Achieve Organizational Success With A Chief Of Staff With Emily Sander
At the heart of organizational excellence, a Chief of Staff stands as a key orchestrator, weaving together the intricate threads of leadership, strategy, and operations. Join Tom Dardick as he sits down with Emily Sander, a leadership coach and founder of Next Level Coaching, to further discuss the significance of the Chief of Staff position in an organization. Emily sheds light on the pivotal responsibilities of a Chief of Staff, acting as the linchpin that connects diverse business functions, offers a strategic perspective on organizational architecture, and seamlessly adapts to fill crucial gaps. They also explore the importance of change management, stressing the value of being present and engaged. Delve deeper into the discussion as Tom and Emily talk about effective strategies for your people’s development, emphasizing the transformative power of incremental progress. Tune in for invaluable insights into the multifaceted role of a Chief of Staff and more!
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Achieve Organizational Success With A Chief Of Staff With Emily Sander
It's my pleasure to welcome Emily Sander to the show. She is a C-Suite executive turned leadership coach, and her company, as she is the Founder of Next Level Coaching. She has written two books. She has written Hacking Executive Leadership and An Insider's Perspective on the Chief of Staff: Why You Need One and How to Be a Great One. We end up talking a good amount about the chief of staff position and getting into the coaching part of supporting an organization. We get into a lot of stuff related to what we do here in the Eye of Power and what's true on our individual level. It's my great pleasure to welcome Emily.
Thank you for being with me. I'm excited to learn from you the perspective of somebody who's used to be chief of staff and now you are a consultant and a coach, and to help people from what a chief of staff perspective is. I'm wondering what is unique about that particular framework as it relates to organizational success.
Thank you very much for having me on your show. A chief of staff is a unique role. No one else in the company has the perspective or the vantage point of a chief of staff, including the CEO. What I mean by that is the chief of staff, instead of being assigned to one functional area like operations, finance, or product, they see across the entire organization.
If you think about vertical silos, they see horizontally across all those departments. They can connect the dots and see where things are working well holistically as a business. They can also see whenever it gets here, it gets stuck, or there's not quite a clean handoff from this team to that team in this stage. They're seeing the whole board to use a chess analogy. That's one thing that's unique about the chief of staff role. There's much more to say about that role, but I'll pause there for a second.
You get a good view of the organizational architecture and what's working and not working. Therefore, be in a position to help advise to make adjustments where necessary, whether it be structural or personnel-wise.
Organizational architecture is a great way to think about it. They're in charge of the underlying system of business. Those are cross-functional pieces. It also is personnel. They're the chief of staff. They primarily work with their principal, which can be the CEO or another executive. They work closely with the executive leadership team, but they're in charge of the entire staff. Whether that's individually, you get to know everyone at a small company.
It’s like, “Let me provide the structure, processes, tools, and opportunities for people to do their best work and to have the information they need to progress, learn, and grow.” There's that aspect of being a chief of staff. There certainly is in terms of strategy. I work with a lot of chief of staff clients now. A lot of people are putting their strategy in place, and the chief of staff is spearheading that with input and collaboration with the CEO and executive team, but the chief of staff is executing a lot of those plans and pieces.
Is that how it's distinct from the head of HR?
There are overlaps. I often get questions from the head of HR and the head of operations. These two things seem the same in a lot of places. They work together. The chief of staff can be involved in certain HR activities or help with operations programs. Their job is not to know the most about operations in the organization. Their job is not to be focusing and running all things operations.
They should have a working knowledge of that and put those pieces together across the board. They don't have an attachment to their functional area like other leaders do. Therefore, they have the freedom to say, “I am not biased towards operations and finance. I am biased to what's best for the business.” Whatever is best for the business and the leadership team overall is what I will be advocating for.
When I go in and talk to people in organizations about people strategy, one of the things I ask in one form or another is, I'll say, “Who's the boss around here? Who are we serving?” There is a right answer to that. The right answer is the organization because, without that, nobody has anything. Clients have nothing. When people are doing harm to the organization, they're generally not doing it because they want to harm the organization. They're doing it out of ignorance, or they don't know what they're doing is causing harm. They think that harm has a positive component that countermands it.
