We're thrilled to share our conversation with Dr. Jan Freed, a beacon of wisdom in the realm of leadership.
Dr. Freed, a keynote speaker, leadership expert, and author, is no stranger to the concept of legacy, bringing to the table her invaluable insights on a life lived with a lasting impact. We take a deep dive into her fascinating notion of 'Breadcrumb Legacy', dissecting how leaders can leave significant marks and foster a culture of wisdom, even amidst change and succession.
In the episode, we explore the influence and impact that leaders can have on others even in the way they end a meeting or leave a room. We also get into the power of feedback loops, both in personal growth and organizational evolution. We take a hard look at the dangers of ego and fear-based leadership, the venom they inject into work cultures, and the essential role of self-responsibility in shifting legacies.
Navigating change and grief is crucial in leadership today. We discuss the importance of metabolizing grief to foster resilience and collaboration. And finally, we delve into the qualities needed to foster trust and generosity in an organization, and how having an abundance mindset or servant leadership mindset can support the creation of a healthy culture.
About Jann Freed, PhD
Apart from being a successful leadership consultant Dr. Jann is the author or co-author of five books. In her most recent book, Leading with Wisdom: Sage Advice from 100 Experts, she interviews prominent leadership gurus such as Jim Autry, Marshall Goldsmith, Sally Helgeson, Dan Pink, and Margaret Wheatley. One of the book’s key insights: to be a powerful leader you must keep your ego in check. In other words, it’s hard to be a good leader if you’re not a good person.
We're thrilled to share our conversation with Dr. Jan Freed, a beacon of wisdom in the realm of leadership.
Dr. Freed, a keynote speaker, leadership expert, and author, is no stranger to the concept of legacy, bringing to the table her invaluable insights on a life lived with a lasting impact. We take a deep dive into her fascinating notion of 'Breadcrumb Legacy', dissecting how leaders can leave significant marks and foster a culture of wisdom, even amidst change and succession.
In the episode, we explore the influence and impact that leaders can have on others even in the way they end a meeting or leave a room. We also get into the power of feedback loops, both in personal growth and organizational evolution. We take a hard look at the dangers of ego and fear-based leadership, the venom they inject into work cultures, and the essential role of self-responsibility in shifting legacies.
Navigating change and grief is crucial in leadership today. We discuss the importance of metabolizing grief to foster resilience and collaboration. And finally, we delve into the qualities needed to foster trust and generosity in an organization, and how having an abundance mindset or servant leadership mindset can support the creation of a healthy culture.
About Jann Freed, PhD
Apart from being a successful leadership consultant Dr. Jann is the author or co-author of five books. In her most recent book, Leading with Wisdom: Sage Advice from 100 Experts, she interviews prominent leadership gurus such as Jim Autry, Marshall Goldsmith, Sally Helgeson, Dan Pink, and Margaret Wheatley. One of the book’s key insights: to be a powerful leader you must keep your ego in check. In other words, it’s hard to be a good leader if you’re not a good person.
Hey leaders, I can't wait for you to meet Dr Jan Freed in today's episode. Jan is an accomplished keynote speaker with a couple of amazing TEDx talks under her belt, one titled Embracing Death Life Through a Different Lens and another titled Becoming a Nobody, which looks at ego in the face of leadership and leadership development. She is a leadership expert and also a five times published author. She has a book called Breadcrum Legacy how Great Leaders Live a Life Worth Remembering, and her most recent book, which we will discuss a bit of the findings from inside the episode today, is called Leading with Wisdom Sage Advice from 100 Experts. Jan is an amazing researcher academic, but she also has the real world leadership development consultancy experience and brings so much wisdom into today's episode from looking at death as a teacher for how we might embrace grief during major transitions and change that we inevitably face as leaders running companies in today's world. What I love about Jan's background is that she is bringing her academic perspective from all of the research she's done on top leaders and combining this with her real world experience in coaching and consulting in her leadership development work. Jan has some amazing insight into the typical symptoms and behaviors that we might see in toxic work cultures with toxic leaders versus really healthy work cultures where a leader might be leading from a place of authenticity, generosity, purpose.
