In this conscious episode, John Lamy, co-founder of The Globally Conscious Leader, shares how he and his business partner coach globally conscious leaders to live out their values and create a positive impact on the world around them. This episode will tremendously help any founder or CEO who feels like they are facing headwinds that are getting stronger every day.
You will discover:
– The advantages of a coached peer group over a private coaching relationship
– 2 of the most common challenges CEOs face and how to overcome them
– The #1 strategic question you should be asking
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. It is the one and only John Lamy who is a seasoned leader consultant and strategic thinker. He has a proven track record in transforming leadership approaches and business outcomes with a foundation in engineering, from MIT and an MBA from Cornell. John’s background in education sets the stage for his work in leadership development. John’s approach to leadership training emphasizes the importance of ethics, core values and strategic thinking. John’s work equips leaders and organizations with the tools and mindset necessary to effectively navigate the complexities of the global business landscape while developing and expanding their individual global consciousness. Well, John, I’m really excited about some of the ground we’re going to cover here today. I wanted to start off with this idea globally conscious leadership. What is that? What are you guys up to there? And why is it so important?
John Lamy
Yeah, what we’re doing is we’re looking toward CEOs and owners and C suites of companies, small, medium, large, that are actually sincerely interested in helping tackle climate change, the big existential problem, one of the, I could say three big existential problems, the other two being nuclear war and AI, but there’s a lot of companies who really want to help. There’s a lot that really don’t that just greenwash, but there are companies that want to help. So that’s where we’re headed. That’s where our whole thrust goes. And I think it’s important to have that kind of as a background for what we’re doing.
Scott Ritzheimer
So within that context, what are some of the unique challenges that those founders, owners, leaders have stepping into that space? What would you say is, is either harder or maybe even easier in that, that ecosystem?
John Lamy
Yeah, I think the hard, the hard thing is, you’re, you’re, you’re going against a headwind. There is a kind of an assumption, or an overlay of our of our capitalist view, that kind of fights against the idea of of a global view, of a long term view people tend to look toward this quarter’s bottom line is usually the metric that matters, growth thereof. Uh, GDP, growth is usually another one. If you know, at a country level, those kind of metrics and that kind of emphasis drives you in the other direction. So there’s this headwind, but they that it’s almost unspoken. And then I think we, you know, we saw in the election, and how people really feel about that. So that’s that’s the hardest thing, right? There is headwind.
Scott Ritzheimer
One of the things I noticed as I was getting ready for this is you do a lot of your work in that space through what you call coached peer circles. So tell what is a coached peer circle, and why have you found that to be such an effective tool for coaching and leading?
John Lamy
Yeah, but it’s on Zoom somewhere between four and eight participants that are truly peers. We like we want to have maybe all CEOs, or all owners, or C suite folks. We would maybe have another one for aspiring leaders, kind of up and coming. That’s an important thing, the pipeline. So you get these folks on on Zoom together in the room, you might say, and then we address issues and problems and in questions and stuff that they’re facing. And we coach Steve. Steve rice is my partner in this thing. We coach. We don’t do a whole heck of a lot of teaching or opinionating, but we tend to draw out other people by asking them questions and stuff like, you know, Person number one will say, we’re going to try this, and person number two says, Yeah, well, we actually tried that. And here’s what happened, well, and see coming from a peer. That helps if some little, you know, wise acre says that you go, Okay, well, you know you’re, you’re kind of negative on everything. But I think the fact that it’s peers that can can actually share experiences or or the other typical thing might be, we’re going to try this. And this person over here says, Have you. Thought about that. Oh no, didn’t think of that. That kind of thing is what really comes out of a peer circle, where they’re truly feel like peers, and it’s a lot like a mastermind group. In fact, it almost is a mastermind group. We haven’t yet done a mastermind group, but it’s a little bit like that. So that’s, that’s the short answer.
Scott Ritzheimer
You got me to my next question, which is, how does that differ from a traditional mastermind approach?
John Lamy
Yeah, it, it really, I don’t think it differs very much from it. Yeah.
Scott Ritzheimer
So as you’ve got these folks together, these peers kind of zooming in specifically on your kind of CEO, founder peer circles. What would you say are some of the most common challenges that are coming up in those discussions?
