How Leaders Think with Kenny Lange

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:00:00]:
Most of the ways that bosses relate to subordinates, if you want to use these terms, is so undignified that it couldn't possibly be inspiring people to a place where they feel trusted and heard and challenged to grow and do something meaningful. So instead, it's a race to mediocrity, a race to status quo, so that you don't lose your job, you don't make waves.

Kenny Lange [00:00:24]:
You welcome to the how leaders think podcast, the show that transforms you by renewing your mind and giving you new ways to think. I am your host, Kenny Lang, and with me today is Jeff Scheffelbein. He is the managing partner of undivided life. He's also a culture expert and a nationally recognized motivational speaker with a passion for human formation and innovation. In his role as a managing partner for undivided life, Jeff and his team provide strategy and culture consulting to a wide variety of organizations. Welcome to the show, Jeff.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:00:59]:
Kenny, what's up, man? This is awesome. Thanks for doing this.

Kenny Lange [00:01:03]:
Yeah, man, I am excited. I hope that we can just touch the hymn of how religiously funny you are on your other show. There's a deep cut joke in there for somebody, for a certain sliver of the audience. The rest of you are going to.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:01:20]:
Have to who touched my robe?

Kenny Lange [00:01:23]:
That's going to be the name of the episode, how Jeff Scheffelbine thinks about who touched my robe. It's a little clickbaity, but I'm okay with it.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:01:39]:
Yeah, it also feels a little self righteous, so it needs to immediately be put into some sort of humility bucket of like, please know that I don't make that comparison of to.

Kenny Lange [00:01:50]:
I'm going to put that in the description. It's like one of Jeff's top three qualities is humility. Self reported.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:01:57]:
Of course, self reported. Kenny, in my, uh, in my podcast, I'm known for being the definition of humility. How's that for I?

Kenny Lange [00:02:10]:
Man? I'm going to have to start adding, like, a dad joke segment in here. We did that with another guest, and because of the doc talk guy and all of his jokes, they're so good. I think one of my favorites is he said, I asked my wife, I was like, hey, isn't your birthday.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:02:32]:
Soon?

Kenny Lange [00:02:32]:
And she said, march 1. So I stomped around the room and asked again, well, tell me, Jeff, what is on your mind?

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:02:46]:
I'll tell you what's on my mind is that I have 25 years of doing something that I think is so in line with you. Like, this whole idea of how leadership strategy and culture all collide to be really just life. It's like showing up for our businesses, showing up for our teammates, showing up everywhere we go. And in the last nine months, I successfully executed an exit from a firm that I had started to launch this new company, undivided life. And what's wild is I feel like I was doing my best to live an undivided life before I left my previous company. And now I feel so unleashed because I'm truly living the priorities that I've always had. Right faith before my wife, before my kids, before all else. But in this unleashed format, what I do every day to make a living, the only constraints of it are really where can I have the biggest impact, not what is my industry, what is my specialty.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:03:50]:
And I left a deregulated energy company that I had helped to start in order to do this. And now I get to be involved in everybody's business, which maybe sounds daunting, but to me it sounds like a place of great liberation to be able to just go to whatever doors open and wherever I'm being called and to build a team around that. So that's my new world. It sounds a little bit like an overlap of your world. Lots of kids and lots of business and lots of love.

Kenny Lange [00:04:17]:
Absolutely. That's really intriguing because I've gotten the chance to hear you speak at conscious capitalism. We've had several conversations. I've never gotten the sense that you're a guy who just lets life be dictated to them. Like, you strike me as somebody who has. You've really grabbed the agency that you have over your life. That I really strive to help people realize just because once I figured, I was like, oh, it was sort of like coming out of the Matrix and it's like, oh, I know kung fu. But I knew that, oh, I don't have to do this thing that everybody keeps saying that you have to do.

Kenny Lange [00:04:57]:
I really want to go do this thing. And I could. And there was nothing really stopping me except for a limiting belief or a narrative that somebody had given to me and I had accepted without question. But so it's curious to me that you say now over the last nine months that you just really feel unleashed. I mean, is it just that you got to steer your way into a greater alignment from the work side of things, or was it something else?