Another key piece of the chief of staff is it's highly adaptable. You have hundreds and thousands of different versions or iterations of the chief of staff role. It depends on the company size, company stage, the makeup of a leadership team, what's going on in that industry, and the highest priority for the company. A lot of times, the chief of staff will gap fill, especially at smaller organizations. They'll gap-fill meaty roles. They'll gap-fill, like, “I'm the chief of staff and COO. I'm the chief of staff and head of HR.” Those are big pieces they take on.
It's adaptable in the sense that what a chief of staff does at company A and company B can be different, but you could be a good chief of staff at both companies. If you take a chief of staff at company A for six months to six years, they're also going to be doing different things. It's a function of time and the function of the company you're working in. It's adaptable. It evolves. It's fluid and influential. If you set that role up right as an organization, it can game-change your whole team and organization.
What I'm getting from that, Emily, is that it can help more elegantly manage stages of growth because you start to get into these problems. As you get to places, new emergent needs come up. We don't have the resources to address those needs directly. People get spread thin, and stresses go high. They’re like, “We got to hire. You should hire this. You should hire that.” What I'm hearing there is that adaptability and the ability to fill gaps help smooth that process out. We can more elegantly and not run into those ceilings that tend to happen as organizations grow.
A chief of staff helps the team know what we are trying to do here. Everyone gets their heads down. They can get tunnel vision and do what's right in front of them. As an organization, especially as a leadership team, you've got to pick your head up, look forward, and say, “Where are we trying to go? What are we trying to achieve?” Reverse engineer and back into that.
A chief of staff can keep that big picture in mind because they're not sucked down into the day-to-day. A chief of staff will go back and forth between strategic and tactical. They can help facilitate conversations and reminders for the leadership team about our top three priorities. You have 47 things that you could legitimately be doing, but here are our top three. Which one of those best connects to those?
Even amongst those, it might be twenty of them connected to our big three, Emily. In that case, which one optimizes your contribution more? Where do you get the most bang for your buck? If you do this activity and work on this project? How close are you getting to the big three goals? If you do that opportunity and that activity, how close are you getting to the big three goals? That one's more. That one's further. That one's closer. I do that one.
This sounds like a job I would love. That brings me to what brought you along your path, Emily, and how you got to be a chief of staff. You're an executive leadership coach who is helping chiefs of staff. You've developed along these lines. Tell us about your journey that brought you along these lines.
I worked with my CEO at a previous job. We were several years ago, but we were at this company backed by private equity. Several years later, the private equity company invested in another organization, and they wanted to bring known players back into the org. They hired the CEO. They pinged me and said, “Do you guys want to get the band back together and smoke jump into this investment?” We said, “Yes.”
I came in not as chief of staff but as VP of Strategic Initiatives. I’m like this catchall amorphous. This title can be whatever the CEO needs it to be. I was doing chief of staff things under that title and role. As things developed, it made sense, and it became clear. They’re like, “She's fulfilling a chief of staff role. Let's make that official to open up more.” I had the advantage of knowing my CEO before, which some chiefs of staff don't. That's a difficult task to go in there. It’s not impossible, but it makes it even more challenging. I knew my CEO and our PE investors on the board. That made it familiar. It helped me glide into the chief of staff role.
Are you still doing a chief of staff role full-time?
I'm not. I'm a former chief of staff. A few years ago, I said, “Let me look back at all of my corporate jobs and say what were my favorite parts of each job.” It was the mentoring aspect. The advice, guidance, and individual one-on-one were like, “I got to help Jennifer get promoted. Christian can present at our workshop for 200 people. He was terrified of speaking in public.” For those types of things, I was drawn to. They were memorable. I was rewarded for those things. I said, “If that's my favorite part of the day, wouldn't it be nice if I could wake up and do nothing but my favorite part of the day all day long?”
Once I figured that piece out and put it together with coaching, I went all in on my coaching practice. It's been an absolute pleasure and a fun, challenging ride. Because I was in the chief of staff role, and I had the coach training, a lot of chiefs of staff reached out to me for coaching, and I said, “Absolutely.” That's how that came about.
You leaned into that, and it became a brand for you.