John Lamy
Some of them are traditional leadership challenges, like having a clear written down, participated in strategy, you know, a written and I’ve done quite a bit of consulting relative to strategy development. It’s amazing how people just kind of let that go. And I’m guilty of that myself, of just kind of jumping in and saying, Well, it’s obvious what we’re doing, let’s just go do it. And that actually is a huge mistake to not have a strategy that was developed by the C suite owner input, probably, but where people can truly answer the roughly 20 or 30 big questions that go with the development of a strategy. So that’s a big one. There’s a second one that we we we talk it has to do. It’s a kind of a more low level thing you might think it has to do with accountability, where people say, Yeah, I’ll do I’ll have it on your desk by Friday, yeah, yeah, for sure. And then Friday comes, is not on his desk. What the heck happened that kind of thing? And we have a program that we adopted from another another guy got a really good guy, but it’s called Mocha, and it stands for motivation, opportunity, clarity and ability. And you just think about those words, motive. You say to somebody, how about this? You can get done by Friday, yeah, yeah. And the person’s just not motivated. They don’t want to, they don’t like that kind of thing, but they don’t dare say that. Well, it’s nice, if you just talk about it, just have a conversation about that or clarity. Now, do you mean Friday morning or Friday afternoon? Did you want me to include the shipping department or just R and D? Yeah, clarity and then that’s opportunity, boss, I am so busy. What am I going to not do? What do you want me to not do this week that I was going to do so I can do this? And that used to be the kind of question that a jerk would ask, but I think it’s it’s sometimes it’s okay. So opportunity, clarity, and then ability. I was at Hewlett Packard for many decades, and we would interview, we would ask upcoming engineers hard technical questions. We’re going to ask them to do hard technical design, and so we want to know if they got the ability. And it’s amazing how many people interview people and don’t look at ability. Thus look at FIT. They’ll look at motivation, they’ll look at springing the step. You know, all this kind of so that four level thing Mocha is all about, about accountability, is a pretty strong word. But anyway, those are two things that that really are challenges, that I think you and the traditional those are just traditional things had nothing to do with global thinking, but gotta have them.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. You, you piqued my interest. You talked about 20 or 30 questions for for clarifying your strategy. What would you say are some of the the most important questions to ask yourself or your team when setting your strategy.
John Lamy
Yeah. I love that question because I’ve done a lot of strategy work, and my humble opinion, by far, the most important question is, who are your stakeholders, you know? And so often we say, Well, geez, is obviously the owner and the shareholders. That’s who it is. It’s the guys who collect the quarterly dividend. That’s something, yeah, yeah, for sure. But how about the employees? How about the supply chain? I mean, given the global. So climate imperative, supply chain is a huge deal. How about well, customers, it really ought to be number one. And segmentation a member marketing class my BA program, segmentation is so important. So you send a message to this segment, you send a different message to that segment, and where are they, and all that kind of good stuff. So your stakeholders is, to me, the number one question, and it goes from there.
Scott Ritzheimer
So good. One of the things that I actually don’t hear a lot about, I talked to lots and lots of other coaches by this show and a few other different mediums, but I don’t hear them talk a whole lot about ethics, not that that would say any of them are unethical, but it seems to be a point of emphas in your coaching. Why is that?
John Lamy
Yeah. Good. I’m so glad you asked that. I’m gonna take that one click deeper. Ethics is kind of like should and should not. You know, we shouldn’t steal, we shouldn’t beat up people, okay, right? We shouldn’t but deeper than that is values. You know, what are our real values, and Steve and I have come up with, I don’t think I’ll take the time right now, but six values that we think are important, and I don’t think they just automatically overlay onto any old company. You have to think about what your own values are. But here’s a good example. Our number one value is love the Earth. You say, Geez, guys, are you? Are you a bunch of hippies or what I mean? And you think about a manufacturing company, our attitude toward the earth has typically been, it’s a resource. You know, we’re going to extract stuff from it, and when we’re done extracting and we’ll go with the product. We’ll put it back out there. So it’s a transactional thing, and the earth right now just aggregating, big, big, big, we are extracting and dumping at roughly twice the capacity of the Earth to handle it. So it only makes sense, it only it’s a reasonable thing, but we like to take it deeper and say, realize that we humans are bonded to the Earth. We’re Children of the Earth. And if we have that kind of an underlying attitude, then the ethics that spring from that are much more healthy. So we ask people to think about values. And like I said, you can’t just like the 10 Commandments is a set of values. Jesus had some stuff he had, you know about the big commandments? Love thy neighbor. We sort of frame our value structure on top of that, you know, like fifth commandment says, Thou shalt not kill. I agree with that, but this adds something to it. So we we feel like those values are really important, that people need to just wrestle with it. Have COVID interior dialog, and even a dialog among the C suite about it. And anyway, so that’s that’s where ethics ranges for me.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, so you, you brought me actually, right to my next question, which is a challenge more for leaders and to some extent executives, but maybe to some degree less for found the founders, CEOs listening. But one of the challenges that leaders, especially rising leaders, have in an organization, is that they the organization, to some extent, has values, whether articulated or not, right? And those don’t always line up one to one with our own personal values. So how do you help leaders to overcome the gap between their personal values and their organizational values?
