The Inner and Outer Game of Leadership with Chris Thyberg

Action's Antidotes

Leadership is more than just holding a title; it's about guiding, inspiring, and managing people effectively. Often, new leaders find themselves promoted into roles without the right tools to succeed. How can we better prepare ourselves to excel in leadership, both internally and externally? In this episode, I have Chris Thyberg, Founder of The Serving Way. Chris and I discuss the challenges of leadership, particularly when someone is promoted to a leadership role without the necessary training to manage and inspire effectively. We also explore the difference between the 'inner game' and 'outer game' of leadership. Elevate your leadership skills—listen now! --- Listen to the podcast here: The Inner and Outer Game of Leadership with Chris Thyberg Welcome to Action’s antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. How many of you out there have ever had a bad boss? And I say that because there’s kind of two different kinds of bad bosses in my view. There’s the person who’s just not able to tame their ego, that can be a little bit psychopathic, sociopathic, but then there’s a broader category of kind of more low-key bad bosses that kind of arise because, well, oftentimes, we promote people who are good at doing the day-to-day job, who are good at delivering the results but not necessarily the ones that are best suited or even training them on how to be a leader of people, which is an important caveat, and so when we look at that category of bad bosses, one thing I want to impress upon you is that it’s oftentimes not those people’s fault, they were never given the training to learn how best to inspire people, how best to manage people, how best to cultivate a positive and joyous work environment for the people working for them, all they know is how to do the day-to-day job and they did it well. To talk about this topic a little bit, I’d like to introduce you to my guest, Chris Thyberg, who is the founder of The Serving Way and a leadership coach. --- Chris, welcome to the program. Stephen, thank you so much for having me and what a great setup. I need you to write copy for my website, please. That was just on point. Well, my production team does produce a transcript of every episode so when this episode does drop in a few weeks, it’ll come in on the page on my website. It’s a delight to be with you. Let’s go. All right, well, that’s wonderful. So, Chris, it sounds like you’re observing the same phenomenon. We talked a little bit about how there are some people who are just psychopathic or haven’t tamed their ego but this broader category of people where they just weren’t set up to be good bosses, good managers, good leaders, because the training you get when you get promoted doesn’t really emphasize that. That’s exactly right, and as I joked with you on the pre-show, as long as that keeps happening out in the marketplace, I have employment for life. Every single client that I am working with is in that in-between space. I call it the growing edge, where more of what got them there is not going to take them where they need to go at this level of leadership. So, for example, the star individual performer with super high competencies, expertise, skills, experience, knowledge, what I call the outer game of leadership, great, great. And then they get that promotion, almost like the bridge too far, and they are on the other side of this thing and they say, “Oh my gosh, I just got a 360 performance review and everything I built my identity around that I got promoted for is now what my team tells me is killing us. What do I do?” And they come to me in that place of how on earth did I get set up for this failure and I said, “No worries. This is the human condition. You are fine.” You are at a growing edge, which means, and I truly believe this and every coach worth his or her salt must come from this point of view, this point of view is that, Stephen,