I love the chief of staff role. It was fun. It was never boring. It was challenging in all the good ways. I felt like I could wake up and make an impact on our organization. I wrote a book about the chief of staff. I speak on panels about the chief of staff because more people and organizations need to know about this role and how to use it. That's a passion.
What's the book's name?
An Insider’s Perspective on the Chief of Staff: Why You Need One and How to Be a Great One
It's called An Insider's Perspective on the Chief of Staff. It’s available on Amazon, Kindle, and all the places you get books.
What you were saying earlier, I was smiling because it's those moments of breakthrough that don't take many of them before you. You feel fulfilled helping people like that. It's wonderful. That's what's nice about being in the self-help or development. It's unblocking the things that hold us in place and getting more of our agency and authentic self, bringing that to the world, getting out of our own ways, spreading our wings, and letting us fly. The things that hold us back are those self-imposed beliefs and limits that might have worked at some point in the past, but they no longer serve, and we sometimes lose sight of the fact that they're holding us back and not serving us.
I have been goal-oriented and career-driven since I was little. That's how I was built. There did come a point similar to what you described, where it's like, “I'm hustling, doing well, getting ahead, and exceeding, but at what? Is this what I want to be pointing all of my energy and time toward?” While it was close and while I enjoyed my career and am grateful for it, I said, “Let me be intentional about going over in this coach direction where I can be more of an influence and impact in the way that I want.” I’m zooming out. My worldview is that when everyone is operating at the top of their potential and what they're supposed to be doing, the world is a better place.
When everyone is operating at the top of their potential and what they're supposed to be doing, the world is a better place.
I'm in my element in coaching. I love it. That's how I'm built and what I'm meant to do. When my clients are successful or when they break through a mental block where they’re like, “I couldn't do that before. I didn't think I could do that.” Now, they can. I get a dopamine rush from all that stuff. It is worth asking what am I going after. Yes, that still makes sense. That's still what I want to do. I want this part of that, but this part has changed. Let me adjust and be intentional about where I'm going.
You find, like I do, that most people aren't that far. A slight adjustment going from the chief of staff to the coaching piece was an intersection. It was a slight adjustment. Sometimes, slight adjustments can make all the difference.
This is a great book called The Compound Effect. They say, “If a plane is going from Seattle to New York and it's one degree off, will it still get to New York?” It's like, “No, it ends up in Virginia, Florida, or something crazy.” Little adjustments can be a big impact. I knew it was the right move, and it was what I wanted to do, but it was still scary because I had never done it before, and I was comfortable in the corporate world. I know how things go. I can make teams, talk to boards, and manage executives, but you go, “Emily, run a coaching business and your coaching practice.” I’m like, “Let me learn how to do that. I had to put the pieces together. There were scary moments where I was like, “What the heck did I get myself into?” I figured it out and put one foot in front of the other.
I'm smiling because what you're talking about is both sides of the equation of the model, which is on the self-directed action versus attitude you talked about. You had the honesty with yourself and the congruency, and you were able to see what's true about yourself. Sometimes, people have a different view of courage. She's brave, which means she's not afraid to do something. No, that's not what courage is. Courage is afraid and doing it anyway. I want to honor you for your courage to step out into that way because that's where you found freedom, satisfaction, joy, and purpose.
Thank you for that acknowledgment. A lot of people get stuck there. They’re, “I want to do this. I know I want to do this.” The inertia it takes to move everything and slight adjustment could be scary because it's unknown. People will stay in the habit, rut, or groove they're in because that's comfortable. I would encourage people to take a look at that in their life.
There was a point after where I was like, “What did I do?” There was a point where, financially, I had to get ready for a dip, which I was prepared for. In that dip, there were scary moments of, “Is this going to go? Is this going to get that first toehold of traction?” I saw this graph online. It's a flat line for a long time. It's like, “When you think nothing is working.” It starts to blip, and it goes exponentially up. They're like, “Don't give up right before your first blip.” Your first, “I can see that now.” That visual encouraged me like, “It looks like nothing's happening, but it's building, and it pops.” That's another important aspect for people to keep in mind.
