really good to be able to give their thoughts about what worked and what didn't.
Amanda Berry: I think there's something really humanizing. And when I read stories like that, like if somebody creating a failure and I'm hearing from people at companies that the company wants them to fail fast.
Amanda Berry: Admit to it and then keep going. There's something really humanizing about that. Because I think sometimes leaders, maybe leaders, maybe just employees, some people can make mistakes and we don't really hear about them. So that when we make mistakes. It feels like we're the only people making mistakes.
Betsy Leatherman: Absolutely. So this is a story of years ago, back before email. So this was like in my first internship out of college. And we, our company at Aon, we use voicemail like we use email now. So you'd voicemail someone and say something and then you could voicemail the whole company. And I will never forget this.
Betsy Leatherman: We had a leader who had done an offsite with a team. And they had made a choice about doing something and it violated the safety of the group. And they got on an all company email and they said, Hey, I just wanted to share what I did today because I actually put the participant in a safety risk.
Betsy Leatherman: Thankfully, nothing happened, but here was the setup. Here's the way it occurred. And I'm sharing it with all of you so that you know, and you're aware and you don't make the same mistake I did. I tell you what, that for me as an employee was so formidable. I was like, Oh my gosh, I cannot believe this person just shared this with all of us.
Betsy Leatherman: And everybody responded back. Thank you so much for sharing. I've done that before and I didn't even realize what could have happened. I so appreciate it. And I was like, wow. And the very last share back was just remember a mistake, if not shared, is just a mistake. But if a mistake happens and you share it, It's information going forward for the system.
Betsy Leatherman: And I have always kept that so close to me. It's information going forward for the system. And so if you're in that outcome creating mindset, and you're trying to figure out everything you can, if somebody has made a mistake and something happened, that's great, because all of a sudden you have new information that you didn't have before.
Betsy Leatherman: And so fostering that open communication and back and forth. Tell us what happened. All of a sudden, it's like, Oh, wow. Okay, that's great. And of course, it requires that you're listening and hearing and understanding, but it does provide quite a great deal of resource for the organization. Yeah.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. I've had a conversation with some folks on the podcast before where that we talk about and what's missing.
Amanda Berry: Because, you know, a lot of times people don't let go of mistakes. If you're a perfectionist or you want to do things right, or you're used to seeing everyone do everything right, or at least you think, when you make a mistake, it like, it becomes a core memory. When I was talking to some folks earlier in the year about this, what we decided was, the way your leader reacts to your mistake
Amanda Berry: is a huge impact on how you sort of process that as well. Like, if you have a leader that's like, hey, it happens, kind of laughing about it, trying to raise your spirits because you're on the verge of tears or whatever, that's one thing. Then it helps, immediately helps an anxiety sort of calm down. But if you have a leader who's just, not as empathetic.
Amanda Berry: It just completely like, like you think you're getting fired. They never let it go. That's a totally different reaction.
Betsy Leatherman: Yes. And the way in which they lead in those moments, how they deploy themselves into that circumstance, that's what remind leaders. Like you're not just doing, you're not just acting. You are
Betsy Leatherman: actively deploying yourself into circumstance in this moment, how they do that could determine how you as a leader end up in 10 or 15 or 20 years, right? And so if you actually take it in that vein as a leader, all of a sudden the way in which I behave, I want to slow things down, right? I really want to slow down so that I can make sure that I actually deploy the way I would want to versus the way my gut instinct might be.
Betsy Leatherman: For me, one thing that my team and I did a few years ago, I was scheduling myself in meetings too rapidly. I would do like meeting after meeting after meeting. And I'd find by the fourth meeting, particularly if we're like on a team's meeting or on zoom, I would look at myself and I would be going like this.
Betsy Leatherman: And that had nothing to do with the meeting or the content of the meeting. That was about me being hungry or tired or overwhelmed with information or overwhelmed with needing to respond. And so I made the choice to do no more than three meetings a day after that. And it took a long time because I am a person that wants to be there for my team.
Betsy Leatherman: Right? So if anybody needs something, I want to be right there. But what I found is it just works better if I have three a day, then someone shoots me a message and says, Hey, can you talk through this? I'm much better to do that. I'm relaxed. I'm calm. I'm way more helpful. And I get actually get a lot more done.
Betsy Leatherman: And that was, you know, I got that from a lot of feedback from people that said, do you know, you're like rubbing your head and your eyes in meetings, and sometimes you'll just put your head in your hands and just respond vocally. And Well, thank you for the feedback. I guess I should turn my own camera so I can watch myself.
Amanda Berry: Because when I was, when you were doing that, if I was in a meeting with you, I'd be like, Oh, I've, she's bored. She's done with this conversation. She doesn't look into it. I got to wrap this up and get off of here.
Betsy Leatherman: Right. Or she's annoyed with the way we're doing this or whatever. When in fact, this, if I'm doing this, it means that I am like so in that I'm actually trying to think harder.
Betsy Leatherman: And if I turn my gaze from the screen, it's generally because I'm trying to think versus Be as a leader, just be with what they're telling me and not feel like I have to respond or react or have any sort of solution. So candidly, what they probably need is to just talk it through with me and that that is actually more useful than any, you know, solution I might come up with.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. I've noticed myself that I have certain reactions like that, like the way I might make a face when someone asks me a question and then I'll see it or, you know, I'll see it in my camera and I'll be like, wow, that came across as really annoyed and sort of like looked angry. I know changing that behavior is very, very hard sometimes, or even just the way that you react to someone who gives you bad news at work or even at home.
Amanda Berry: It's hard to change that fundamental behavior that we're sort of used to, but once you recognize it, it's a little bit easier.
Betsy Leatherman: Well, it's true. And you know, we just had a situation with a leader. It was actually really cool to see. So there were probably five of us on the email, sent an email. There were some Information in there that could have been other than positive or neutral.
Betsy Leatherman: Somebody wrote back and had a pretty reactive response to it. It came back to all of us. We read it. We were like, okay. And then came back a few moments later and said, can I try that again? That was not the best me. That was not the way I want to deploy myself against this situation. Let me try that again.
Betsy Leatherman: And then rewrote their response. And I tell you what, the courage to do that, the authenticity to say, a second, that's not who I am. That's not who I want to be. And the action orientation to rewrite that to all those people and come back. It was pretty remarkable, actually. It actually was a really cool lesson.
Betsy Leatherman: I know that the person wishes it wouldn't have happened in the first place. But getting to see the way in which they changed that was really fun.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, it goes back to what you said, sharing mistakes, right? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Even just hearing that, I'm like, oh, it almost feels like I have permission to do that when I don't show up my best self.
Amanda Berry: I can say, hey, no, you can still fix this. Yeah. Yeah. That's incredible.
Amanda Berry: Well, Betsy, this has been so much fun. You're amazing. I've had a great time talking to you. I feel like there's so much I can learn from you. If we had 20 hours to record this, I would have a million questions and learn so much. So thank you so much for being on Cohesion.
Amanda Berry: I really appreciate it. Before I let you go, let our listeners know where they can find you if they want to reach out.
Betsy Leatherman: Absolutely. So leadershipcircle.com is our website and my email is betsy.leatherman at leadershipcircle.com or you can reach out on LinkedIn. I'm on all those places and I'm also at Twitter.
Betsy Leatherman: My handle is at BBleather.
Amanda Berry: Great. Thank you so much for joining me Betsy. This has been great.
Betsy Leatherman: Thank you so much. Have a great day. I appreciate it.
Amanda Berry: You too.