Trust on Purpose
Are you intentional about building, maintaining or repairing trust with the people in your life? Most of us aren’t, and sometimes important relationships suffer as a result. So much of what is right or amiss in those relationships ties back to trust, whether we realize it or not. We are dedicated to helping you become intentional about cultivating strong trust with everyone important in your life: the people and teams you lead and work with, and your family, friends and community, as well. In the Trust on Purpose podcast, we dive into everything that makes up trust, what supports and damages it. We unpack situations we commonly see with leaders, teams, organizations, and others we work with to show how trust can be strengthened, sustained, and repaired when broken. Listen in for conversations between two pros who care deeply about you being an intentional and masterful trust-builder in your life so you and your relationships flourish. We share pragmatic and actionable takeaways you can use immediately and deepen with practice. If you have questions or situations related to trust that you’d like us to talk about in a future episode, please email charles@insightcoaching.com or ila@bigchangeinc.com.
We'd like to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music that you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for the superpower editing work that he does to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to the smooth and easy to listen to episodes you are all enjoying. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.
Trust on Purpose
Is Your Leadership Style Too Rigid? Discover How Flexibility Builds Trust and Drives Success
Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you
In our latest episode, we talk about the often-overlooked but game-changing aspect of flexible leadership with Kevin Eikenberry, a well-known author and leadership expert. As leadership gets more complex, knowing how to be flexible gives leaders the tools they need to handle uncertainty. Kevin shares how leaders can develop an adaptive mindset based on intention and awareness, helping them respond to challenges on the fly.
You'll hear Kevin's take on self-reflection, understanding context, and why moving away from rigid answers creates a more collaborative environment. As always, our conversation blends theory with practical approaches, showing that flexibility isn't about abandoning your values; it's about enhancing how you respond to different situations while staying true to yourself.
Kevin has generously offered a unique gift for our listeners: KevinEikenberry.com/gift
Join us for a great conversation about building trust and vulnerability in leadership roles and how these elements help create resilient, high-performing teams. Whether you're a veteran leader or just starting out, this episode offers insights that can transform your leadership approach.
We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.
Hi, I'm Charles Thelmer.
Speaker 2:And my name is Gila Edgar, and we're here for another episode of Trust on Purpose and Charles. What have we got on our slate today?
Speaker 1:Well, we have an interview with a gentleman named Kevin who has written a number of books, but he has a new book out called Flexible Leadership, and I'm going to actually ask Kevin to turn over to Kevin for a moment and ask you to introduce yourself. Tell our listeners a little bit about your background and yourself.
Speaker 3:Hi everybody, I'm Kevin Eikenberry and I'm the Chief Potential Officer of the Kevin Eikenberry Group, which is a leadership and learning training company based in Indianapolis, Indiana, with a team spread out across the United States, and we're in the business of helping leaders reach their potential and make the world a better place their potential and make the world a better place.
Speaker 1:Well, we're going to talk a lot about the book CNN, so at the end, we'll ask you to give our listeners information about where they can find the book. This is great. I'm looking forward to it. So do you want to just jump right in? I'm ready if to it. So do you want to just jump right in?
Speaker 2:I'm ready if you guys are Record Okay. So interesting question, kevin. So I'm going to say, as soon as you talked about flexibility, I immediately noticed how tightly I'm holding and constricting in my core. Why is that? Why is that? And you know that's funny because what come to mind immediately is the tighter I hold it, the more control I have over so say more um there's definitely some uncertainty in my next couple of weeks.
Speaker 2:some of it's really big and a bit scary, um, and so, yeah, I feel like there's a part of me subconsciously that if I hold on to it tight, then I can control what the outcome may be, and if I hold on to it even tighter, I can disconnect.
Speaker 3:And there's no flexibility there.
Speaker 2:And there's no flexibility.
Speaker 3:And I would actually argue argue is the wrong word. I would actually comment that the way to deal with uncertainty is to allow yourself to flex.