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:05:26]:
I would probably say alignment is mostly it. And it really comes down to this fact. I spent 18 years of my career in deregulated electricity. And my entry point was so neat because energy in Texas was deregulating back in the early two thousand s. And I entered right after it started. And so I felt like I got to be an entrepreneur within this large company and this new industry. I felt like I got to be a quick study and then an expert, and I got to have an impact, right? I was challenging all the false narratives and the limiting beliefs that people had around how do you build a team? How do you build technology? And almost the music to my ears is when somebody says, you can't do that. You can't automate x, Y and Z.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:06:15]:
You can't allow a team to share in a goal. Where's the personal accountability? You can't be friends with your employees. Like all that stuff, every time I heard it, that was almost like I knew I was going in the right direction because it was countercultural, not to be countercultural. I wasn't doing it to buck the system. But I knew that there was parts of the system and parts of the beliefs, parts of the business school way just don't resonate with me. But I keep thinking about what you just said, like this agency, this agency over self. And I think most of us are afraid of some sort. First of all, we just have fear.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:06:50]:
And then we have this fear of not looking good. Then it becomes a fear of looking bad. Then it becomes fear of failure. And when you really keep breaking it all the way down, it becomes fear that I can't handle it. Because at the end of the day, you can handle anything. You could handle bankruptcy, you could handle loss of health, you could handle loss of house. I mean, you really could. But we're just afraid of this unknown worst case scenario.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:07:16]:
Worst case scenario doesn't happen very often, but it does happen. And even if it does, what's the worst case scenario? For me? It has to do with death and sadness and all sorts of things that happen in a family. But people survive that all the time and they go on to what's next. So all that to say with, at the time I left my company, I had six children, and the youngest was only about five months old. There's a lot of reasons to be afraid, right? How am I going to provide? Where is it going to come from? But once I can release myself from that fear and trust God and trust that through that agency, I'm going to be able to unleash places of even greater impact, then I'm really not afraid. And so I think that the fear part and then the agency part for me is I actually think I'm going to do more impactful and more important things, when I'm not tied back to an industry that I'm really not that vested in anyways. I mean, my whole business over 18 years had been built around electricity. Kenny, I don't really care about electricity.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:08:23]:
Like, some people get really excited about clean energy or innovative products or the impact. I like the people involved, but I wanted to have something that was more of a calling for my life. And then since starting this business, my wife and I found out we're pregnant with number seven. So I have even more reason for the fear bucket. Yes, sir, I saw that. Yes, I have more reason for that fear bucket. But for some reason, I feel more in tune with the agency part and the calling part than I even did nine months ago. It only continues to propel itself.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:09:00]:
So I don't mean to talk so vague. It's more like now I get to be involved in anybody's business as a consultant. I get to launch whatever businesses we want to as practitioners of this operating system. So don't just consult people on it. Let's build brands that live it. Let's incubate other people that we know. We believe in those founders, we believe in their potential products, and they just have no place to go. Let's incubate those folks.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:09:26]:
And then where we can, we're actually making a whole move to buy existing businesses, especially from baby boomers, and then turn around, put our operating system in place, and bless 100% of the employees there with an ownership structure that allows them all to have the upside of a successful turnaround or a successful growth curve without having to chop up the company. So now I went from being involved in energy and then doing all this cool stuff on the side, coaching people and being involved in a lot of nonprofits and helping startups to. I still have ownership in the energy company and I still love those people, but I get to be unleashed to do the thing that I was finding so much fulfillment in my daily sidebar extra work.

Kenny Lange [00:10:14]:
Yeah, it sounds a lot like you got to take the thing on the side and really bring it into the main focus. It reminds me of something when I sold my first company, the digital marketing agency, and I came on board and I was sharing, I was like, here's some ideas I have. I was asking the owner questions and starting to do a couple of things, and he sent me a message that really struck me, which was, he says, it seems like you're really good at this. You're really passionate about it, but you just needed a bigger team to really get the opportunity to do some of these things because I sold to a larger organization and that stuck with me. And I was like, yeah, there really is. And much like you, web design wasn't like the thing that just got me out of bed in the morning. I loved helping people. I love that aspect.