Speaker 1:
Inside today's episode, we're going to get into how a leader can be leaving a legacy as they run their company. We'll get into what leaving a legacy actually is. Is that something that you do at the end of your career or when you leave a position, when you leave this earth, or is that something that we get to consciously cultivate, bit by bit throughout our lives? How can they lead from wisdom and keep wisdom or knowledge alive and well inside of an organization, even through succession? How can leaders face the current meaning crisis that we seem to be in to align with a larger sense of purpose? How can leaders unlock and leverage feedback loops to become better leaders who are leaving positive legacy, and so much more.
Speaker 1:
It's a really valuable conversation. So glad that you're here for another week on Living Leaders. Without further ado, let's get right into our conversation with Jan. Jan, welcome to the Living Leaders podcast. I'm so excited to have you today. Thank you, I'm honored to be here. I've been particularly excited to have this conversation with you because of your work in leadership and legacy, and I would love to just help ground listeners in your background a little bit before we get into what I know is going to be a really powerful conversation. So I'd love to hear more about how you got to where you are and what you're working on these days that has you feeling alive.
Speaker 2:
That's wonderful. I was a college professor and I say that I only did that for about 30 years, so I taught undergraduates and a small liberal arts college in Iowa. I was a professor of business management leadership. In my last 10 years I was an endowed chair in leadership and character development. So I really did this deep dive into leadership when I got that chair. And it's an interesting story because in 2004, I was granted a sabbatical and you have to have a research project and I knew I wanted it to be around leadership.
Speaker 2:
So I attended Jim Collins book Good to Great had just come out. He was doing a book tour and so I went to hear him speak and I wanted to be the last one in the line because I wanted to ask him a question. So I said can I come study with you, be an apprentice? Can I shadow you? Can I learn from you? And he honestly looked at me like he'd never heard that question before and I said I'm going to be on sabbatical and I'd like to see if I could do this as part of my sabbatical work. And he said oh gosh, I don't really know. I've never been asked that question before. And I pulled out a one page document. That was an article that he had written for Training Magazine, and in the center is his picture. Now it was published in 1999. This is 2004. And I said I carried this in my Franklin planner on a daily basis. We're not carrying those anymore, but that's what I was doing. And he said okay, here's my car, give me a call, we'll talk. When I called him, he said my wife has just been diagnosed with breast cancer. We don't really know what's going to happen Now. To my understanding, everything has turned out fine, which is great. But at the time he said I really cannot take this on as a commitment, but I will speak with you for an hour.
Speaker 2:
On the fall I was also heading up a speech program and we tried to get him as a speaker, and so I know at the time that he was charging $5,000 an hour to coach and that it was going to cost like $45,000 to have him come speak. We couldn't afford that. But I did talk to him for an hour and he helped me frame my research study, which turned out to be a book called Leading with Wisdom Sage Advice from 100 Experts, and I actually interviewed more than 100 people, but some really of the top thought leaders in leadership Warren Benes, margaret Wheatley, sally Helgesson, parker Palmer, and the list goes on, and after analyzing the data, each theme that emerged became a chapter, and one chapter in the book was called Leaders Live their Legacy, and I found that just really resonated with people. I was getting keynote talks and workshops requested based on Leaders Live their Legacy, which I called Leadership Legacy. So then I did a deep dive into legacy work and out of that then I developed this concept called Bread Crumb Legacy how Great Leaders Live a Life Worth Remembering, and I'm sure we're going to talk more about that.
Speaker 2:
What I do now is I actually left full-time teaching after 30 years and for the past 10 years I've been teaching a graduate leadership course for the University of Iowa. I'm in Des Moines, iowa, but I primarily do speaking, writing, workshops and leadership coaching. So that's where I am now and working on a big project with a manufacturing company really trying to develop leaders. Too many people fall into leadership positions, nicole, without any training, background, study, reading. They just fall into it or they get promoted into it and really do not understand what it takes to really inspire others. So I'll stop there.
Speaker 1:
Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing. And you're so right. Often leaders do find themselves in these positions and don't necessarily have the training. Maybe they've been conditioned into a set of rewards and incentives that isn't actually healthy for an organizational culture or leaving a legacy for future generations to come. Here on Living Leaders, we talk a lot about that multi-generational perspective of leaving the world a better place. We have a lot of sustainability professionals and executives who tune into this podcast especially for them. I'm really keen to get into your specific definition and how can leaders be thinking about living their legacy? I love the way you framed on that.