I was on a coaching call. I have a group coaching thing that I'm taking part of. The coaches there were making a great point along these lines about our vibrational frequency, where a lot of times you can't see it, but you're working on your beliefs and things that empower you. You are getting rid of those things that are holding you back. As you do that work, it takes time, but that's when you start getting that toehold, and things happen before you know it. It looks to everybody else like it's overnight, but it is a longer process than that.
There's no such thing as an overnight success. Everyone who's been called an overnight success spent years putting in the work and reps. I would agree with that. There is this great analogy or poem by someone who wrote a book about the Tao Te Ching. They said, “It's like striking a rock over again, and you think nothing's happening. All of a sudden, on the thousandth strike, the rock crumbles because you've been putting little cracks and splinters into it the whole time.”
There is no such thing as an overnight success. Everyone who has been called an overnight success spent years putting in the work and the reps.
Let me steer us into the Eye of Power world because I want to learn from you as it relates to how you might use a model like the Eye of Power from the perspective of a chief of staff. I haven't done that yet. You're going to be able to give me some insights. Hopefully, other people can learn from those insights.
The thing about the Eye of Power that distinguishes it is it's a flashlight and a model. There are lots of models out there to help us understand ourselves better. There's no shortage of those. They all help us because you can use these things to get insights that you might not otherwise see that same way. What I'm trying to do with the Eye of Power is shine the flashlight but help people step along the journey because it's not an intellectual exercise. The insight is only a small piece of the pie. Changing behavior is a complicated proposition because we are not intellectual, logical creatures. We are creatures of emotion.
For that reason, making positive changes is not finding something out and doing it. Everybody knows this. We’re early in the year. People are in mid-New Year's resolution, and some of them have already fallen off the path, and we're only a few weeks in. That's because it's emotion. We are complicated creatures. We think we know ourselves, but all we see is the part of the iceberg above the water. There's a whole bunch of ourselves that remain hidden.
What I say is it's not a good strategy to try to make permanent positive changes alone. It's way better to do it with help. Having a coach is a good idea because you can't see your own blind spots. You need another human being to help you make critical decisions and have that accountability piece, not just accountability but also an emotional bond that says, “I don't want to disappoint that person. I want to make that person proud and feel good. I want to reward that person.” We are in a collective project together. We humans need each other, and that's where we get purpose from.
What I've got with this system is when you install it, people are trained as guides. They go. You're assigned a guide, and shortly thereafter, you are guiding somebody else. You're going through a program that corresponds to the various sectors of the model. Each sector is archetypical, but it may or may not be the thing that you're wrestling with at the moment. It'll be different things for different people. It's going to have a customizable element to it because what you want to work on and why it's an important thing for you to work on will be different than the person sitting next to you or in a different role in the organization.
The effort here is to get something that is going to tap into all of what I laid out there to help people have the highest chances of making that positive change they know intellectually they want to make. As chief of staff, if you want to install something like this, what are the things that would come to mind to you, Emily, that you would think about in terms of either things that you think might be challenges or things that you would want to take advantage of? It’s a wide-open question there for you.
Let me throw out a few thoughts, and I might ask you a few more questions on how you're doing it for reference. Some of the things that came up where you were talking were there's always a change management piece to the chief of staffing. Sometimes, that's minimal. You're in a mature company, and it's stable, but you're always fine-tuning, tweaking things, and adjusting to the industry. It's sweeping like ground-shaking changes for the organization.
A chief of staff leads people through a process of change management. There are all the stages where we need to acknowledge and accept this is happening. We need to mourn the loss and be open to this new opportunity and what's ahead. We need to embrace it and figure out the positive pieces to look forward to.
There's the overall change management process, which is across the different functional areas. There's also the human element, where a lot of chiefs of staff are coaches, maybe not officially, but they're coaching in that capacity where they're helping their CEO and their executive team manage themselves through this change. They can then manage their team.
A big part of being chief of staff is keeping the CEO sane and everyone in a good head space. They're not cluttered and stressed and not carrying that to their team. Those were some of the things that initially came up as you were talking, but I'd be interested to hear how you're deploying this and installing this and mapping that to what a chief of staff would be doing or augmenting. If a chief of staff was involved, how could that go?
The idea is born at the individual level because that's where the work is. It's the person sitting in the seat, looking in the mirror, having enough courage and honesty to see it and say, “This is real. This is what's true. This is why I'm this way. This is why I'm frustrated here. This is why I have this dream. I’m sorting out those things that make us want to move from status point A to status point B.”