Kenny Lange [00:11:07]:
But really, I just loved having the people and the opportunity to build a team, grow leaders, help them realize what they're great at, where they want to go, and that they could have that agency inside of the organization or just for their own life. That's the part that got me out of bed. And now I get to just do that one slice instead of that just being, well, that's a piece. When I can find it, I'll revel in it. It'll make the job sweet. But now that gets to be the whole part. And that sounds a lot like what you're getting the opportunity to do now.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:11:42]:
Yeah. I've always felt like I was looking for all these external ways to stretch my creative legs, to have a bigger impact on the key leaders, the ceos, the head priest, the whoever. And I kept doing all this stuff on the side, and I felt like I was coming back to a place where I wasn't really capitalizing on my full potential. And to give you two great examples of what happened throughout my discernment and at the end. Right. So to exit a company that I was the founder of is a very big deal. I don't take that lightly. I didn't want it to be in any amount of negativity, but I wanted to do it as a place where I was running towards something new.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:12:20]:
So that was a big part of this two year discernment. I went on after more than a decade running that company. I can remember sitting down with my wife a year and a half ago, and I said, hey, I think this is the week that I'm going to sit down with my partners and let them know that I'm starting my exit and that by the end of 2022, I plan to be out. And I said, do you have any problem with that? And she said, the only problem I have is if this wasn't the conclusion you came to, because I watch you, and I can see the fulfillment you have when you're going and getting really deeply ingrained in all these other businesses and operations. And I can see how muted it feels when you step back into the organization you started. And a lot of that was not anybody's fault. It was really just a matter of I'd already put my full self into building out that architecture and that strategy. And now it was their chance to go and scale and buy other companies.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:13:10]:
And so to hear my wife say, this isn't to say the other company is small, but you're called to bless more people than you're capable of reaching today, I thought was such like a beautiful witness from her of support, but also of knowing me almost better than I know myself. We lie to ourselves a lot about where we are. So then get this. I go through the whole process. I sit down, I tell my partners and one of my partners that I physically was the furthest from. He was in Washington, DC, and I would call him similar. He's a creative trapped in a businessman's body, doing really great business, but he's also creatively minded. And I think he could see a bigger picture connected to me.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:13:48]:
And he said, this place is going to miss you. But my question is, what took you so long? In other words, I always thought you were so much different or bigger than the four walls of electricity. And even, you know, the content I put on LinkedIn every day, I literally pour, like, high dollar coaching and challenge into LinkedIn every day and turn that platform into a meaningful place for me and others to engage. And what's so wild about that is it didn't make any sense for me to do that in my former role and transitioning into think role. It is a place of blessing other people, of sharpening the axe for myself. And as a byproduct of those two things, it also leads to incredible connections and clients and a chance to connect Kenny to so and so, because y'all need to work together. I do that stuff all day long. That's where it starts to feel really unleashed.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:14:46]:
And it's not just about the job, it's about this way of being.

Kenny Lange [00:14:51]:
Yeah, there's a couple of terms I've heard recently that try to move away from the notion of work life balance. And it's our mutual friend, Dr. Elise Cortez. She talked about work life integration, and I've had another person I'm close with use the term work life harmony, which I thought was a cool term, but it really sounds like you found the place of integration, alignment of harmony with who you are, what you're doing, and what you want to accomplish, which you can visibly see it. That's energizing just the way that you talk about it and how exciting that is. I'm curious, as you work with people and you have a really unique name for the company of having an undivided life. I don't think the name of your company is as meaningful if there wasn't a predominant or prevailing way of thinking that was contrary to that. Right.

Kenny Lange [00:15:59]:
Like, why else seek that out if it was so common and easy to achieve?

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:16:02]:
Yeah. Amen to that.

Kenny Lange [00:16:04]:
So what do you see in people? That. And it's not like you're not wagging your finger. I figured it out. I'm smarter. Come follow me and I'll bless you. But really a compassion towards others that aren't living that way. But what's the thinking behind that in your years of experience?