John Lamy
Yeah, that that is very tough. Um, I don’t, I don’t think there’s a really easy answer to that, because the the the aggregated personal values basically form the corporate values, you know. So you tend to, there have been quite a few studies about you tend to attract like minded, you know, like valued people. Even we were talking before the show about geography, you know, you have, there’s this wonderful book called The 12 nations of America that talks about the persistence of. Structures and political structures throughout the country, you know, and where they came from. So the point of all that is that there tends to be an attraction, a mutual attraction, but if somebody has a fairly outlier set of values relative to everybody else, I don’t have an easy answer to that, you know, I just don’t.
Scott Ritzheimer
I think it brings us back to, yeah, one of the, one of the things is, as you’re going through this, you mentioned the interview process ahead of time, I think it is why we, we I think rightfully spend more time on looking for value, fit and alignment? Yeah, I remember in my days leading my own company, I always used to say, it’s not my job to put these values in you, right? It’s my job to call them out of you. If they’re not there already, right? Then there’s just nothing to work with. If they’re there, then it’s my job to foster them, and I always felt like that was the best way to kind of manage that tension. And I feel like we saw some success with that.
John Lamy
Yep, I agree with that 100% you can’t just jam values into people, and people’s values don’t change too much over their life. They will change with traumatic events. A spouse dies, you your values can take a jump forward, but they should play as pretty hard.
Scott Ritzheimer
John, there’s a question I like to ask all my guests, I want to hear what you have to say. So there’s the question, what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching and listening today, knew?
John Lamy
Yeah, and this is going to sound so funny, but I love it. And this back, it comes from back, but I was managing a bunch of engineers, so I had a boss, and then I’m here, and then they have, you know, and then they’re below them. So you got this structure. I call it the Charlotte’s Web approach to leadership, Charlotte’s Web. And if you’ve got anybody that’s got kids, knows Charlotte’s Web, and this spider spoke English, and she would do it by writing it in the web. Okay, and so here’s this pig, a welber, and he’s going to probably get slaughtered. And so she takes the web and writes, that’s some pig. She writes that in the thing. So she she’s obviously the smartest one in the room, right? She speaks anyway she can write, but she’s pointing at the pig, saying, that’s some pig. And so people come and buy go, wow. Okay, let’s the point of that is, if you’re the boss of some people, you’re walking in the parking lot, and your boss happens to come up and say, Hey, how you doing? You say, Hey, boss, let me tell you about what Mary came up with last week in my R D lab, she came up with a new way of doing a differential amplifier that blew my socks off. Oh, really, yep, that’s Mary. So I’m pointing over here at Mary. And so the next time the boss happens to be walking in next to Mary. He says, Hey, I heard you came up with this new wig and differential amplifier. She feels great, and she’s hurt. She’s appreciated. And conversely, I’m getting together with my team, and I say, Yeah, I was walking in with the boss this morning. He had this great idea to do X, Y and Z. So people get the idea the boss is pretty cool. Point is you spend a fair amount of time passing credit, passing goodness up and down, as opposed to if you have your own insecurities to deal with, which we all have our own insecurities. Say, I thought this up. My idea. How often do we hear that kind of thing? I so I like that Charlotte’s Web approach. I used it. I thought it was great. I thought it worked. So I don’t know there’s my my simple answer to your very profound and appropriate question. good. I love that the Charlotte SWE approach, John, there’s some folks listening, and they’d love to get plugged into a group like that with like minded leaders. How can they find more out about you and the work that you guys do there?
Okay. I think our website is the best place to start: thegloballyconsciousleader.com and I am John@thegloballyconsciousleader. So, fantastic place.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love it. Head on over there. We’ll put it in the show notes for you. Check it out. It’s a fantastic site. John, thanks for being on the show. Just an honor and privilege having you here today. And for those of you watching and listening that 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.
Contact John Lamy
John Lamy is a seasoned leader, consultant, and strategic thinker. He has a proven track record in transforming leadership approaches and business outcomes. With a foundation in engineering from MIT and an MBA from Cornell, John’s educational background sets the stage for his work in leadership development. John’s approach to leadership training emphasizes the importance of ethics, core values, and strategic thinking. John’s work equips leaders and organizations with the tools and the mindset necessary to effectively navigate the complexities of the global business landscape while developing and expanding their individual global consciousness.
Want to learn more about John Lamy’s work at The Globally Conscious Leader? Check out his website at https://thegloballyconsciousleader.com/
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