It is an individual sport in that way. What I was saying earlier is, yes, that's true, but to plan to go from A to B by yourself is not going to take the least amount of time. It'll cost you more pain and suffering than if you would team up with somebody who has your best interest at heart and, ideally, would be trustworthy enough to have skill at getting you and seeing, “This step was going to mean this. Let's not go there.” It is a collective enterprise in that way. I'm going to ask you this point question, Emily. The thing I'm thinking about is, wouldn't every organization's culture be better off if we could elevate the coaching skills of all of the managers and all the people in the organization?
Yes. I'm not saying that because I'm a coach. I do feel that way. We lead ourselves before we lead anyone else. We're the CEO of our own lives before we're the CEO of a company. Another quote from a philosopher who's a lot smarter than me was, “You can control other people. That's powerful in its own way, but if you have control and awareness of yourself, it has true wisdom.”
If we're trying to optimize ourselves as people, humans, or leaders, our results, output, and interaction with people are natural extensions of that work. You exude different things when you're working on yourself. When you’re clear about your goals, what you're good at, and what your development areas are, that's key. It unlocks so much.
We've all had points where we're going in circles, we're trying to logic this thing out, and we can't see a way out of it. Someone looking from the outside will say, “What about this?” You're like, “I didn't even see that. That's a great point because that changes this whole dynamic and equation here. Let me look at this thing in a new way.”
Things like that are helpful. Having someone who's for you, a lot of people go out competing and trying not to do anything wrong. They're in all these different social situations and having a space with another person where you’re like, “I can let my guard down a little bit. I can trust this person because this person is 100% for me. They want me to be successful. They want me to reach my goals. That doesn't mean they're not going to challenge me at certain places, but it means their job is to get me to my top performance. I know that. Anything that I hear from them and anything that they say to me is in that effort.”
The things that swim against that in organizations come out of our weaknesses. We feel vulnerable and less than. The idea to me is we have these insecurities. People may fulfill personas. They'll put out an image of strength they don't believe that is them. It isn't them deep down. They don't realize that if they would put the persona down, lean into what they are, and develop those things, it'd be a lot less work. It's that effort to prop up that image that keeps people away from that honest courage that allows them to develop. That leads to the political animal in organizations, where I got to be invested with and what everybody else thinks rather than what is.
I was involved with the DISC profile and DISC assessments for a while. There's this thing called your natural style and your adapted style. Natural style is how you show up when you're watching Netflix on the couch. Adapted style is how you show up when you're in a meeting with your leadership team. For most people, there's a difference. Some people are like, “No, I'm me wherever I go, take it or leave.” Most people adjust a little bit. It's taking a look at that and saying, “Am I stretching way outside of my natural style?” If you are, is that worth it?
In some situations, you have to take yourself out of your normal comfort zone to operate in a certain scenario, such as something drastic like, “Someone is in a burning building. I don't feel like running in the birding building.” Here's what needs to happen in this situation. In the team meeting situation, do I need to be that far outside my natural style? Do I think I need to do that to impress all these people? Do I have to show up in this persona to be successful in this company? It's worth taking a look at.
The answer may be yes. You're like, “In this thing I'm in, I have to be this way.” You can make some adjustments. The gap between your natural style and your adapted style takes energy. That's what you were saying before. It takes energy to prop that thing up. If you have to do that to survive or be successful in certain situations, know that and recharge your battery someplace else. Take a look at that and see, “Can I be closer to the real me and have that be accepted by my team?”
It takes energy, and you don't know. You don't see the energy it takes, and you wonder why you're tired, burnt out, stressed, and where it's coming from. It creates a thing that sneaks up on you. The benefit of it, when I'm debriefing the DISC, is you might be able to connect with rapport with a wider range of people because you are adept at adapting in the moment. That is a benefit, but at what cost? No matter what your profile, personality, skills, or level of experience is, it seems to me that what you want to do is get real as much as you can with yourself and other people because that's where all the power is. As soon as you drift away from reality, you're losing power.