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:16:24]:
Yeah. So think about this. If you're a leader of an organization, ultimately what you want, and I'll take away the humanity of it for a second, what you want is a thriving organization that has top line growth, that is reducing bottom line expenses, that has lower turnover, that has less legal costs and less lawsuits. You want all these things that are pretty fundamentally, you could say, selfish, right? Better earnings, better valuation, better multiples. Like, all these things are the result of an organization that is like what I just described. But in order to get to that, if you don't start to recognize the humanity of the people around you, you try to say, well, we're going to put the right things on the wall, and we're going to make everybody go through these mandatory courses, and we're going to have these special parties, and you still end up having the turnover, the legal issues, the disconnected team, the infighting, the gossip, like, having to replace everybody during turnover, and a boss that is unbecoming of an executive. Like, all those things happen. And so I always ask people, like, if you were to barrel right down to it, what if I described to you something that I don't think is utopian, but the exact opposite? A place of highly engaged individuals who come together and believe that business is a team sport, where they are free to unleash their creativity, they take appropriate risks, they care about each other in a personal way, so that if somebody is going through a tough time, the work doesn't slip.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:17:57]:
That person is just taken care of in their absence, whether that's physical or their emotional and mental absence. And that teammates know how to interchange with one another. So that when my time comes and tragedy hits my family, you step up for me. And we're in this kind of sprint together where we're highly aligned, loosely controlled, fully formed adults called to do great work together. Now, all of a sudden, the math that you did before, to say, this is our growth trajectory, and this is how we reduce costs, you get a better version of both sides because your entire team becomes, in their own mind, agents of the organization and teammates, and not just subordinates. But to do all of what I just said, you kind of have to break the whole thing apart. You kind of have to realize that most of the ways that we communicate and most of the ways that bosses report or relate to subordinates, if you want to use these terms, is so undignified that it couldn't possibly be inspiring people to a place where they feel trusted and heard and challenged to grow and do something meaningful. So instead, it's a race to mediocrity, a race to status quo, so that you don't lose your job, you don't make waves.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:19:14]:
And if you get inside of most organizations, Kenny, you know this, people are really miserable in great organizations because their boss is mean, their boss is ungrateful, their boss is selfish. And guess what? Their boss didn't start that way. They got there because they're a product of a system, because they're treated that way by their boss, because that's the only way they can survive. To come home and put food on their table every night is by keeping their head down and having that race to mediocrity that you don't care about people. And so we all start to not only believe, but reinforce. It's almost like the hazing in a Fraternity. First it happens to you, and then you become it pretty quickly because that's the survival of being in that group. And so the ship left a long time ago, where I believe there's all these great organizations and only a few that are unhealthy.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:19:59]:
I think there's a few extremely healthy organizations that haven't taken their eye off that ball. They focus on it all the time. And then there's a whole lot of different diseases plaguing these organizations. And if we can make business human again, which doesn't mean, oh, we're going to play foosball, and you have the ultimate flex schedule where you don't really have to work more than an hour a day. Like, no way. People want to be challenged. They want to be accountable, they want to have the freedom, all this stuff. But if you can create those kind of organizations, think all of a sudden you have outrageous loyalty.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:20:32]:
You have people who feel like they can take real risks. And guess what? They end up having better results because those risks are good to take if you feel safe and secure. So what's countercultural? Dang near everything.

Kenny Lange [00:20:48]:
Yeah, I love that you point out something about the manager, they didn't start out that way, right. Because so many people talk about, like, people join companies, but they leave bosses or they leave managers. And I do think it is important to realize that on the vast majority of those bosses, those managers didn't start that way. But I don't want to say that they're victims of a system because they do have a choice in the matter. Culpability, sure. But I forgot the way that the saying goes. But your system are perfectly configured to get the results you've been getting. And so it is a race to mediocrity.

Kenny Lange [00:21:41]:
But if you were to call that out and ask any executive, hey, what do you think about if we just really drove people towards the middle? Like, not terrible, but not great. There's sort of like a lukewarm hatred for the place, and people did as little as possible to stay employed but not really thrive? Is that the kind of business you want? No, they would laugh you out of the room. But yet that's what ends up happening, because the system that they've designed, that they've crafted intentionally or unintentionally has created that. So larger organizations obviously are larger ships, to turn, to use that metaphor. But would you go so far as to say that no organization is too far gone to start over? Because I do think it is probably terrifying when you go into a boardroom or something like that and you say, hey, ladies and gentlemen, we can help you here at undivided life. The only thing you're going to need to do is to start over.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:22:56]:
Yeah. Change everything.

Kenny Lange [00:22:58]:
Change. I got a list of everything. It's actually a very short list. It's one bullet item and it's everything.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:23:03]:
Yeah, you're the right people. You're just doing it wrong.

Kenny Lange [00:23:08]:
I don't know where to start. Maybe just at the beginning. So how do you help leaders see that in a way that isn't one that does communicate that compassion that you were talking about of. They didn't start this way. They likely did not want it to end up here, but they simply do not know how to get to the place that they want. They can't connect the dots for whatever reason and make it feel like this is possible. How do you help them? I have to imagine you're reconstructing a narrative that they've embedded in their own mind, right?

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:23:45]:
Sure. You just asked a question. We could write a whole book about this one question, but I'll try to give you a simple kind of bullet point answer.

Kenny Lange [00:23:53]:
Coming fall 2024, the collection ready, Kenny.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:23:57]:
And Jeff.

Kenny Lange [00:24:00]:
I would buy it mostly so that my mom tour.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:24:03]:
We got the whole thing ready. Presales. So my first is this. There are plenty of examples of people who've done, either built incredibly large organizations or done turnarounds that you would score really high in the world of a dignified workplace that's also creating results of excellence and are changing industries. I don't think. They're not the majority, but there's plenty of them. So I think, knowing those examples, my favorite one right now, you've heard me talk about this is Barry Waymiller and the leader, Bob Chapman. His book everybody matters.