Speaker 2:
I imagine that's very intentional of not just leaving, but also living, and I wanted to tell you that I really like the name of your podcast, because my definition of a leader, first of all, it's a person who's in a position to influence the lives of others. That's a very broad definition. My definition of a leader includes parents, pastors, teachers, coaches more than just bosses or managers and one of the examples that I often use when I do workshops and actually I'm doing a keynote tomorrow and I'm using this story so during my sabbatical, which was about 2004, I went to a workshop facilitated by Peter Senghi. Now, at the time, peter Senghi was one of the major gurus of leadership. This was at MIT and he's the one who coined the phrase systems thinking. His main book is the fifth discipline and I think it's the art of system thinking. In this workshop he starts off by asking us how do we define leader? What does it mean to be a leader? Then he reminded us that the root word spire S-P-I-R-E or S-P-I-R Latin root word means breath. He said a leader should breathe life into people, projects and programs. I often use that because inspiration, aspiration, this whole idea of breathing life into leaders should breathe life into. I often in workshops will say have you ever worked for someone who they just took your breath away in a very negative way, like you couldn't breathe or you were suffocating. They come into the room and you just feel like they popped the balloon. That is a bad leader. That is someone who's not breathing life into people, programs and projects, but taking their breath away in a very negative way. That's how I look at leadership.
Speaker 2:
Then legacy I came up with this concept when I was doing workshops on leading with wisdom my book Leading with Wisdom. I would ask participants I'd say when do we leave our legacy? People would say when we leave, and I'd say, okay, leave what? Leave the earth when we die, leave a job, leave a career when we retire? And I'd say that's true. But I said, what happens when I leave this room today? What happens when you leave a meeting? We are leaving our legacy in bite-sized pieces all along the way every day. When we are aware of that and we look at life like that, then I think it's our North Star, it's our true North, it's our guiding light. It can keep us in our lane and not get out of control. So, anyway, that's where I put the two together. So breathe light into people, programs and projects and then be aware that we're leaving our legacy. We're dropping crumbs all the time and they accumulate, and these crumbs are not necessarily positive.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, that's a good call out too that they're not necessarily always positive being aware and intentional about how we feel when we leave a room or the influence that we've had on the people who we've just interacted with. I love the way that you're framing this as breadcrumbs and how it slowly builds over time. We find ourselves in a moment in work culture right now where there is, unfortunately, a lot of ego, a lot of fear-based mentality at certain leadership levels. I know, at least in the organizations that I've worked in and helped consult for, where there's been more toxic work culture. There's typically a fight or flight, reactive state that a leader might be in. They're maybe doing their best to survive, but they might not always understand how that reactivity that they're stuck in is impacting others, to the point where, if you're perpetuating this reactivity in this fight or flight, we're actually hijacking the collective nervous system of our teams in a way and maybe those employees go on to have lower quality relationships with their spouse or they turn to a coping mechanism like alcohol.
Speaker 1:
We talk a lot about that piece here on the podcast and, similar to your definition, living leaders are always in the present moment of their leadership, starting with self leadership and taking that responsibility, that self responsibility of how I show up matters, how I model and embody my values, the language that I use and ensuring that's not harmful, it all matters. And so I guess I'm painting this picture and inviting us into the space of imagining a toxic workplace, where maybe a leader has been trained to lead more from ego. What can a leader do to notice the legacy that they're living and leaving? And if they notice that they're not so happy with their breadcrumbs and maybe there is some negative impact, what can a leader begin to do to shift the legacy that they're creating day to day?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, first, those are excellent questions and I just wanted to say that I agree with everything that you just said. In fact, the other day I was listening to a podcast interview with the former CEO of IBM and Jenny Rometti. She made a statement that I wrote down and she said how you do something will probably be remembered more than what you do. So again, that how includes tone of voice and where you communicate and how you deliver that message and how you make that decision. I thought that was a powerful quote.
Speaker 2:
I'm a big believer in feedback, because you don't know how you're being perceived. You don't know how it's received on the other end. When I was teaching, I have several what I would call feedback mechanisms that I would collect on a regular basis, because usually in higher education they do faculty evaluations done at the end of the course. That's too late for me to make that course better for those students. So I would administer my own very simple feedback mechanisms about every three weeks. Once students understood that there are no repercussions, that they do trust me and I actually tell them what I will or will not do based on their feedback, then students just started sending me ideas. Have you thought of this, what if you did that? What if you made this change? So I think leaders have to really be open to feedback and be asking for it, because if you're the boss, unless you've created a really safe environment that I worked hard to create as a faculty member, unless you do that, people are less likely to give you feedback.
