In this noble episode, Lynell Green, CEO of The Lynell Group, shares how she built a strong work ethic on the foundation of her entrepreneurial childhood, and how she helps leaders up and down the org chart to develop and benefit from a CEO Mindset. If you are a leader who wants to grow, this episode is gold. And for the founders, CEOs, and executive directors out there, stay tuned for the whole episode because there is a special nugget or two just for you.
You will discover:
– How you as a leader can inspire your team to take ownership of and pride in their work
– What you should be focusing on specifically right now if you are the CEO of your organization
– What is so special about a CEO Mindset
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And here with us today is yet another high demand coach we have with us the prestigious the one and only, Lynell Green, who, from a young age, learned to own her success by running a paper route, babysitting and operating a bakery. These ventures taught her valuable lessons about business and life, customer service, hard work, adaptability and innovation. They laid the foundation for her CEO mindset. We’re gonna dive into that here in just a moment where waiting for solutions wasn’t an option. She created opportunities, and as she grew as a leader, she realized this mindset isn’t just for CEOs. It’s crucial in all leadership roles. It’s about strategic thinking, long term goals and seizing opportunities. Well, let out, I’m so excited to have you on the show, at least we have fantastic conversation. I like to set these up with with a little bit of a definition, just to make sure we’re all talking about the same thing. Because CEO mindset, CEO mindset can mean a lot of things to a lot of folks. Would you mind defining for us what a CEO mindset is?
Lynell Green
Great. Well, Scott, you gave me this wonderful, amazing introduction, which really did include some of the foundational principles that I actually honor in the CEO mindset. And to your point, I believe it’s for everyone. We all are the CEOs of our own personal journey. So even if you don’t think you’re the boss, you are the boss of you. So it starts there. It really starts with us owning that we’re in charge of our own growth and development, and as leaders, we also are in charge, in some respect, of the people that are on our teams and in our organizations and at the fundamentally, what that means is that there aren’t any victims here. We really we can’t control everything that happens to us or to our businesses or to our our industry, but we’re 100% in charge of how we react. And I find that fundamentally, it’s a past, present, future phenomenon that people you need to learn from the past, you need to execute well in the present, and you need to have a clear vision for the future. And I find that if you can embrace that as with this, that all that is the CEO mindset, fundamentally having your arm arms around all three of those dimensions of leadership
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s so good and and this question is a little bit obvious, but we’re going to dive into a little bit deeper the CEO mindset is not just for CEOs, right? So how deep in the org chart should it go?
Lynell Green
Well to me, if I’m the CEO, I’m 100% responsible for how the organization goes. So if I’m a janitor, and not that we’re thinking that that’s a bad thing, we I love janitors. I need them, and I’m glad that they’re that they’re there. But if you have a the team that’s responsible for cleaning your building, and they own that, and are taking pride in that, and are looking for creative ways to do that better, more efficiently, more effectively. That’s going to be a very different team with very different results than if you’re just handing them a bucket and say, you know, keep the bathrooms clean and get things off the floor. So I think every level of the organization needs to understand that they own whatever lane that they’ve been given, and that ownership is also has to have the authority for them to be creative and entrepreneurial. And I think that’s the critical component, is that leaders don’t know how to give that power away, so to speak, and let people own their lane like really, we think leadership about people following us, but it really is about people discovering their own journey more so in my view.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s so good you mentioned almost in passing, taking pride in the work that they do. And I I’m actually very passionate about work and the nobility of work, right? Just in and of itself, whatever the job is, I think there’s an opportunity in every job to experience the nobility that that is inherent in good work. And so why do you think it’s it’s so hard for so many people to take pride in their work?