Kenny Lange [00:24:45]:
And those are real books in the background, ladies and gentlemen. Those are real books. That's a real background. That's right. Yes.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:24:51]:
By the end of this talk, I'm going to pull every one of them off the shelf, and there's 400. Okay. Everybody matters. What a great homework assignment for anybody listening. That book is about buying a very large organization that had just the race to mediocrity and turning into a thriving culture that turned around and bought 80 other companies without doing any layoffs. So there's so many examples of this. Conscious capitalism where you and I first met has a lot of these examples, both in the small groups that were a part of it, also in the genesis of the entire organization. But when you're working with a leader, if you were to poll leaders and say, how's your culture? Is it fair, poor, good, great.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:25:30]:
Everybody's going to say good or great. And a, they're disconnected, and b, why would they ever say anything else? So the worst barometer of a culture is how a leader thinks their culture is right. If they say it's really bad, then it's terrible. You should run. I've made that mistake. But what I like to do is work with a leader and say, imagine if. Or imagine when your organization looks like this. Imagine if this was happening on these different pockets, and you start to paint a picture of something that you know isn't true today.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:26:03]:
It doesn't take long to figure that out. And then when they start to say, yeah, that would be awesome, you start to show them there's a bridge to get there. There's things that we can start to put in place if we want that four years from now, what could we do that we have done by two years from now, one year from now? And it's just strategic planning backwards. While you're talking about, what does it look like and feel like to be our client, to be our employee, to be our employees, family members. Here's another one. What does it look like to apply for a job here and get rejected? What does it look like to get fired from here? What does it look like to be one of our suppliers? So let's start treating everybody in that stakeholder mentality. And I bet if we can turn the tide on those, like, what does it feel like to be one of these people? How do they feel? Like they're in a winning relationship. I bet we can solve almost any problem together.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:26:48]:
So then you oversimplify. We have worlds where I'm part of an organization that has a nonprofit. They have a pamphlet called 73 things to know about XYZ. And I'm like, 73? I think seven is too many. I think the ten pillars of this and the three core values of this and the two, if you start to overcomplicate things, you miss it. If you come down to every business is a people business, and everybody matters, or we're going to focus on communication and relationship building as the pillars to build upon. Because guess what? I promise you, those bad organizations. Well, let me say this.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:27:29]:
The organizations with bad cultures. I mislabeled. The organizations with bad cultures are stacked full of talented people in every department who can do the job to extreme excellence. We've just created structures where they don't feel comfortable doing that. I can remember getting on an airplane once and asking the flight attendant something, and I basically got yelled at for asking if they still have those old pins you would get for flying. It was my friend's first flight ever. He was special needs, and I was, like, just asking. Meanwhile, and I'll use this company by name, I can remember being on a southwest flight where they had lost baggage.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:28:02]:
Everything was late, and there was a line of people yelling, and everybody was still acting like they were on the same team and they were here to help. And they were talking to the next client with this polite demeanor. And I was thinking, there's no difference between the person who yelled at me on the other plane and this person in front of me, except for the environment around them that either nurtures or strips away this dignity aspect of their interaction.

Kenny Lange [00:28:28]:
Wow. Yeah. It goes back to the adage of, you become the sum or the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Right. And how much time a week do each of us spend in our work environments? Right. I mean, it's become cliched at this point, but you say, well, you'll spend more time at work than you probably will with your family during the week. But you have a choice in what atmosphere, and that may feel like a luxury to some people because I've gotten that. It's like, oh, well, it must be nice, like you have this education or this experience or something like that to just go and have your pick of the things.