Speaker 2:
Once you create the environment, that will tell you how you're being perceived, what the breadcrumbs. And then I think, like you said, self-leadership, self-awareness we can tell. I also do workshops on assertiveness and assertive behavior. If you know the difference between passive, aggressive and assertive behavior, then you know when you've made mistakes, you know when you've been too passive or you've been too aggressive and maybe you need to apologize or maybe you need to speak up more. I think that self-awareness and then that with feedback, because we can control, we certainly can influence. I mean it controls too strong of a word control the legacy, but we can certainly influence if we're aware of our actions. A leader's legacy involves how you say something, how you behave, what you say, how you interact All of those are part of your legacy.
Speaker 1:
Beautifully said. It reminds me a little bit of what you often hear in trauma healing space as well, around intent versus impact it's. I love what you're saying about building in as many frequent feedback loops as you can, because we might not always have an accurate view of the perception that others have of us. What's also fascinating about this, too, is this is how nature works as well. Nature builds in as many iterative feedback loops as it possibly can to sense, make its context, so that it can appropriately evolve to be a fit for its context. We love to geek out on biomimicry and regenerative business models at living leaders, too, very great, it's a perfect metaphor Excellent.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and living more like an organism than a machine, and I think business is at an incredible moment right now where we're realizing that the top-down approach isn't the only approach. There are more adaptive structures for our organizations that might have more idea flow, where people do feel safe to give feedback. So I love that.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, Are you familiar with Margaret Wheatley's book Leadership in the New Science?
Speaker 1:
Not that book.
Speaker 2:
Specifically, I love the loops model that she's telling, that's my favorite book of hers Leadership in the New Science and that was the first book that I read that really helped me understand organizations as living systems Amazing, amazing. And I've interviewed her for my last two books, so I'm a big fan of Meg Wheatley.
Speaker 1:
Excellent. If the audience hasn't read that book yet, I think that's a great recommendation for our audience as well. So thank you, wow. So what I'm hearing is feedback as a mechanism for better attuning your breadcrumbs that you're leaving, growing that all through self-awareness. When it comes to legacy, if someone is stepping down from a position, I'm teeing this question up because I know from my work at Leaders on Purpose, where we're working and studying Fortune 500 CEOs, that succession is a huge challenge right now, particularly for the longer-term challenges that we're facing globally, these challenges that will span multiple generations of humans, let alone multiple generations of leader and many CEOs. And so how, if at all, does legacy coincide with this succession challenge that we're seeing? How do you pass down the legacy if you're leading the North Star purpose of an organization?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, one of the concepts or topics that I'm very passionate about now is lost knowledge, which goes hand in hand with legacy, like when people leave, retire, when they get promoted or they move on, take a new job. How are organizations capturing that knowledge? Because it often walks out the door. And what really bothers me is when companies offer early incentive retirement programs to people at high levels at any level really, but particularly at high levels and they offer them this incentive because those people are costing the most. So if you want to improve the bottom line, get people who are making more money to retire early and then not even try to capture the knowledge. That's walking out the door. It's like very short-sighted. And there are ways to do that. You could interview them. You could videotape these interviews. At six months to a year that they're going to be leaving, you could have a series of interviews where you capture their wisdom.
Speaker 2:
Some people are walking out with secrets that nobody else may know If it's not documented. I would say they go hand in hand and it is tough. It's very tough. Legacy's walking out the door, but not only their legacy but what they know, and companies often invest lots of money. I had a friend who was working for a big feed research company, and the company paid for he and his family to live three years in Italy and collect all this research and do all this work. And then he got back and the company got purchased and so the headquarter company offered he and people at his level early retirement to leave, and it's like they just invested three years, you know. So, again, a lot of companies I don't think they realize what's walking out the door, and so it's legacy and lost knowledge, it's everything.
Speaker 1:
Yeah to your earlier point of organizations as living systems. It almost seems if people are leaving the door or even getting paid to retire early. It's like this living system has amnesia over and over again, and that's a good point. The wisdom or the knowledge. I've never really thought about lost wisdom in quite this way, where there's, it's almost like a leak, and so these different ways to harness the wisdom.