Lynell Green
That’s a great question. Scott, I did a workshop at Facebook a few weeks ago, and one of the things you know, since tech started having layoffs, there’s a lot of job insecurity, etc, and people are trying to survive. So you get into survival, very few of us do our best work in survival mode. And if we’re not careful, we begin to work inside of a survival work ethic, which very few of us can excel in that environment, because our, in my view, our. Brains don’t work well as well as they could. So that notion of nobility and work really does require us to manage ourselves from an emotional intelligence perspective and continue to do excellent work regardless of what the environment is saying, regardless of potential layoffs or will you get laid off maybe. Will you get a new manager? Will you get part of a reorg? Will you know you lose your funding like, who knows? Maybe, yeah, you can still do excellent work and honor the nobility of work given whatever circumstances come your way. And I think people feel, at times, when circumstances come that they now have an excuse not to do excellent work and not to honor your term the nobility of work?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it’s kind of like when you stop and think about it, it’s if you don’t do that, what do you hope to gain? Right? Like, let’s say, let’s say, the worst thing does happen, and you are let go through no fault of your own, and you’ve just been busting and giving your very, very best everything that you have, what, what folks don’t recognize until they’re in that experience in that role, is how much momentum you carry into your next job, if you spent months and months just driving and working and being the very best version of yourself, and it doesn’t work out. It’s Yes, frustrating, right? It’s a huge setback, and it’s a challenge, but you’re able to take and just continue that work ethic, that application. We had folks who started who had had a ton of potential, but that potential wasn’t being utilized in their previous work, and so they let that convince themselves to just kind of dial it back. And then they came and worked for us, and we would do a lot of what you’re talking about and opened it up and say, Hey, take ownership. But there were so many habits just ingrained in the way they showed up that some of them made the leap. Don’t get me wrong, some of them, but it was hard, right? It’s really, really hard to build those back. And so I love in your answer, it was all about what we can take ownership of. You’re not waiting for management to change something. You’re not waiting for the certainty to come. There’s something that we can each do right here and right now. Would you agree?
Lynell Green
Absolutely. Scott, very well said. And that one word that I love, that I talk about all the time, and it happens if you’re doing if you’re trying to fly below the radar, trying to just minim, you know, stay out of trouble, so to speak, because of whatever’s going on in the workplace, you’re now creating habits that have you. In my views, have a mediocre work ethic. You have a work ethic and and you’re in charge of how well you continue to build on that and how efficient you are, not like a machine, but understand that if you’re going to be you’re going to run a business, or be part of a business, that you want to do your best work. And you can’t do that if you’re trying to fly below the radar, do mediocre work get away with as much as you can all of those things that you’re outsmarting yourself, if you at all honor any of those those principles as a mindset.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, you, you brought up earlier, just the need for creativity and that entrepreneurial kind of approach to problem solving. And then you talked about the need for leaders to create the space for that to happen, to give that away, to give that what are some things, maybe deeper on that, or in addition to that, that might prevent the CEO mindset from taking root in an organization?
Lynell Green
Well, I love that question. I think that some leaders are insecure, and they actually feel threatened if their team members are owning it or maybe coming up with ideas that they didn’t think of or that they feel are too risky to implement and execute. So in order for you to create a CEO mindset, you have to be secure as a leader, and you have to give the people on your teams the space to make mistakes if they know they don’t have the space for failure. Yes, we want people to fail fast, but some failure isn’t fast. Sometimes you have to implement it and take it, you know, a little bit further down the road before you realize, wait a minute, we need to pivot here. And they it needs to be a safe space for that type of entrepreneurial spirit in order for you to continue to build a climate and culture and where people feel safe doing that and the I just want to say one of the things Scott about this, because we’re so metric driven as we should be, being making informed decisions. We want, you know, the analytics to make sense with with what we do. But I find that, I call it the eye factor, being smart about your ROI, your KPI. And your Dei, and I know dei has been has gotten its own slant lately, but when I say it, I really am talking about our cultural intelligence, that we our teams are global. Now, most of the teams I work with you know, we are in four or five countries, and if you as the leader of the team or the organization, are not culturally intelligent, which is where I find diversity and equity and and inclusion live. Then you can forget about meeting your KPIs and your ROI. Yeah. So that whole I factor owning that requires to do it well, giving people, letting them off the leash. That’s kind of what I what I how I could summarize that.