Kenny Lange [00:29:07]:
It's like, no, I've had panic attacks. I've just cried at my desk trying to make this happen and figure this out and wondered if I knew my butt from a hole in the ground and all these different things. But you can start to pick those environments that you place yourself in, which I advise people all the time that if you're looking to make a change, go find where those people are hanging out. You don't have to be a contributor right away, but you'll start to soak up some of those things and just ask questions, even if they sound stupid. And you can start to shift some stuff pretty quickly.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:29:43]:
Think about a list of best places to work, Kenny, if you think about those lists, and I'll tell people, go, look, there's 100 listed in Texas for small, 100 listed for medium. You can do the US lists. I've been on all those lists before. Somebody says, well, don't you have know nominate yourself? Don't you have to pay to be on there? Yeah, those are all true. If somebody paid and nominated themselves to be on there, they might actually care that they have a great place to work. So let's not knock somebody for doing those things. Right. And then on top of that, they still had to win.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:30:13]:
Yeah, I've been on lists where we didn't win or we didn't qualify. So for every one winner, there's probably five to 15 people that didn't win. So there's still like a vetting process to it. But I don't know why when you were talking, I want to share a story with you, so let me just go free form, if that's cool with you, Kenny. That's what we hired our first employee. Maybe it's because we're talking about Southwest Airlines. He used to be an internal strategist at Southwest. His name is Cody.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:30:42]:
We hired Cody at undivided life. This guy has a Yale undergrad, a. M. Masters worked at American Southwest wingstop. Like, he's like the all star optimizer. Okay. He reminded me on day one of when he and I very first started talking about doing business together. And it was at my old company at five.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:31:05]:
I posted something one day and it said, open interviews. Book 20 minutes on my calendar over these two days for any job you want to talk about at our company, and I'll talk to you for 20 minutes about it. And I had maybe 22 people show up to open interviews. They just booked time on my calendar, and I would get on the call. I would spend twelve to 14 minutes learning as much as I possibly could about them. Some people wanted admin jobs, sales jobs, marketing, executive, leadership strategy, fill in the blank finance. I'm not saying we had those jobs open. I just wanted to meet these people.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:31:41]:
And if I knew there was nothing for us to talk about related to my company at the time, I would spend the last seven to eight minutes trying to a, coach them on where to go next, b, figure out who I could connect them with and then c, offer to stay in touch with them. And most people took me up on this, ended up hiring four or five people for sales and marketing jobs. Cody showed up to that open interview. We talked for a couple of months. We couldn't find the right fit, but it was how we got to know each other so well on the work front, so that when I started this new company, he was the first hire to bring in. But your podcast, if I'm not mistaken, is called how leaders think. And where I think I'm also countercultural is that I give and try to help without any expectation of a return. It's like an agape style love of just give.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:32:33]:
And what's wild to me is by doing that, it may be a decade later, all of a sudden I have the right connection for you. You're looking for something to happen in New Jersey, and I make the right connection for you. And I have to go back in the databank to some time when I just hung out with somebody during open interviews, or connected people because they needed to meet, or we end up working together or starting a company together, or buying something together, or becoming best friends, or nothing. Or I just gave and nothing ever came of it. And I don't need to see the why. But to me, I think that's a countercultural view of leadership, which is, I know I can't spend every minute of every day giving to people. I can give some minutes of every day to other people and to jump on that call or to coach that person or to help them through a struggling time. If it's 20 minutes of my day, I can pull that off.

Kenny Lange [00:33:30]:
Absolutely.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:33:31]:
You remind me, I wanted to share that with you.

Kenny Lange [00:33:33]:
No, I'm glad you did. It's intriguing how those things can come full circle. You have no idea where it'll end up, and I come back to. And I try to remind myself, especially right now, I'm still in the first 18 to 24 months of my business, and I have five kids and a wife with some medical needs and some different things right now. And I'm like, all right, well, the pressure is on. I got to make that cash. But you can't go up to people and just like, hey, I really need money. And I'm pretty sure I can fix you.

Kenny Lange [00:34:12]:
Hire me. Let's do. Yeah. And end up like, was the guy at West coast choppers had the pay up sucker tattooed on his hand. I can't show up that way. But it's a pretty famous quote from Zig Ziglar, which is, you spend enough time helping other people get what they'll eventually you'll end up with what you want. And I try to remind myself of that. Especially I go to a networking event, or I'm just talking to somebody, that I can't explicitly draw a line between this conversation and some sort of extracted value, either directly for me or for them.

Kenny Lange [00:34:55]:
And I hate to admit that, but there's sometimes I am in that focused. I'm on the grind mode, and I'm thinking, what's the roi of this conversation? This person's not going to buy. They're not going to connect. They're not going to do anything. This was a waste of my time, and I wasted my family's time, and I'm letting everybody down, and then I just have to pause and like, okay, well, what does this person need? And how could I help them? And this sounds like, if people go, you google me, you'll see he's like, that guy's on staff at a church, and he thinks like that. Like, yeah, I do. Because I'm human. Because church people are human, too.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:35:29]:
That's right.

Kenny Lange [00:35:30]:
That's a different book for another day. But I think that one, I really admire that you've taken that approach. And it sounds like with some discipline, too, because I don't think anybody just happens into that. Right. That takes some willpower. So as leaders are thinking about, I have this culture. Maybe it is in survival mode instead of. I don't think it's a real word, but I like thrival.

Kenny Lange [00:35:59]:
Because you have survival and thrival, but it's thriving. But they want to go from surviving to thriving. But like you said, you come in and you're trying to paint a better picture. Now, if they could have done that by themselves, they wouldn't need someone like you. They wouldn't need someone like me or other people in our profession that are out there to help. Is this where you see the benefit of. I've seen you operate in these different communities to where there's a helping mentality of, well, I have these gifts, you have those gifts, and we come together and we help one another sort of unlock things because of how we're uniquely wired and designed. Is that a shift that you help leaders make, or you see one where they're trying to do everything themselves, or it has to come from them in order to make a place successful? And that's been a limiting belief, or is it something else blocks them from engaging? I mean, anybody gets in enough pain, they're going to make a change, they're going to spend some money, they're going to do something.