Speaker 1:
That brings me to a question about culture as well. An organization, if it's operating as a living system, if it's connected to its North Star purpose, we can really see a thriving culture in that sort of context, with those types of ingredients. When it comes to leaving a legacy, I'm assuming that these folks are aware of what brings them meaning or what their purpose or their gifts might be, and I'm seeing this pattern across many organizations right now where we seem to be in a bit of a meaning crisis. We might be defining a purpose statement at a very artificial or superficial level. But to actually live a life of purpose and meaning inside of an organization and to scale that sentiment or that embodiment through a culture, I guess what does it look like in your experience to create cultures of meaning or share a legacy. Even Can we create legacy together as teams and as organizations, if we do have this North Star purpose that you're mentioning.
Speaker 2:
Again. That's excellent because I often say that a vision or shared values they have to live in your heart, not just live on the wall in a frame. They really have to live. And I think what we're seeing here is that we're seeing organizations that don't have a living purpose, as reflected in people don't want to go back to the workplace. Okay, now I'm generalizing because some people do, but I think if the organization doesn't really have a living purpose as a magnet to draw people back, then people say I can work at home, I like the flexibility.
Speaker 2:
I'm finding the resistance to going back to work very interesting to me because I wiped going to workplaces. You know Now I also have done some research and writing on. I do think flexibility and autonomy is here to stay. People want to have more control over the destiny. But if the organization is saying we want you back in the workplace, usually three days a week, you can choose which three days, unless you have an important meeting or whatever To me that seems very reasonable. One time Meg Wheatley said to me. She said I'm working with too many organizations who describe their employees as the walking dead, like you know, just zombies. And again, if the workplace doesn't have a culture that is living, that is thriving, then people would rather be at home. So I think that this is a good test of does the organization have a culture where people want to work?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, it's interesting to think about that disengagement almost as a symptom, If culture can be on the spectrum of healthy or to unhealthy what are the symptoms of each type of context and I think when people are really engaged in meaning, they're clear on their purpose, they want to show up to your point, they want to move that mission forward, to experience the joy of what it's like to embody that and to be in collaborative space with one another and, I suppose, leave that shared legacy to some extent. And yeah, I know that because you mentioned Margaret Wheatley a couple of times and the piece of her work that I'm most familiar with is actually her two loops model. I'll drop a link to that video on YouTube in the show notes because it's so good for any listeners who haven't seen that I'd have familiar regrets. Well, that'd be great. Yeah, it's fascinating.
Speaker 1:
It's a look at what are the roles that each of us might play as leaders when we're shifting from one paradigm to the next Okay, or one set of norms and rules to the next.
Speaker 1:
And what fascinates me about this and I want to get into a little bit of your perspective on end of life and looking to end of life is sort of an inspiration for a legacy.
Speaker 1:
I know you gave a really amazing TEDx talk on this, but in two loops.
Speaker 1:
What I find fascinating about this model is that one of the roles that leaders get to play is the role of hospice worker and effectively holding space for some of the grief to process and to move through us as we let go of what's no longer working and we step into a model that is updated, upgraded, whatever it might be, but often we're ignoring the grief process that comes with big change, and so that model does an amazing job of that. But I just wanted to invite your perspective on when we are in the face of big change and sometimes this can almost feel like a version of ourselves is dying right, whether we're facing that succession that we were talking about and leaving an organization or stepping into a new role. There's so many types of change that can feel like a death of sorts, and we almost get to practice for that moment to moment, similar to how you're describing building legacy. So I guess, from your perspective, what can we learn from death as a part of life when it comes to building our legacy?
Speaker 2:
As you said, I did a TEDx talk called Embracing Death, thien Life Through a Different Lens, and I talk about how, when I was full-time teaching, I would teach undergraduate students typically age 20 to 22, about grief, death, dying, as a part of leadership development, and what would be assignments I would have students do is write their own eulogy. Now I started doing this in about 2008. And that was long before David Brooks of the New York Times wrote his book called Second Mountain, where he talks about eulogy virtues and resume. Virtues focus on what you've done, you've accomplished your awards. Eulogy virtues focus on your character and your being and the kind of person you are, and it was a very powerful exercise and powerful course. You are so right.