Speaker 2:So this piggybacks onto something that I've been focused on more and more the concept of surrender. And surrender, I thought, was basically, if any of you, either of you, look at tarot cards or anything, there's a picture of a hanging man in some tarot decks and it is quite literally an invitation to surrender to life, and he is hanging by the sail of a ship, on the mast, hanging upside down like this, and that concept terrifies me because I don't know what I'm surrendering into. However, a lovely meditation this week gave me a different analogy about surrender is like a river with a big rock in the middle, and the river and the water doesn't try and go over the rock or through the rock or straddle the rock, it simply flows around. And so I think what you're inviting me to consider in this moment sorry, that was a long story that that flexibility actually feels like in partnership with the surrender, so I can flow around, I don't have to push a rock uphill, I don't have to resist it.
Speaker 3:Well, it's going to come anyway, Like whatever's going to come is going to come right, so resisting it is somewhat futile really.
Speaker 1:Yeah, resistance is futile.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, okay, let's try not to be cliche here, charles.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes.
Speaker 2:But how? I mean, you've written a book about this and so, in your experience, how do you see leaders showing up when they think they have to control or be certain, in uncertainty, and what does that look like in your experience?
Speaker 3:This is all still before that. We're actually doing our thing here.
Speaker 2:Yes. We may have like a little chart some editor has made, and so we may take a preview, or we could just start.
Speaker 3:No, I just want to make sure I was clear here, that's all.
Speaker 1:Why don't we call this recording for the podcast, and we'll do the intro at some point?
Speaker 3:later on. Well, that's fine. So why don't you ask me the question again and make it easier on the editor?
Speaker 2:Make it easy. Chad, this is for you, my love. The editor is my nephew. So the question is in times of uncertainty, in your experience working with leaders, do you feel that they're more likely to be holding, trying to control, and what do you see? I guess maybe the question is actually what do you see in leaders?
Speaker 3:Well, I work hard to avoid overgeneralizing right.
Speaker 3:So I do think there are a couple of things that leaders often do, and let's start here as to why this is so. Leaders have gotten promoted to wherever they are, whether those of you listening are a frontline leader or have been leading for a very long time and in several different roles and you got promoted because you were good at something, and you got promoted because you had answers, and it's hard not to believe that one of the reasons you got promoted is because you had right answers, and so that's part of our identity as leaders, and I say that in a careful and nonjudgmental way, like I just think that's true. And so it's very easy in times of uncertainty for leaders to do really one of three things To feel like they have to have the answer, so they proclaim it, to just bull forward which could be related to that or not, like we're just going to try to put our blinders on and ignore it, and here we go. Or they become immobilized by it, and chances are in most cases, none of those are probably the perfect or best answer. And I really want to go back to something that you said that I think is really at the crux of one of the big ideas in the book is that when we think we have to be right, we don't have to always be right and in fact that's not always the right goal. I'll put it that way, right, we don't have to always be right and in fact, that's not always the right goal. I'll put it that way, right?
Speaker 3:We grew up in school and we were taught two plus two equals and Christopher Columbus discovered America in. And here's how chlorophyll works Like I don't know, like photosynthesis, you know like I don't know. Like, don't ask me to explain photosynthesis, but my point is there were right answers and then we came up as an individual contributor and became leaders. And there were right answers and we got, as I said a minute ago, we got promoted because we had a lot of the right answers. And now we feel like we're not only do we feel like maybe we ought to, but we're like that's supposedly the job.
Speaker 3:And in a world of 30 years ago, when there was more things that were clear, world of 30 years ago, when there was more things that were clear, when a best practice was a good way to think about the world, when all what I would call, when the context was clear and we had clear cause and effect and all those sorts of things, then right answers were pretty useful. But I think now what leaders need to be thinking about is what are the range of possible good answers? Or, stated a slightly different way, what's the best answer given our context, based on the information that we have, which, chances are, isn't everything we wish we had? That's the definition of uncertainty. How do we navigate that, rather than being immobilized by it or bullying through it, forcing for the right answer? Because here's the thing when we try to find the answer, almost always we will get a bunch of unintended consequences that won't be clear until sometime later and maybe might not be clear for a long time, because the world's complex.
Speaker 1:There are a couple of things that come up. The reason I listen to you that that's wonderful One is if I believe that I should know the answer. That precludes my ability to learn or to be curious.