Kenny Lange [00:37:06]:
But I have seen that as a stumbling block. I'm curious what you've seen.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:37:11]:
Yeah, I think there's a little bit of all of those components when you start working with a client, which is why my favorite tool to bring is a blank piece of paper to come in with no assumptions. Even if they've told me they think something is good or bad, or the problem is going to be XYZ. Let's find out. Let's do an assessment. There's a few things we can do that are tool based, but a lot of it is. Let's just have a couple of conversations so we can find out what we're really working with. What your background view and what your team's view is. The part where somebody thinks, I have to solve it myself, is one of the most dangerous beliefs for a leader, because not only are you in jeopardy of things, only being as good as that person could possibly be at everything, right? Nobody was meant to be all things to all people.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:37:56]:
And a lot of times a leader, especially if they were a founder leader, believes that that's what they're called to be. I'm supposed to know everything, be everything, approve everything, so on. Not only is that now limiting the company to be only as good as that person and not as good as the multiplative effect of many people, it actually becomes the source of degrading and demeaning for employees. Because who am I if I don't get to make decisions? Who am I if everything I do has to get a final blessing? And you haven't given me any freedom to run? And so when I think about that from a culture standpoint, one of the ways that we can help to advance a culture is to help a leader, to take their hands off of every decision and to show in their actions and reinforce in their words a place of trust and a place of I'm not going to weigh in with my decisions because at the end of the day one of my fundamental beliefs is that work is a place of human formation. That work is what allows us to be refined and formed, to be who God called us to be. And if we take away that level of engagement in somebody's work, we're actually taking away their own formation and I think we're kind of robbing them of their own development. Now that doesn't mean everybody needs to be executive level. It just means allow these people to do their craft.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:39:18]:
And so you walk into an organization, it's in survival mode at best. You really can't start saying, oh, we're going to have this whole system, this whole new program. This is what it's going to be like for our coaching architecture. You got to start with what are the limiting beliefs and then the words and the norms of how the leaders are presenting the strategy. What's next, their approval, their disapproval? What does reprimanding look like? What does celebrating look like? You start to really pick apart to. It's just core like if I can get your muscle memory to change so that in these scenarios your initial reaction isn't x, it's y. And when somebody presents you with an idea, you're not jumping to this conclusion. You're in a place of listening and contributing.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:40:13]:
So you're just going through all these muscle memory changes to really kind of bring somebody back to a place where they're probably going to end up being a better member of their family, a better member of their community, a better friend, because it's the same things that get in the way of all relationships. They're just on Front street and highlighted when you're at work.

Kenny Lange [00:40:35]:
Yeah, absolutely. In particular because there's more pressure, especially if you're further up in an organization. Right. One of my pastors has said it's like pressure doesn't make you who you are, it reveals who you are any more than squeezing a tube of toothpaste doesn't create the toothpaste, it just exposes what was in there. So some things for good and for ill can be on display. So as somebody is thinking through their organization changes they want to make, they like what you're saying? Yeah, I got lost along the way. I feel a bit fragmented in my life. Things go bad at work, they end up bad at home.

Kenny Lange [00:41:31]:
It's sort of a snowball effect in either direction, which is kind of a nice thing if somebody's wanting to get started. This may all sound great to them, but again, can feel really daunting. Even if their company isn't Fortune 500 on the Inc 5000 or what have you, maybe they've just got a small team of five to ten people and they're doing a couple of million or whatever, and they're just trying to lead, make a life for their family, but somehow they ended up here and they're not quite sure how did they take their first step towards what sounds like an improvement in health as well as just their own leadership all around. Where would you direct them in terms of a baby step in the next 24 hours?

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:42:19]:
Sure. I think doing it within your own abilities. So let's just take away for a second you're not bringing in any outside help. Remember that clarity is part of creating a better culture. When people are more clear about expectations, they're more clear about communication dynamics, and they're more clear around where we're headed. So the kind of the vision of where we're going together, it allows them to be a better part of the team. So it's not hard to take steps to being more clear. If you can pause and stop acting like I'm so busy or I'm too busy, everybody's busy.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:43:01]:
We know that. But it's critical to get this clarity component right, because if we can get that right, then we can get people closer to being on the same page. So I think clarity and then being consistent in clarity, so consistency can then lead to accountability. If I'm clear and I'm consistent over time, then we can be accountable to one another on what we said we were going to do. We can have kind of the speed of trust of who does what by when and if we have clarity, consistency and accountability, we create freedom because now people are free to run because they don't have to worry about, am I doing the wrong thing? Am I going to get micromanaged? Is this going to piss somebody off?