Speaker 2:
I was so fortunate with my Leading with Wisdom book that I had a chance to interview William Bridges. William Bridges is the expert on transition work. Now he has passed away and a new book came out a year ago by Bruce Filer of the New York Times, fei-ler, called Life is in the Transitions, and it's similar to William Bridges' work but he has a twist on it. But what I like is both of them start off with three main phases, and they're not necessarily linear, but three main phases that well, william Bridges said we start with ending. So endings are deaths. So even if you move houses, you sell your house and you move to a new neighborhood, something is ending. You're getting married, something is ending your singlehood, your single friends. You're not losing those friends, but you're no longer single. Bridges says we start off with ending and then we go to. The next stage is usually what he calls the neutral zone, and this is where we're really uncomfortable. We don't really know what's happening next Now. Bruce Filer calls that the messy middle.
Speaker 2:
A lot of people don't like the messy middle. They don't like that neutral zone. One example that I often use is people will have affairs. I'm not condoning those, but people don't want to leave something until they have something else. They don't want to be alone in the messy middle. They don't want to be alone in the neutral zone. Or people will leave a bad job and go to another bad job.
Speaker 2:
The point of the messy middle is to figure out what didn't work, what went wrong, how come that didn't work, and you need to figure that out before you really jump into another relationship or another job. It's really important work that we need to do, and most people don't want to do it and then the third major stage is beginning. Then we begin something and people who really did the work that is needed in the messy middle usually end up with a much stronger, good beginning. But all of these especially the ending something's dying and there's a lot of grief involved. So I've done a lot of work in the whole idea of grief in the workplace. I was doing this after the financial crisis in 2008.
Speaker 2:
But now with COVID, yes, people were dying, but industries were dying. Companies are dying, the ways of doing things, like you said, new paradigm of doing work. It might be very exciting to say, oh, I get to stay home now, but other things are dying. We're missing that socialization in the workplace or our friends. We could talk just on this topic alone, because in my book Leading with Wisdom, death and Dying and Grief is part of a chapter, and then in my book Bread Crumb Legacy, I have an entire chapter devoted to this. I call it embracing death. My students started calling me Dr Death because I talk about death a lot and I plan death the way people plan parties or wedding. But I think it's an important aspect and if we don't understand our own coping mechanisms, then how can we, as a leader, help those who work with us or for us, so I think it's definitely an important topic.
Speaker 1:
Wow, I'm so glad to hear that grief work is part of the leadership model that you're working with. I think it's such a natural part of life and of being human. If we don't process those emotions or those feelings, it can stay in our system and fester. And I think this is where a lot of the resentment or disengagement can actually come from is we're not actually metabolizing change to the level that we could.
Speaker 2:
Yes, I love how you said that, and I'm also a hospice volunteer. As a volunteer, I get a chance to practice my skills.
Speaker 1:
Wow, yeah, wow. That's amazing. I haven't personally done hospice work, but for a while I was COO of the Conscious Dying Collective is now what it's called. It totally shifted my perspective on leadership and how, if you're at the helm as the leader, how do you really bring people through a grief process and a transition process, and I think the pace at which we're having to process this type of change in transition is only accelerating.
Speaker 1:
I also look at changes that we're seeing in technology and emerging tech where, similar to what you said, entire industries and companies are dying, entire job categories are going to be going away with AI, and so it never ends. Our ability and our need to metabolize grief, I think, is always going to be there in the human experience. But I do want to also highlight one thing you said about this messy middle and how uncomfortable that can be, because that's the other piece. Where I see a lot of disengagement start to happen is when we don't name the change, we don't normalize the grief and we don't give space or normalcy to actually feeling the discomfort that comes with that. People might be like this is too much, I'm uncomfortable, I'm going to start to pull back, I'm going to start to put up those boundaries and we lose some of that collaboration and reflex that we might have in a different environment.
Speaker 1:
These transitions are only increasingly important in how we lead transitions as leaders, yeah for sure. So, jan, I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about a very specific type of death, if you will. One thing that really drew me to your work and wanting to have you on the show is one thing that you said about keeping your ego in check. I actually saw an amazing quote where you said it's hard to be a good leader if you're not a good person. Yeah, and I just love that. I couldn't agree more. In your work of living and leading a legacy, what are the ways that you're seeing ego turn up or maybe get in the way, and what do you mean by being a good person to be a good leader? What does that really mean to you?