Scott Ritzheimer
I love, that there’s, there’s this challenge just dialing in on, on CEO in particular, maybe Executive Director, President, founder, whatever the title is, that person is sitting at the top of the organization. One of the things that I found that catches a lot of them off guard is exactly talking about that insecurity thing. So they, they, let’s say, they do a great job. They get their executive team Thinking in this way. They’re owning their you know, they’re they’re cascading that down the organization. They’re doing everything that they can do. What can happen is, the founder, Owner, CEO, can kind of look around and be like, well, now what do I do? Right? Is like a Ricky Bobby moment, you know, what do I do with my hands? And what does a CEO do once they’ve succeeded in giving their executives a CEO mindset?
Lynell Green
Well, I love when you actually experience that, where everybody’s running, you know, full throttle, and things are being handled in a way that you’re happy as the leader and the CEO. Fundamentally that you know I did that past, present, future, what the leader needs to constantly have their mind on is the future, because if they’re if you’ve given everybody, if you’ve empowered your team, but you’re not clear about the vision and where you’re going, especially as quickly as tech is moving. AI is, you know, our partner now and helping us be creative even faster. Um, there’s all of these components now that invite and then we’re the world has gotten smaller with technology. So the I find that it’s CEOs are spending their time like, what’s going on in your competitive marketplace? Just like a lot of these smaller companies, in particular, they interrupted somebody else. They were, they were disruptors. Well, there’s a disrupter coming for you. Don’t and they’re probably already in the garage, working on their business model, TINKERING AWAY AT something. Pay attention, and as the leader you’re paying attention to the you know, when we do the SWOT analysis, I find it’s fun to play with our strengths and cheer ourselves on. We should, but those threats, I find that great leaders don’t, don’t. They’re unapologetic for looking at the threats, being honest about those looking at disruptors. Do we want to partner with those disruptors? That’s a common phenomenon, but it’s not if you let them get too big, where they can actually, like, start nipping at your heels. So that’s what I find leaders, they should be spending their time on, helping their leaders continue to grow their teams, but also looking at the bigger picture. I say, staying in the helicopter, looking at the bigger view.
Scott Ritzheimer
So good, so good and so true. So no, there’s a question that I have for you ask all my guests. I’m very curious to see what you have to say. What would you say is one of the biggest secrets, or the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Lynell Green
Yeah, well, this is probably going to sound a little interesting, but that whatever they’re doing right now, they’re not going to be doing forever. It’s temporary. The people you’re working with, the job you’re doing. For most of us, we’re not going to die in the seat We’re in. We’re going to continue to evolve and grow and develop. So you want to treat what you’re doing right now as a season, and it’s just like if you were harvesting anything. You want to maximize the harvest of that season. But that also means you have to be willing to plant and water and fertilize and then harvest, and then you might stay in that in this job or this role, another cycle, but you want to realize that you and and that your people will not be with you forever, right? One of the things that happens when you’re building a team where you’re encouraging entrepreneurship is people find other ventures and other things. You want to celebrate that so be able to celebrate your season and celebrate the season of the seasons that your of your team and and your executive team then, and the everybody that’s helping you accomplish what you’re committed to accomplish.
Scott Ritzheimer
So good, so good. And now there’s some folks listening, and they’d love to work with you. They’d love to have you come in and talk to their team. How can they. Find out more about you in the work that you do. Where can they reach out to you?
Lynell Green
The best thing is to go to my website and subscribe, and you can send me a note if there’s something in particular that you have in mind. And we’re, you know, my team, we’re great at following up. So it’s lynellsplace.com
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. We’ll get that in the show notes for everyone. Check it out. As great website, great resource. Lynell, fantastic fantastic wisdom. Just loved every bit of it. Thanks so much for being on the show. Really appreciate having you here. And for those of you who are watching and listening, you know that your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Lynell Green
From a young age, Lynell Green learned to own her success by running a paper route, babysitting, and operating a bakery. These ventures taught her valuable lessons about business and life—customer service, hard work, adaptability, and innovation. They laid the foundation for her CEO mindset, where waiting for solutions wasn’t an option; she created opportunities. As she grew as a leader, she realized this mindset isn’t just for CEOs—it’s crucial in all leadership roles. It’s about strategic thinking, long-term goals, and seizing opportunities.
Want to learn more about Lynell Green’s work at The Lynell Group? Check out her website at https://www.lynellsplace.com/
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