Speaker 3:It precludes my ability to be curious, which means if I think I should Charles to your first point, then I put the pressure on me and I don't ask anybody else, not necessarily because I don't want help, but I kind of think I'm not supposed to like. It's supposed to be my job to figure it out, like that's why I'm getting paid my salary to do that. And I will respectfully say to people even though I started out by saying I understand why that may be why you're there, how's that working for you?
Speaker 1:The other thing that comes up as you talk about this is often the belief is yes, I'm here because I know I'm supposed to know the answer. And on top of that that's where people's trust in me is built on here is that I'm the guy who knows the answer, I'm the woman who knows the answer, which, in fact, especially when the answer doesn't work out well, the trust breaks pretty quickly. So if I go out instead and say I'm not sure, I'm not quite sure, I'm curious about this, I may not have the answer. I probably don't have the answer If you begin to ask around, that actually ironically, counterintuitively, builds trust.
Speaker 3:Well, 100% right, without question. I would say that the key here isn't even to frame it. I mean, I know that we got here by talking about a question and having an answer, right, but I think it helps us as leaders to not frame it as an answer. But what are the perspectives that will help us see this complex situation more clearly, even though we may not get to complete clarity? That's okay. That's the way the world is. The world is more interconnected and more complicated and complex than ever. Fine, what that means is the more perspectives we can bring to the table, the better, and there's no one that has all the perspectives, right. So I think it's easier for us as humans, slash leaders, to let go of the idea that we have all the perspectives than to say, well, I'm supposed to have the answer, because, again, answer goes back to school Two plus two right, four divided by two, right, I guess.
Speaker 2:So I'm thinking about Amy Atkinson. I think forward and anyway she talks about as a leader, declaring we've never been in this situation before and so collectively I actually need all of your perspectives Because no one of us can solve it so inviting and actually declaring like We've never been in a situation like this before. So how could we us being engaged?
Speaker 3:So what are the range of plausible answers, what are a set of options that we could consider? So I like to think of what I call and I think I made this up Like if someone can say this is already out there, then I will say that I heard it somewhere and don't remember, but I call it plausible cause analysis, like what are the plausible reasons something happened, or plausible reasons why this is the situation. So, like I will often in a workshop with leaders say okay, have you ever been in a situation where you ask a question of a group and you get nothing? You get no responses. And I know where people's heads go. They go to negative intent, like why don't? They aren't, but they don't care, they're not paying any attention.
Speaker 3:I said but what are the possible? What are the plausible reasons? And with any kind of group of any size, we can come up with about 10 reasons why people didn't say things something right away, including their thinking right, and a whole bunch of others, most of which are of benign intent at best or at worst. And so my point is if I now know that there are 10 plausible things here, I don't have any idea which it is, but if I. It's the same in any kind of situation. If I've got 10 things that it might be, what could we do that would address more of them? If we did this thing, it would address four or five of them. That's a better shot than without having thought about any of that. We still don't know right, but we're improving our odds. Listen, as leaders, we are in the influence business and we can influence other people, but we can't control them. We can also influence outcomes, but we can't control outcomes. So the question is how can we improve our ability to have influence that might get us a good result?
Speaker 1:So when you work with people, what are their responses? What do you work with people? What are their responses? What do you hear from people?
Speaker 3:Well, you know, I think a lot of people say, well, being flexible is really good for everybody else, but like, I have a way I do it, like I think that's the first. I think there are two things. I have a way I do it, like I think that's the first. I think there are two things Like no one disagrees intellectually with the idea of being flexible as a leader. I haven't really found anyone that disagrees with it intellectually, but I see a whole lot of people that have a hard time thinking about actually doing it for themselves. Right, for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 3:But I think it's important for us to identify something, because this is a podcast and you guys are experts in trust and, charles, you and I have had conversations about trust and how to build it and all sorts of things in the past, and I would say that perhaps some of you listening are thinking well, how can a leader be flexible, even though they like that idea in concept, right, like, how can they be flexible when I? How do I trust them if I don't know what they're going to do? How do I trust them if they're not being consistent, if they're not being stable, if I don't know what to expect. So if you'd like, I could share a metaphor as to how to look at that. I think.
Speaker 2:I would love that.
