Building Strong Leaders & Healthy Organizations

Hello everyone, my name is Dr. Kris Lea, and I'm an organizational psychologist, which means I study how people work together. The organizations that they work in hi I'm Leanne Ferry. I'm an executive leadership coach, which means I work with individual leaders to navigate challenges and achieve goals in their organizations, so welcome to our series, everybody today. 

00:00:23 We'd like for you to get to know us a little bit and then invite you to visit us again and again for our upcoming podcast series, so Kris, I think it'd be helpful for everyone if you explained a little bit about what you actually do yes thank you so at a high level I help my client organizations to be more efficient 

00:00:47 Productive and happier places to be, and the way I start out doing that is with some diagnostic work. Then I help them to develop some custom solutions to help them to reach their future state, whatever that might be, so that's a high level. Still, Leanne tells us a little bit more about what you do as an executive coach. Yeah, sure, so as an executive leadership coach, I work to help leaders become more self-aware, more resilient, and more courageous in all they do.

00:01:14 I do that by providing sessions that are confidential, safe, and a non-judgmental space that allows leaders to really take that pause and reflect on their best path forward, and the coaching facilitates their clarity and getting into action around the 

00:01:41 Topics that are most important to them in their work and their lives [Music] yeah, really is so um could talk about that all day, but Kris can you give an example of the kinds of problems or an example of the kind of problem that you help solve with your clients so um let's start with saying that there there is no perfect organization I haven't found one yet 

00:02:12 But I have found a lot of organizations with really fantastic leaders that care so much about their organizations that they want their organizations to be really healthy places to be, and that's that's so important, so leadership is is really critical here, but since every organization has one problem or another uh we generally call those organizational pain points, and so I helped to understand what those pain 

00:02:38 Points might be, and one of the things that are really common is just a general sense of employee disengagement or malaise let's call it employee disengagement, and that that is happening across many, many organizations and in fact, uh, the Gallup research institute talks about over 75 percent of employees which this number this stat includes managers at all levels 

00:03:06 Also, um, that they are disengaged somehow, and this is really relevant for organizations because disengaged employees and managers really don't contribute to their fullest and best strength, and part of the reason for that is that there is in some organizations mistrust that's that runs deep and makes it difficult for open and honest conversations to happen 

00:03:38 And for people to be able to work together in a much more collaborative way, so the lack of trust is fundamentally at play much of the time, and what I see about a common denominator for the two of us is that coaching which coaching conversations really are fundamentally about building trust coaching conversations can happen peer-to-peer it can happen from 

00:04:06 Supervisor to a staff member can happen in any direction inside of the organization because a coaching conversation in organizational terms is about open dialogue and inquiry which is really meant to deepen the relationship, and I really think that it is very important for organizations to operationalize thank you for explaining that Kris and  

00:04:33 That example is relevant to the kinds of clients and leaders that I work with. Also, I'll give you two examples of the kinds of problems I work on with clients. One of them speaks directly to what you're talking about; there is distrust between the leader I'm working with and higher-level leaders, and so often, that conversation. 

00:05:03 In the coaching session in the private space with me is around how to approach those leaders, how to create better relationships with those leaders, how to communicate better with those leaders, but it's coming from the leader that's downstream trying to create the better relationship going up, so it's really interesting so in the session we talked about 

00:05:26 You know courageous conversation uh communication skills such like that um sort of deepen their awareness of what's going on is it something they're doing is it something they need to shift is it some new you know communication technique they need to try so those conversations happen a lot in my sessions I wanted to give another example of another kind of problem that I often 

00:05:50 work on with clients, and that's the one where the client, the leader actually has trust with their team or believes that they do they're very well liked they um, their team members come to them about anything everything they have really good relationships but the leader struggles with direct communication with giving immediate feedback 

00:06:14 To their team members, they are worried that if they do that, it's going to break the trust, so these are leaders with really good relationship-building skills; they just have this fear and this belief deep down that if they give direct feedback that it will break that trust that it will break those relationships, so I do work on those kinds of topics a lot 

00:06:39 And it ends up often at least being one component of what their belief what do they believe about this what are they believing about what it means if you're direct, and so then we dig into that, and we find out what's getting in the way of them really showing up being and becoming the kinds of leaders that they really want to be so so important Leanne so important um so we need to 

00:07:06 As supervisors and leaders, we need to be able to have conversations in which we give feedback without damaging the relationship; important yeah, you and I both work for very similar purposes, which is to create excellent leaders and healthy organizations for our clients, and we have so much to talk about but 

00:07:27 For today, we're going to wrap up, but everybody out there wants you to know that we'd love to connect with you on LinkedIn, and if you'd like to get a hold of us, I can be reached at krisleaconsulting.com, and I can be reached at leannefairy.com would be great to hear from you yeah and thanks so much for spending time with us today, and we can't wait for the next video 

00:07:48 Podcast, so see you next time at courageous conversations. Bye-bye