Kenny Lange [00:43:42]:
Right.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:43:43]:
I've literally never said this in this order before, but it makes perfect sense to me. Clarity, consistency, accountability, freedom. But you can't start with freedom and accountability. You got to start with, are you clearly communicating what it is we're even talking about?

Kenny Lange [00:43:58]:
Right. As one of my coaches had told me is a lot of leaders try to hold people accountable for results that they weren't clear about the definition of in the first place. And that's where we get sideways.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:44:14]:
My coach. So you do a good job of referencing your coaches. The coach that took me to the next level, now it's been 15 years. He said upset comes from undelivered communication or unmet expectations or worse, when you have both undelivered communication and unmet expectations. And your example there is, we think we're being clear, but we're not. And so it creates this double form of upset. And now people are mad. Now you're just mad about being mad.

Kenny Lange [00:44:46]:
Yeah. Which is the worst kind of mad.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:44:50]:
Yeah. Try that at home.

Kenny Lange [00:44:51]:
What are we arguing about? I don't know, but I'm mad about it.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:44:55]:
Right? I'm pretty sure I'm right, too, about something.

Kenny Lange [00:44:57]:
Yeah. I was more concerned about being right than doing what's right.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:45:03]:
Jenny, when you coach people, have you ever noticed they'll come back and say, actually, everything you said, I used it at home and my husband now has a better understanding, or my wife thinks this. It's like you give them the right tools for communication and they immediately try to and should fix home life issues, and then they revert back and finally apply it to the people at work. Because it's the same genesis, the same root of all these issues and these communication, these fights.

Kenny Lange [00:45:32]:
Right. I mean, business and leadership would be really easy if it weren't for all these people.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:45:37]:
Yeah. No. What's up with that?

Kenny Lange [00:45:39]:
Right. So no matter what size you are, a company or organization or mean, it's still people at the end of the day. Well, Jeff, this has been illuminating. Obviously, we've got a lot to talk about, especially about our book next year. It seems like I need to start working on an outline. But if somebody wanted to know more about you undivided life and your work, where would you direct them?

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:46:07]:
Two things. One is the website is just undivided life. So I bought that URL after being on a run one day, and I realized that's the name of the company. That's the URL. That's it. So, undivided life. And then I would highly recommend if somebody likes this type of content, if they want to be challenged daily on things around company, culture, leadership, communication, the confluence of faith, family, and everything that makes us a whole person. Just check out my LinkedIn and follow there or communicate there, because I post every day.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:46:39]:
Jeff Shufflebine. There's not many of us in the world, and I'm on LinkedIn now almost more than once a day, and I'm having a blast on there.

Kenny Lange [00:46:48]:
Yes. And we will link that up and I will say, I have it. It's sitting on my desk. So I don't want you to be the only person who busted out a book.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:46:57]:
There we go.

Kenny Lange [00:46:58]:
That you sent me called tribal leadership. And he probably has 17 copies sitting right there. Oh, look at that. We're book twinkies, so we'll get matching tattoos this weekend. But yes, I highly recommend that book to people. It's been really eye opening. Of course, you had the other book, everybody matters. I literally, in my head was thinking about the book, everybody poops.

Kenny Lange [00:47:28]:
The children's book. Very similar content, just little shorter. More pictures.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:47:35]:
Yeah, pick more pictures. Here's my other shameless plug, the beat of dudes. I don't know if that's going to.

Kenny Lange [00:47:41]:
Where'S focus or not. I have my stickers.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:47:45]:
So the beatitudes is a religious. There it is. It focused. A religiously funny podcast twice a week. And it makes. Oh, yeah, you got your sticker that says, just living my undivided life, baby. And the beatitudes. The beatitudes can be hard to find, though, because it turns out there's a thing called the beatitudes that's a little more popular than us.

Jeff Schiefelbein [00:48:07]:
Matthew's gospel, but the beat of dudes, if you type that and put it in comedy or a dash somewhere, you're more likely to find us. But you can go to thebattadudes.com. That's another place. Put a d in there, dudes, and.

Kenny Lange [00:48:22]:
We'Ll capitalize it just to make sure nobody gets confused. But it is a very enlightening and hilarious podcast, so I highly recommend it. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom with us. And to everybody else, remember, change the way you think. You'll change the way that you lead. We'll see you next time. It's.