Speaker 3:Okay. So I can look outside of my office window right now and see a tree, and you may not. Wherever you are, you may not be able to see one, but you can see one in your mind's eye. Like I'm not talking about a young tree, I'm talking about a tree that's been around for 20, 30, 40 or more years. It's stable, it's strong, it's sturdy, it's consistent, it's not moving, it's right there, it's rooted, and yet you don't have to look at that tree for very long if there's any kind of breeze at all, and you find out that that same thing that is stable and consistent and solid and known is also flexible. Right, like one of the one of the synonyms for flexible is pliant, and a tree is that, but it's not only that.
Speaker 3:So when we say, how can I have, how can I be trustworthy and how can I build trust if I'm flexible and I would say this isn't an either or conversation right, leaders must be rooted in their values and their principles and the mission of their organization and what they're trying to accomplish.
Speaker 3:Rooted in and we need to be, I believe, flexible in our approach, into what we actually do in every moment, or in different, as the context dictates that we do or that we might do something differently. So the idea here is that consistent and flexible are not opposites, but there are two ideas that are symbiotic, and that we hold them in tension and that when we hold them in tension then we can say which direction should I lean. This is what I would call a flexor right, or it's the idea of a flexor which direction in the situation that I find myself, which direction should I be leaning? Because the ends of that flexor, the ends of that continuum, the far ends, are probably not, are very unlikely to be the best answer. The right answer is, the better answer is somewhere in between.
Speaker 2:And the context will tell us where in between we ought to be.
Speaker 3:Can you share how you define flexible in a leadership context? Yeah, in the leadership context, being a flexible leader means that number one, that I am intentional about, recognizing that I can't necessarily do things the way I've always done them, or the way I'm most comfortable doing them, or what my style tells me. So flexibility as a leader starts with intention. It then is about the context what does the situation tell me? And then being willing to flex to best address that context.
Speaker 1:Something came up for me as you said that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You said it starts with intention and I wondered what you said earlier to be clear on values and what I see the values not only personally, but values for the organization. Right, that's part of knowing oneself. So, even perhaps to hear you talking this even before, intention is understanding, knowing myself well, knowing what I'm rooted in.
Speaker 3:As the more we are self-aware and the more self-knowledge that we have, the better chance we have to be a more effective leader, Right and sometimes. And one of the things I'm suggesting here is that understanding ourselves well enough to know that we have natural tendencies that we may have actually made part of our identity. This is how well, this is how I lead, this is how I do it. I am an XYZ leader, I'm an ENFP. I have these four strengths. I mean I could go right on down and we could, and I'm not picking on any of those instruments or styles. That's not the point. The point is they're useful until they're not, and they're not useful when they become our identity. And so people haven't spent enough time in self-reflection if they're just saying, well, this is the kind of leader I am. And so I'm suggesting, even if we don't deeply understand that for ourselves, we have to at least recognize that that identity in and of itself is oversimplifying the world and oversimplifying the possible range of our responses. And I don't have to go into therapy or go further back than that. I just have to be recognized, say, okay, what I've come to believe, or even just what my natural habits are. This is my learned response when this happens to me in a meeting. This is what I do. Is that always serving you? And I would suggest probably not.
Speaker 3:Let's just take the simplest of contexts. I'm in a meeting with a team, with my team, who have all been on our team most of the people for many years, and the shortest time anyone's been there is a year. Would I respond in that meeting different Might I need to respond differently with that group of people than with another group of people. Well, we can very easily say, well, sure, and yet most leaders don't. We can very easily say, well, sure, and yet most leaders don't. Right, and that's the basic point here. Right, Like we have to say, okay, what's this? I have to be aware enough to say stop and don't go into instant, automatic response and say what does the context tell me and might there be a way that would get me better results here?
Speaker 1:That question.
Speaker 2:Well, I want to go poke around in the topic or content.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Charles, your question might need to come before.
Speaker 1:Well, my question well, where my question comes from is so in the trust framework we use one of the four dimensions of trust. It's sincerity. Which sort of is integrity and honesty? And part of that is, of course, be consistent, right? So if I say something to you and then I go say something to Ila, they should at least be reasonably consistent, that's good yeah, agreed.
Speaker 1:And so I wonder, for a leader who's trying to be trust-driven that way, how they would also hold this idea of they can't exactly. They're not going to be the same in these two different contexts that you just mentioned. You know this meeting with this team that they've worked with for a bunch of years and maybe, I guess, I think that please go ahead, Go ahead.