When you let what someone else thinks about you dictate your day, and they're pulling you around by a chain, you're giving away your power. You're saying, “You, someone outside of myself, tell me how I can feel. You tell me if I can feel okay in this situation or if I need to be nervous. You tell me if I'm worthy to be on the team or not worthy to do any of this.”
The other distinction I would make is for DISC. One of the great things about DISC is it'll help you communicate more effectively with people who have another style. Some people like short and sweet bullet points to get straight to the point. Other people like slow and methodical. They’re like, “Take me through the spreadsheet and the cells.” It helps you communicate. Adjusting your communication style and flexing that to your audience is effective. It’s something you should put energy into. Being someone you're not is negative energy. You're propping yourself up. That's someplace where you can conserve your energy and be closer to your authentic self.
One thing I'd say is people can tell when you're yourself. They might not even notice consciously or be able to describe it, but something subconsciously they can pick up on, where they’re like, “This person is comfortable, secure, and grounded in who they are versus like this person who’s flitting all around, trying to do all these different things and put on a song and dance.” People can pick up on that. That's something to consider.
That's that energy and frequency we're talking about when we're talking about going along. It's when things get congruent in the way you're describing there that corresponds with that takeoff where your power starts manifesting, and you start making a difference in the lives of other people. I was smiling earlier when you were talking to Emily about practicing the DISC. Years ago, I started a company called the Communication Gym. One of the things we did was practice those adjustments, and there's utility there.
I was with that company for several years. There's good utility there to notice that this person wants the bullet points. Give them the top three things and beyond with it. There's nothing inauthentic about noticing that and adapting to that. If I'm the person who wants every single thing spelled out before I'm going to make a decision, it doesn't mean that everybody else thinks that same way.
If I take what's in my head and assume it's what's in everybody else's head, I'm not going to be as effective. As if I can say, “This is how I think. I understand that other people think something else.” This is a skill. It doesn't necessarily mean unauthenticity. It means it's a skill to be able to serve a wider range of people in a more elegant way.
It makes you more effective and better at your job. You're not trying to be something you're not. You're understanding the different people in the world.
People can get hung up on it. They think, “This isn't the way I talk. I am soft.”
For a soft talker, if your kid was about to get run over by a car, would you get loud? You could do different things.
There's a lot of utility in what we're talking about, and people should pay attention to this, but what moved me away from the training of the techniques and the hows of the world because there are tons of them, and we can learn these sorts of things, my experience in training people like that was I fell out of love with the how and more in love with the why. We would have clients that would come in. They would do it. They'd have success, and we'd never see them again. I'd be like, “Why did that happen?’ I learned that it's not the how. It's much more the why.
We have to get attached to purpose and see, “Here is the special thing that I have been given in life. This is my set of gifts and things that I'm into. It's not accidental. This is the package.” The best advice that I can think of that I've ever gotten and that I give to people is to look at those. Let's develop, feed, nourish, and figure out, “What's the best way I can put this to service with other people.”
That's going to throw fuel on the fire to our sense of meaning and purpose, which gives us energy and potency and increases our power and ability to help people. You create this positive spiral. It's connecting to that why. It is digging into what's real and true for people that seem to be fundamental. What's your view on all of that?
I agree that the how is the tactical surface-level stuff. You have to have that at a certain point. The why is the intrinsic, instinctive gut-level stuff. It can inspire, push, and pull you through tough times. When you have a strong connection and clarity to why you're doing something and making sure that's aligned with your purpose, that's the key current. If you're dealing with the how and tactics, you're missing the big foundational piece. To be most effective, you should have both. You should understand why you're doing something and have these tools on how to get there and flex into different leadership situations. The most important question is why.
For anyone reading this, you could ask yourself, “Why'd you get up? What got you up in the morning? Why do you do what you do?” You could ask yourself a series of why questions. Most people will say, “I got up, took a shower, had breakfast, took the kids to school, went to work, and came home.” Why did you do that? I want to provide for my family. Why did you do that? That's what you're supposed to do. Why? That's the value I hold to take care of people. Peel back the onion and get to your ultimate why. That's a good exercise for people to go to. Whether it's to reinforce what they're doing and why they're doing it or if it's like, “I need to make that slight adjustment over here to be more in line with my big why.”