Speaker 2:
After all this research and talking to all these people and I continue to interview people ego development really emerged, and so I really did the deep dives. And we have to have an ego or we won't be able to stand up. Everybody has to have an ego. But what happens is the ego wants to protect us and the ego wants us to think you're right, what you said was right, you're correct, you're not wrong. Ego can be a defense mechanism. What happens is when we're aware of what's happening, then we can feel the ego kind of creeping up and taking control. Sometimes I use the metaphor of an elevator and we can feel these feelings creeping up and we all have them. We're human, it's human nature to have lanes of jealousy, greed, envy. When we have these feelings, then they often manifest in behaviors such as defensiveness, not open to feedback, micromanaging, over controlling, toxic behaviors that lead to a toxic environment. And so when we sense these behaviors creeping up, we need to say to ourselves that's not healthy, I have to let go of that. That's not a good way to think, that's not a good way to behave. When we're not aware, then these behaviors take over and next thing we could be creating a toxic environment and not even aware of it.
Speaker 2:
One of the questions, nicole, that I like to ask in workshops is how many of you worked for a bad leader? Now again, my definition of leader is someone who's in a position to influence the lives of others teachers, coaches, parents and hands just shoot up in the air and then I say I don't think most people wake up in the morning and say today I'm going to be a bad leader, today I'm going to be a bad leader no, but they just get stressed out, they get jealous, envy, greed, somebody got the promotion they didn't get and next thing they're over controlling. They're telling you what to do that command, control. When you work for a toxic leader, that person can literally make you sick and I know that.
Speaker 2:
I can think of one person in my career 40 year career that I think he was evil. I think he, I do think he woke up and said because it was just too much of a pattern, and initially I took it personally, and then, when I started investigating, no, he was doing this to person after person and really making people feel bad. I don't know if he was trying to destroy self-confidence. I think the bottom line is he was extremely insecure, but because he wasn't willing to work on his insecurities and didn't know that he was really creating a bad environment for a lot of people and that is not a good legacy. Well, it's all connected.
Speaker 1:
That's so helpful and it connects to what we were saying earlier about the role of self-awareness in leadership as well, and hearing you say you can notice those thoughts that come up and you can notice those behaviors as a signal that you're leading from ego and maybe turning towards that control. And it might, unless it's someone who is waking up each day and wanting to be a bad leader. It can come from a good place. It can come from a genuine place of survival of wanting to feel safe, and so we lean on control.
Speaker 1:
But this, yeah, this is just so helpful in thinking about the behaviors that turn up when we think about really good, effective leadership versus leadership that might be perpetuating toxic culture, even if that's not the intent.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that's the intro.
Speaker 1:
Even if that's just our nervous system. Yeah, and I'm so curious. In your latest book I know you got to interview 100 amazing leaders. I'm curious are there any other common patterns or behaviors that you're seeing when it comes to these leaders, who are coming from more of a sage leadership lens and starting to weave that legacy?
Speaker 2:
It is the opposite of an unhealthy leader. But time after time, interview after interview, I would say to myself or to my husband, I'd say these people are kind, they're generous, they're not competitive. Anyone I spoke to, they were willing to share everything. It was just like if I had a question. They were so willing to share their time, their wisdom, their expertise and I was just so grateful I learned so much Like. My personal mission is to continue to learn and to share what I'm learning with others. I do that through writing, speaking, coaching. I write an article for Training Magazine, both in print, for every issue and I'm gonna be writing about this. So that's why I want you to send me the link of that other person that you interviewed about death, because I can talk about your podcast in my article training article okay, so I think it's just really important that again, people were they came from such a good heart, not competitive, willing to share, willing to share their wisdom. It was just wonderful.
Speaker 2:
A lot of talk these days about having a mindset of abundance instead of scarcity, and I heard a quote the other day let me see if I can say it Then obscurity is a cousin of greed. This is when we allow our own belief that there is never enough to keep us from being generous with what we have with others. The thin of scarcity is a cousin of greed. So if you're greedy, you're greedy because you wanna hold on to things that you think information is scarce or information is power, so I don't wanna share it. But when you have that mindset that keeps you from being generous with what you have, that really struck me because, again, if you have this mindset of abundance, you're willing to share it, because other good things will come back to you If you share it. But if you're competitive and have this mindset of scarcity, then you're less likely to collaborate and be healthy with others.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, absolutely. It reminds me of what you said earlier too, around feedback looping.