Speaker 2:Well, I was just to say, but we're not doing massive pendulum swings here, right.
Speaker 1:I think that's the boring.
Speaker 2:And so I think you know what I love about this knowing ourselves and the self-awareness is we're often actually just looking for tiny tweaks and nuances. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:Team versus customer right. But I again to our point is that it takes awareness and then intention about going into this particular setting with the best going to arrive at. How can I frame this, how can I support the people in this conversation to get there, because what's not changing is where we're trying to get to right.
Speaker 3:what's not changing is here's the here's the outcome we're we're searching or striving for, and so what is changing is the approach that we might need to take, or maybe only tweak right and maybe different with this group right now, when they're feeling that uncertainty than it might be with them a week from now, when they're less so right. And so absolutely I think that's right.
Speaker 1:It takes capacity to observe the contest. You're a very good observer of the contest.
Speaker 3:A hundred percent. You know, I say somewhere relatively early in the book that I believe that being a more flexible leader is the path to being a more effective leader, but it is not an easy path, right that it's far easier for us to lean into our natural response. I'm fundamentally saying consider your natural response and decide if that's the right answer or the best answer right now or not. Is that going to get you the result that you most want right now or not? So there's the effort of the self-awareness, there's the effort of that intention of stopping, even if only for a breath, the natural response, right. And then there's Charles, to your point, being not just willing to, but able to observe the context. And in the book we give people a framework to help think about that as well.
Speaker 1:We give people a framework to help think about that as well, that would be really valuable for a leader if it's all of his lead. For me, if I'll lead a leadership context, To have a framework for reading the context.
Speaker 3:Ilya, you had a question about context, so it's now the time to ask it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I, because you've mentioned it a couple of times and, of course, in reference to the book. But how do you help to look at context?
Speaker 3:to our own devices, treat everything like what we've seen before, and I think our world isn't necessarily quite like it's been before, right? So I like to use a admittedly somewhat simplified version of the work of Dave Snowden with what is called the Kenevan framework, and you guys are familiar with that. I see nodding, I see one nodding head.
Speaker 2:No, no, I don't Yay. We met a heart about that one.
Speaker 3:You need to have a conversation about that. But let me just do it in a very high level and again, I am oversimplifying it on purpose at this moment. But the Kenevan framework basically says it's a map, is what it is. So imagine if I put you in the wilderness and say your job is to leave, to get out of here. Your first thing was where's the map? I need to know where I am so I know where to go. And that's the idea of making sense, or the sense-making idea of this Kenevan framework, which says basically there are four sort of domains in which our context might lie, and they're fuzzy at the edges and there's all sort of stuff. But just for our purposes, right here, here are the four the context is clear, the context is complicated. The context is complex or the context is chaotic. The context is complex or the context is chaotic, and I mentioned earlier on that.
Speaker 3:I think most of us act as if it's clear that the context is clear, that the knowns are known, that the cause and effects are clear, that someone's got the answer, that best practices can reign and in some situations that is fantastic, phenomenal and awesome. But that's not the whole world all the time and it's less of the world than it used to be In a world that is more global and more interconnected and more messy than ever. That's not always the context of our work, and yet most of us continue to happily blissfully being blissfully unaware operate in that context. So I want to go. I went around if you envision this as a map everybody. I started at the bottom right and I went around sort of counterclockwise. But what I want to do is slide over to the last one I said, which was chaos or a chaotic context. And here's what I think happens is that we tend to think about the world as if things are either clear or they're chaotic. In fact, we use the word chaos all the time. Right, and Snowden would say and I would agree with him that the chaotic context is specific and relatively infrequent and that much of what we call chaos is probably complex, might only be complicated, but here's what complex is. Complex is there are things we don't know and we know we don't know them, and there's some other things we don't even know. We don't know Like it's, like it's the true uncertainty thing, right, like I don't even know, I don't even, we don't even know where all the levers are. So I'll give you a simple example. Well, it's not a simple example, but it's the one that all of us have experienced in the last few years.
