Being a Good Leader—Inside and Out with Chris Thyberg

Leadership today isn’t just about managing people—it’s also about managing yourself. With so much change happening around us, how can leaders stay grounded and show up for their teams in the best way possible? In this episode, I talk with Chris Thyberg, a leadership coach and founder of The Serving Way. We chat about what it really takes to lead people in today’s world—whether it’s dealing with AI, figuring out remote vs. office work, or building trust in your team. Chris shares helpful advice on how to lead yourself first, and how being honest, curious, and human can make you a better leader. This is a down-to-earth, thoughtful conversation for anyone trying to grow as a leader in 2025 and beyond. Tune in and learn more. --- Listen to the podcast here: Being a Good Leader—Inside and Out with Chris Thyberg Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Last fall, I had Chris Thyberg on the program and we talked about leadership from both the perspective of an inner game and an outer game, how you need to take care of yourself in order to take care of the people that you’re a leader for. Since that episode, a lot has changed in the world, because the year 2025 has been marked by just a really rapid kind of pace of change on many different fronts, and that has caused a lot of people who have, say, different reactions. The range of reactions to these changes have been quite variant, as would be expected, and that has caused some additional challenges with regards to group cohesion as well as being able to delegate and trust the people who you’re working with. So, once again, I would like to bring back to the program Chris Thyberg to talk to us a little bit about what we need to do to be good leaders from both internally and externally now where we sit well into the year 2025. --- Chris, welcome back. Thank you, Steve. It’s a pleasure to be back with you after an excellent conversation last time. Well, thank you for coming back. This podcast has had maybe, I’m going to say three or four repeat guests, not that often, but it is something that’s changed quite a bit since we talked in September of 2024. I think we’re all familiar with what types of changes and, as you know, this is not a political show in the sense that I’m not here to tell anyone how they should or shouldn’t be responding to that aspect, nor is it telling anyone how they should or shouldn’t be responding to things such as AI, the number of layoffs, and the additional challenges and anxiety in the workforce today. All we can really do is kind of respond to it. Chris, what are you observing as far as the people that you work with and how they’re responding to all the different forms in which this change is taking place? Yeah, thank you. The last time we talked together, I described the conditions that leaders are under as white water conditions, as paddling down the river in the rapids and they’re starting to get class 4, class 5, maybe there’s even a waterfall that you can see coming up. All right. So, here are a few things that have been contributing to now what feels like windsurfing in a hurricane. If we thought the river trip was a little hard, sometimes, yeah, let’s try windsurfing when the swells are 20 feet high and we’re in driving down rain. Right, so you got a whole new situation here. Yep, let’s go. So, one aspect is the place of AI, how disruptive it is, the anxieties it’s creating for everyone, from longstanding employees to folks coming out of college, those entry-level positions that now people are arguing can be done just as well by a well-trained bot as that expensive college grad. So, what I like to remember in this space is that, right now, generative AI is like a very eager, tireless, relentless, driven intern that absolutely knows nothing at all about you, your business, your people, your leadership. All of it, right? So they need a lot of training and to invite people to see that, now, if these could be kind of really enthusiastic helpers on the side, then maybe now we can see that we can contribute the unique brain power and even more the emotional, cultural, social, human-to-human intelligence that is the bottom line. And so that’s how I’m thinking in terms of AI and starting to use AI in interesting ways in my practice to help support the coaching process. All right. So, now, that sort of flows down, I’d say, into coming back from working at home, the struggles over how much in-the-office time, how much freedom. Are we building a culture? Do we have cohesion if we’re kind of spread out and everyone’s sitting with their own little chats and playing around? Yeah, that’s gotten a lot harder, and so I want to explore that a bit more with you in the conversation. And then the last thing I’m noticing, again, without political comment, but I work a lot with nonprofit and social sector entities, and the flow downstream of impact on budgets and grants and getting great work done in their neighborhoods and the context that they’re in, it’s harder, and so I’m sitting with leaders in a great deal more pain often than when I started this in 2018. So, would you say that these are the three primary forms in which the anxiety is taking place right now, in general, in the workforce, of like how is AI going to force me to transition, force me to adapt? What does it really mean? Are we abandoning remote work? Are we all coming back to the office? What’s the right amount of flexibility as well as, in many sectors, where is the funding coming from? Where is some of these budget cuts and some of these transformations in what gets funded going to impact certain organizations? Yeah, that’s what I see with my thinking partners, aka clients, because I don’t fix people, I don’t fix –– well, I don’t fix problems, I really help people grow up into their greatness.Share on X And so, from my point of view, those kind of leaders, that’s what I’m seeing. I’m sure other people see other things as well but that’s what I’ve got a line of sight on particularly. Now, so let’s go through those in order, since those are the ones brought up. So we start with AI and, with AI, is there a certain type of role, you talked about the new college graduates and whether or not people think that the AI tools can do it just as well for a lot less money. Are there other types of roles that people are really getting anxious on? Because I’ve read some materials and seen some videos that have mentioned specific roles, I’m not going to specifically say, not to scare specifically, but there’s types of people that are feeling a higher level of anxiety versus others that are feeling maybe a little bit calmer about it. From the kind of leaders I’m seeing who are sort of senior, middle entering the exec ranks and C-suite, some of the things they are bringing into the room with me is how do we keep intact teams that trust one another? And how do I delegate to people really effectively? And how do the teams beneath me delegate really effectively? When we say AI first, I’m in a number of companies like Duolingo in my backyard here in Pittsburgh are saying, AI first, don’t do your work until you’ve started with AI. Well, that can make people anxious if they don’t feel very skillful. But I think if I were a senior leader, I’d really be wanting to know how much hallucination am I getting back? Yeah. I asked my people to go first to AI. And are they exercising their human judgment, their own brilliance with this really eager intern who doesn’t really know anything? So I’m seeing that it’s less the people that I’m with are worried about job displacement for them but they are taking a bigger, systemic, strategic point of view at it. And I’m finding with some leaders, curiously, they’re actually using AI with me between sessions to kind of sort out insights that they’ve gotten, books or articles I’ve recommended that they can’t read the whole things but they could ask ChatGPT to summarize what’s the essential stuff from these free resources that I talked about with Chris and they seem really relevant to what I want to do. It’s like the good old Executive Book Summaries on steroids. Yeah, exactly. So that’s what I’m seeing there and helping them use the tool for themselves to support their own leadership growth as well as getting a sense for the real human-to-human cultural stuff that they really have to be responsible for as sort of the primary culture officers of their organizations, the chief value officers. That’s all going to be human, human, human. Now, this reminds me of another conversation that I’ve had a few times recently around the phenomenon of people using AI tools, specifically ChatGPT but sometimes others, quote, unquote, as their “therapist,” and I’ve actually talked with a couple of people last week who both do that as well as having a therapist of their own, which reminds me of the situation with you and your clients. And in both conversations I had last week, they told me that they actually let their therapist know that they had done this AI therapy and it is to be expected. Do you have any feelings about when your clients also use AI in conjunction with your coaching, how that could be done right or how it could potentially be done wrong? That is exactly the right question. Because coaches, like therapists, we sit around and say, “Are we gonna be out of a job in two years? No one needs us.” They’ll just, quote, “self-medicate” by playing with somebody’s hot off the press coaching bot. Right, so here’s what I’m experiencing. First, it’s always working with each leader on what they most want to get done, what’s most important, and so coaching is all about where are you now, Steve? How did you get here? So you can start noticing the worn in habits,...