Speaker 1:
It's almost like if we're in that competitive scarcity space and we're not being in that open, receptive, generous state. I think we close off a lot of the information flow, whether it's the feedback loops or transparency that could actually give people the information they need to have a big breakthrough or to innovate on something. If it's not visible, they won't be able to work with it effectively. And I love that kindness also turned up in the patterns that you were noticing, because I think this really can help create a culture of trust, and I think, particularly with how our context seems to be unfolding and the role that leaders are finding themselves in, where, all of a sudden, you're not just fiscally responsible for your company, you have to be attuned to the political landscape and the climate landscape. It's so complex right now what leaders are having to navigate and if we don't have cultures of trust and generosity and transparency, I don't know how we can actually be prepared or resilient enough to even navigate these changes.
Speaker 2:
So I in many ways relieved that this showed up in your research, and one of the things that I think is so rewarding, a silver lining of COVID is that and this was reflected in quiet quitting, the great resignation, the great reckoning, whatever you want to call it is that workers are not gonna put up with a lot of unhealthy leaders, that finally, the leadership style or approach or servant leadership I'll just put it under the big umbrella of servant leadership is finally getting the attention it deserves, because workers are saying I'm not gonna put up with it, I don't have to anymore, and so therefore, that's really rewarding for people like me, or another person that's a hero of mine, Howard Baehaub, who was the former I don't know international president of Starbucks.
Speaker 2:
He's been beating the drum of servant leadership for decades now and it's just rewarding because workers are saying we expect compassion, empathy, trust, understanding, flexibility, and I think that's really important. One quote I often use is leaders. Should clear obstacles not be the obstacle? Wow, I often ask that in workshops, how many of you worked for a leader and that person was the obstacle? They were in the way.
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
You could have done your job better or faster or more enjoyable if they were not there, and that's another way to get at Good and bad leaders.
Speaker 1:
So, yeah, so helpful. Wow, jan, we've covered so much ground today and I know that each one of these topics is probably a deep dive in and of itself. But for listeners who want to get to know your work more or sign up for your newsletter or any of the other resources that you've mentioned, like your books, where can folks go to find you and work with you?
Speaker 2:
Thank you very much. The best place is my website, which is janfreecom two N's and two E's and something might pop up, or there's a box on the website where you can subscribe and if you subscribe, you would get my monthly newsletter. That's very easy to read, where, again, I'm sharing what I'm learning, and you would get a monthly podcast. So I do interview people on a monthly basis, called Becoming a Sage. It's all about life and work wisdom. So I do have a podcast so you wouldn't be burdened. If you subscribe, my book can be. There's a 20% discount coupon from the publisher of my latest book, bread from Legacy, and that can be found on my website, or my books can all be found on Amazon.
Speaker 2:
I'm very active on LinkedIn so they could look for me on LinkedIn again Janfree, with two N's and two E's. I'm somewhat active on Instagram. I'm late to the game but I'm trying. I'd rather write books and articles than be on Instagram, but I'm trying. But I would say LinkedIn, my website. If they Google me, things would come up. They could find me that way too. I appreciate the opportunity. I've learned a lot. You had excellent questions.
Speaker 1:
Thank you, Jan. Thank you, and I'll link to all this in the show notes and maybe a link to your TEDx as well, because I think folks would be interested in that. Yeah, wow, thank you so much you might be interested Nicole.
Speaker 2:
I also did a TEDx. It was a virtual TEDx because it was during COVID, but it was called Becoming a Nobody and that's all about ego. Oh, perfect. I would encourage people to check that out too.
Speaker 1:
Amazing. Oh yeah, so relevant for where we ended up in the conversation. Amazing, wow, jan, thank you so much for your time and wanting to give you the final word if there's any parting words of wisdom that you'd love to leave listeners with today.
Speaker 2:
I like to say may the rest of light be the best of lights. May you be leaving positive breadcrumbs wherever you go, Beautiful.
Speaker 1:
On that note we will wrap up. Listeners, Thanks for being here and we'll see you next week for another episode.