Speaker 3:Right as we were having this conversation, it was almost five years ago that a pandemic started to sweep Europe, and then the world, europe and then the US, and we sent everybody home and everyone had to work from home, right, and that at the start of that, you know, over about over a two or three week, four week period, chaos. And what did we need? We needed someone to say we're going to do this. Might not even be right, but we got to do something. And that's what we did. And we did that at the governmental level, and we did that at the organizational level and in a chaotic context. That's what we need. Someone needs to do something, because otherwise we are totally unable to move. And so we look to a leader, and a leader can play the role say let's go here Now. We might have to change it later.
Speaker 3:And that happened a lot, right, early in the pandemic. We're going to do this, we're going to do this, we're going to do this, okay, but we had to do something. And so, but what's happened since then? Well, we sent everybody home and then the medical part of it calmed down and we realized that we could actually be together and we could actually bring people back to the office. And then people started bringing people back to the office and now again, as we're having this conversation, there's more and more talk about bringing people back return to office the way it was before, and I don't want to get in a conversation about why that is necessarily. I think there's all sorts of reasons, some useful and some not, but I think all understandable, because what's happening is people are trying to say let's just put it back to the way we understood it. The context is clear again, let's just do it like that. But what's happened is what? All kinds of unintended consequences. So we set a policy, which is a good thing to do when the context is clear, but a policy is not a good thing to do when things are complex, because all the dominoes will fall in all these different directions and we wonder where we were left.
Speaker 3:Like two, two years ago or so, I was telling people uh, think pilot, think pilot, not policy. And in a context context what we need are to try stuff, to experiment, to be curious and then try stuff. Let's see if this works. If this works, it's great. If it doesn't, then we can go back in another direction and we're making decisions that we can change. Like we can change our clothes Right, we can do this and we can change. Or we'll put on a coat no, we'll take the coat off. We'll put on a sweatshirt no, we can make changes to that. We try something, not quite what we want. We can make an adjustment, and yet that's not what leaders usually want to do. That's not the way many of us that have as much gray hair as I have were brought up. Necessarily, and again, no disrespect to what's happened in the past, but the world is different now.
Speaker 2:The world is more complicated and complex than it ever was before. I need a tiny little clarification In the model what's complicated.
Speaker 3:So complicated is you know what? I don't have all the information, but I'll bet most of the information is available. So we need to have expert opinions, we need to have a variety of perspectives and while we may not be able to get complete clarity, we can come a lot closer. There are things we know, we don't know, and we can go try to figure them out, or at least get some guesses, some plausible options right, which is easier to deal with than full-on complexity. Does that help? You're welcome.
Speaker 3:Now there are downsides to all those things, right. Like if once, well, we can lean into the expertise too much. Like we can assume someone has that expertise, whether it's us or somebody else. And again, that's where we get in trouble sometimes with that right answer stuff. Well, I'm the boss, here's the right answer. Here we go.
Speaker 3:Well, I had blind spots and that's what kept me from understanding all this stuff. If I'd have known all of what I know now, I would have made a different choice. Like we say that all the time you went the simplest way. This is not in the book. I know, charles, you've written your book like seven times and it keeps getting better every time. Longer but better. I know We've had this conversation, but my point is this like here, what I'm about to say is not in the book, because I didn't.
Speaker 3:I wasn't smart enough to have it in there, but it would be if I was doing it again. If you've ever, as a leader, been in a situation where you ask someone asks you a question, or you ask yourself a question, and your answer is it depends Like if you're aware enough to know that it depends, it's not clear, it's either complicated or complex. And when you hear it depends, the next question if you're coaching someone or someone, or you're in a meeting and someone says it depends, well, what does it depend on? Let's talk about those possibilities, those plausible things.
Speaker 2:Charles, you're muted.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 2:Okay, whatever you said that was brilliant. Say're muted. There you go. Okay, Whatever you said that was brilliant, say it again.
Speaker 1:Oh, oh, my God, I can't, I don't know.
Speaker 3:It's complicated.
Speaker 1:I had to cheat, right, You're busted. Actually, what I was going to say is I mean, I'm thinking this might be a close to the place to wrap, except that we need to go back, say our this point or ask you is we've talked a lot about some of the concept, basic concepts here that you write about in this book. Listening to you talk about it sounds like it's a really powerful book for any leader Reading and using those concepts.