The iris of the eye is the four quests. How to do it is one of the quests in the pain quadrant. Why to do it is the quest in the purpose quadrant. You're speaking my language, Emily. I appreciate that.
We are moving to the purpose quadrant. We all should be swimming there.
You made the point that was reflected in my model there. The model describes what I notice in the world. It’s not the only way to look at it, but these things are connected. It's not like, “I can figure out the why and ignore the how.” No, these things build on each other. It’s like everything. To gain a skill, you gain a skill. I'm good at this. You're good, but are you great? You're good, but am I good enough that people will pay me money for that?
Maybe I have more to go. I'm good enough that people will pay me money for that. Am I noteworthy enough to sell at this level? Not yet. I got to get better. Why would that be important? It's important because I make a big difference for a wide range of people. There are lots of people that need and want this. I'm failing them if I don't at least give them the chance to benefit from that. There are these beliefs and things that can drive us forward.
There's also an element of you going through the motions, checking the box, and doing the things because I'm supposed to do it, or you can be present and engaged with what you're doing. You might do the same series. You might get up, have breakfast, get a shower, take the kids, and go to work. You could do the check-the-box version of that for decades, or you could say, “No, I am going to spend my morning time intentionally with my family at breakfast. I'm going to talk to them on the car ride to school, engage with my coworkers, and be connected to the mission of our organization for whatever period of time I'm there, come home and do these things.” You can be more connected throughout your whole day, even if the why, the how, and the what you're doing are all the same.
That's one of the most important things for people to internalize. I was on a coaching call, and the coach was talking about discipline. I was like, “This is my discipline here. How do I lose discipline?” On my phone, I had these Sudoku and those games that kept my mind occupied when I had those gaps in my schedule. I said, “I'm going to do away with the games.” I did them enough to know that it was taking away my bandwidth, but I didn't know to what degree. At that moment in time, I said, “No games.” I'm looking at the board in my office here. I wrote, “This is your discipline. No games.” I erased all the games off my phone.
My fingers are shaking, Emily, while erasing them. That's how important they were. I didn't know that they were that important to me. I deleted them all. At that time, I was shocked at how much more present I was with my loved ones and how much more frosted I was with ideas that came. I had no idea the price I was paying. If I had any idea that those distractions were costing me what I did, I would never have started in on any of them. It can be video games or television. It can be things that are harmless. It doesn't have to be this bad thing. There's nothing wrong inherently with these things, but when they take us out of that present moment that you pointed at, they're robbing us of our own lives.
If you look at the stats, young people are spending their entire lives on this magic rectangle in their hands. If you add all that time up, they're taking years off their life doing that stuff. We've all seen the studies where the social media platforms and those games know how the brain works, and they build their apps to be addictive there. You're working against some smart people. They're not necessarily good people all the time, but they are smart people who know how to get your brain going on the dopamine.
I'm not sure they're doing anything that they think is nefarious necessarily. They want you to be in the game. They want the game to be as engaging as possible. They want you to enjoy it. They want my game to be better in the next guy's game. None of these things by themselves are what I'd call bad or evil. They don't relieve us of our individual responsibility to be the captain of our ship and the author of our story. I'm 62 years old. I'm learning this lesson now. <
I play Words with Friends. I love that game. You're interacting with my different friends. It's fun that way, but I'm in control of that. If you ever get to a point where it's in control of you versus you being in control of when you do that, how you do that, and how much time, that's a good dynamic to look at. People know when it's controlling them, and they're on top of things.
Being deliberate with your time and your day is my New Year's resolution or a reinforcing theme I had for 2023. I want to be deliberate and focused with my time. You can look at the things that take your focus over, like a squirrel or a shiny app. Take a look at all those things and start to clear the decks for your big purpose, why, and big priorities.
Be deliberate with your time and day.
That type of exercise is helpful. If you're saying, “Emily, I am deliberate with my priorities, and playing games on my phone is part of that.” It’s okay if that works for you. I would go through that process and take some inventory of what's moving me closer to my goals, who I want to be, and what's taking me further away. Do I want to be someone who plays games eight hours a day? Is that who I want to be? Do I want to be someone who relaxes and has some fun? Sometimes, that includes games every once in a while, but I'm more dedicated to this area over here.
