The Inner and Outer Game of Leadership with Chris Thyberg

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, if you’re my client, you are not a problem to fix. You are a person who already has inside resilience, you have flexibility, you have creativity, you have a wholeness, you have a capability on the inside just hasn’t been tapped yet, and so now we start making a little pivot from clients who come, and we will definitely work on the outer game of leadership, that is our skills, practices, ways to show up, ways to speak and write and have presence and make good decisions and delegate and, and, and, and, that you will be better at. You will have demonstrable performance excellence on the other side. That’s what clients are paying for from a good coach. And then comes the moment when the pivot is it’s not just the outer game of leadership, it’s the inner game, or to use a metaphor, it’s not just more apps on the phone of my leadership, technique, skill, behavior, yes, yes, yes, to all of it. I actually need an operating system upgrade. I need to start looking at the world differently. I need to look at who I am as a leader, not just what I do and how I do it.Share on X I need to ask the hard question why do I even want to be a leader at all? When we’re ready at that growing edge, we start bringing in the inner game, the inside out change of leading myself well first, leading myself well, and then from within, I can be a more effective leader for others. So, you see it all the time and that’s the top line of what the coaching conversation, what the coaching journey can be like walking alongside people at that growing edge. I love metaphors, so really believe that they’re already pregnant with the next great leader they’re going to be. But it’s not my baby, it’s their baby. I’m just a good midwife. Yeah, just who they’re becoming. Now, you say the inner game versus the outer game. How can someone listening wrap their head around the distinction between that? What is the border between the inner game and the outer game? So it’s very fluid. In fact, it’s a mistake to think there’s too firm a border. So, one of the big things that you named at the beginning of the difference between the pathological boss, the unskilled boss, and the great boss. Yeah, the ones that are already doing a good job that don’t need your help. Beautiful spectrum. So let’s focus on trust. All right. That is coin of the realm. A great leader can create conditions for trust between leader and followers and within the team and then trust with that team and the whole rest of the organization, all the stakeholders, the customers, the vendors, the suppliers, the whole nine yards. All right, so what goes in trust? Well, for me to trust you as a leader, I need to trust that you’re competent, that you can functionally do it. That’s outer game stuff, okay? Now, when you’re talking about that competence, are you talking about the skills that got people to the leadership position? Are you talking about – Talking about skills – – at the job, the knowledge of the industry, etc.? Yes, and now the new levels of competencies, skills on the other side of leadership, like how to run a productive meeting, from strategy to execution, decision making, all of that good stuff. So, you need to trust me that I can actually do the job of leading well, that I’m competent, and that can be learned. But, for you to trust me as a leader, you actually need to trust that I will do what I say. I may be competent but if I don’t do what I say I will do for you, it doesn’t matter that I’m competent. I lack integrity. I don’t do what I say I’m going to do. That’s inner game. And now, a bit of outer game again, for you to trust me, you need to trust my communication. Can we have difficult conversations? You can’t trust what I’m saying to you and have a productive conversation, then the leadership will fall apart. Well, having those hard conversations are learnable skills, competencies. Underneath that is do you trust my motivations? Yeah, that’s a big one. That’s a huge one I’ve encountered a lot. Yeah, because I may be super skillful, I may follow through as a leader, I may follow through on what I say, I may be extremely persuasive communicator, but I’m actually out for world domination. Out for myself. Yeah, exactly. Now we’re back on the inner so that example, just in the space of trust, it’s a dance. There’s how we’re showing up on the outside that people can see in our behaviors, even the nonverbals, and then what’s going on on the inside on how we’re making meaning of the world, how we’re interpreting the world, how we’re trying to get ahead. Sitting at that base of that inner game so much of the time is, what am I afraid of? What am I protecting? It’s the leader who’s more protective and driven by fear for themselves that will undermine whatever competencies and skills and outer game stuff they have until they look on the inside and say, “Now I know why I don’t delegate,” because I have this little story, if I delegate to you, and you mess up, the world will fall down on me. Therefore, I can’t trust you. And at the first sign that you are struggling with the delegation, thank you, I’ll just take it back, because I built a whole career on being the expert problem solver. Holy cow, I got to give up that identity to actually be a leader at that next stage. Yeah, because those are the people that are not only destroying the morale of their employees but also probably working way more hours and way harder than they need to be as well. Yeah, it’s no win for them. Yeah, it’s a win for no one. Yeah. And this entire conversation brings up some of the topics I’ve heard around the idea of manifestation. And I know some people like the spiritual conversation, some people want everything practical, and what I love about the manifestation conversation is that there’s a way to translate it into the practical because