Speaker 1:Is there anything else that you think would be valuable for us that have a context in the context of trust?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so first of all, thanks for the kind words and I would say this that we have sort of dipped into some of the biggest ideas, and the formula of intention plus context plus flexors equals flexible leadership. The book is organized at a meta level on three points which I think are really important, and those are mindset, skill set, habit set. So if there's something we haven't talked much about, it's about the habit set. But it is to say that our current habit is to not be intentional right, it's to just do what comes natural, what we've done 52 times before, whatever. So what I try to do in the book is help people see what I mean.
Speaker 3:The conversation we've had today helps you to see the landscape and help to understand the big picture here and that we have to think about this. Tensions between things rather than picking one end or the other, and that in the world is much more of a both and than an either or world and those sorts of things, of things. So understand, because if people don't get that or don't buy that, it doesn't matter what the skills are, because it's not going to match for them and there's not going to be any chance that they'll take any action. So mindset has to match the skill set. But if there's not, if the skills sit in the tool chest and become dusty and rusty, what's the point right? So the last part of the book talks about how do you start to operationalize some of these things for yourself and for your organization, and so that's sort of you know the sort of the overall arc of the book, if you will and it's it's been great to have this conversation with you guys.
Speaker 3:I um, uh, it's been. It's been great. I've enjoyed it a great deal. It's been great.
Speaker 2:I've enjoyed it a great deal. So one other thing before we wrap. Actually, there's two things. One, thank you, I'm already. My mind is spinning thinking about the handlers. I'm currently working with how that will be so valuable for them. But it's new, yeah. And part two is how can people find you?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Where would you let people connect with you? Tell us about that.
Speaker 3:Sure. So the book is Flexible Leadership, navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence and probably the easiest way. I mean, if you want to buy a book, you can obviously go to Amazon. You can find it, and that'd be awesome or wherever it is that you buy books, right, if you go to flexibleleadershipbookcom, you'll get all sorts of information about the book. But I want to actually give you two things, and you can certainly connect with me on LinkedIn, all sorts of stuff you can find me and our work at kevineikenberrycom.
Speaker 3:But I want to give everybody two things. Number one if you're intrigued by this and if you're interested in thinking about how I can start to do this, I would suggest you not buy one book but buy two. And here's why Because if you buy two books, you can give one to someone else and then you can go on this journey together and you have a much better chance of success when you have a thought partner, when you have a peer learner, a peer coach, whatever. However, you want to frame that, and I strongly encourage you to do that. I know you're saying well, kevin, you want to sell two books instead of one, and that's true, but I believe that with all my heart to be true that you will get far more from this if you take action on it. And the best way to take action on it is to do it with a partner. So you can go to kevineikenberrycom slash buy two the number two, the numeral two kevineikenberrycom slash buy two. You'll find that option at the other link I gave you, but you can do that.
Speaker 3:But here's the other thing for all of you that listened I have a gift for you and the gift is at kevineikenberrycom slash gift. I have a gift for you and the gift is at kevineikenberrycom slash gift. And if you go there, the thing about the book, the idea in the book that we haven't talked about it really at all, is confidence, and so when you go to kevineikenberrycom slash gift, what I have for you is a gift of the masterclass I created about building confidence in ourselves and others, and we sell it every day for $79, but not for all of you. All you have to do is go and download it for free, and when you're on that page, there's other stuff about the book as well. So if you go to kevineykenbraycom slash gift, kevineykenbraycom slash buy two, you know it's a good place to start.
Speaker 2:That you just made my heart burst. One of my values is generosity, and so I just I feel the generosity of what you just shared. Thank you.
Speaker 1:It's my pleasure.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you for spending time with us, for sharing so generously. I loved this conversation. Carols, any closing words from you?
Speaker 1:Yes, also. Thank you, hang on a minute closing words from you. Yes, also. Thank you, hang on a minute and this is going to be mopping my door. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just want to extend my thanks as well. This has been a really interesting day and, yes, I am going to go take advantage of the buy two, or buy two books and share ones. I love that that worked through.
Speaker 1:Yes, I'm going to say something, thank you. Thank you, we'll check in review again in a while and see how things are going. What you book I love that, yeah, yeah.