We need downtime. We do need to relax and find ways to chill. There's an insidious element to these things. Having gone through what I went through, what I would emphasize to people is, even if you think it's not a problem for you, go on a diet on it. You say, “I'm going to put that away for a week and come back next week.” See if you notice anything. You might notice that it's hard to do for a week, which tells you something. You might notice some things that, for me at least, I thought I was present. I was engaged with my family and this was over a holiday when my daughter was in town.
I'll give you an example. The fact that I wasn't on those games, which normally I'd be sitting there. I'd watch a football game. I'd be doing this. I'd be in hog heaven, getting my dopamine fixes and happy. They wanted to go out to the greenhouse. That's something they do regularly over the holidays. It’s something they'd done a number of years. Because I wasn't playing that game, I'm like, “I could go. Why can't I go?” I went with them, and we had a lovely time.
That's a time that I would not have had with my wife and daughter, but I did get to have it. Now, I could think, “How many times in the past did I not have that?” I could cry over the spilled milk. That's here or there. Going forward, it shows me in fairly clear terms what's more important and how easy it is. I don't think anybody is going to sit there and say, “No, I'd rather sit there and play whatever that thing is than go have a time with somebody you don't get to see that much.”
Everything in life is a trade-off. You're making intentional decisions, and you traded off. Sometimes, that's tough because you're like, “I want to do both of these things. I want to spend time with my daughter and do this volunteer activity.” Both of those are good, and you have to choose, but there are trade-offs to everything. Make sure you're making a deliberate choice.
Everything in life is a trade-off, so just make sure you're making a deliberate choice.
That's a great piece of wisdom. That's a good thing for us to start to wrap up on. Is there anything else we touched on that's still on your mind, or anything else you might want to add, Emily?
We covered a lot of ground. Do the work on yourself, and don't overwhelm yourself with it. Do the little things you can here and there. Those small wins will add up faster than you think. Keep doing them every day, and you'll start becoming the person that you're creating. A lot of people are like, “I need these other things to define me.”
Your deliberate choices and how you spend your time and energy define who you are. You can, by your actions, create your character, which is freeing because you're in control of that. It opens up the possibility. It's like, “If I do this ten minutes a day, I'm the person who does that.” You are. That's how that works. Look at yourself, be self-aware, have fun, and be free to create the person you want to be through your actions.
I call that the power of incrementalism where, in our society, we're successful with all these amazing technological and pharmaceutical breakthroughs. We think that there are quick answers to every problem. When it comes to developing ourselves and being the full person we're meant to be, that's not a quick-fix shortcut proposition. Do the incremental thing on a daily basis and watch it happen.
The theme of our discussion goes to what you were talking about, which doesn't seem like anything has happened. That's a lot of what happens in life where you keep on keeping on the things you know are moving you in the right direction. Sooner or later, at some point, you start to see it, and you are astounded by how that exponential payoff comes. Thank you so much, Emily. I appreciate your time. I loved our conversation.
Thank you so much, Tom. I thank you for what you're doing and everything you're putting out there. It was a pleasure being on your show. Hopefully, we can continue our conversations.
I'd love that.
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Thank you so much, Emily, for being on the show. What I take away is quite a bit there. I like how you laid out the chief of staff position as a person who connects the dots among different groups of business functions. It’s somebody who has a good view of organizational architecture and has a position to see it in a strategic manner. You underline the care and feeding of the CEO and the other C-level people's sanity. I like that aspect of it.
The ability that they'll have to be adaptable and fill gaps might help as organizations go through stages of growth. They might be in different states. They might be in place of a turnaround. They might have different places where they have to focus. Having somebody who's adaptable like that and can fill in rather than have to hire every single function is a potential benefit of that role.
We talked about how that relates to change management. Sometimes, change management is subtle and sweeping. We focused a lot on the human element of things, how we can give away our power, and how it's important to be present and engaged. She highlighted the power of the incremental, which we talk a lot about in the Eye of Power. It was a great show. Thank you, Emily, for being my guest.
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About Emily Sander
She is the founder of Next Level Coaching. As an ICF-Certified Coach, she helps business professionals step into effective leadership with one-on-one coaching.
