Being A More Flexible Leader With Kevin Eikenberry

What does it take to lead with confidence when the ground beneath you keeps shifting?

Today, Kevin Eikenberry, a globally recognized leadership expert, bestselling author, and Chief Potential Officer of The Kevin Eikenberry Group, joins us. For over three decades, Kevin has been helping leaders unlock their full potential—and now he’s back with a powerful new book, Flexible Leadership: Navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence. He dives into what it really means to lead in today’s fast-moving, ever-evolving world. From managing remote and hybrid teams to making decisions in the face of ambiguity, Kevin shares practical frameworks, timeless wisdom, and fresh insights on how to stay grounded while staying flexible. If you’ve ever felt like your leadership playbook is outdated—or you’re just searching for a smarter way to lead through complexity—this conversation is for you.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/kevin-eikenberry/.

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Being A More Flexible Leader With Kevin Eikenberry

Author And Chief Potential Officer At The Kevin Eikenberry Group

My guest is Kevin Eikenberry. Kevin is the Chief Potential Officer of The Kevin Eikenberry Group, a leadership and learning consulting company that has been helping organizations, teams, and individuals reach their potential since 1993. Kevin is a prolific writer and speaker and the bestselling author of Remarkable Leadership: Unleashing Your Leadership Potential One Skill at a Time. He also has a new book out called Flexible Leadership: Navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence that we’ll be talking about. We’ll talk about that book, we’ll talk a little bit about some work Kevin does in the space of remote and hybrid work, and we’ll cover his career journey. Let’s get going.

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Kevin, welcome and thanks for joining me on the show.

I’m glad to be with you, JR. Thanks for having me.

Flexible Leadership: An Overview

Yeah, sure thing. You have a new book out called Flexible Leadership. Give us an overview.

Here’s the thing. In a world that is more complex than ever, I don’t think anyone’s going to come argue with that with more uncertainty than ever. I don’t think anyone’s going to argue with that. We need to think about the fact that if we try to lead exactly the way we always have, what’s the likelihood we’re going to be successful?

The biggest of pictures, an awful lot about what leadership is and what takes to be successful as a leader hasn’t changed since the pyramids. There’s an awful lot about leadership that isn’t changing, but the stuff that is changing mostly because of context matters a lot. We’re not spending much time talking about it. Over the last 100 years, a lot of really smart people, some of whose shoulders I stand on, have done all sorts of things to try to help leaders figure out how to be more effective.

We’ve created all sorts of tools and assessments and all that stuff, all of which are excellent until they’re not. When they’re no longer excellent is when we’ve taken a style and made it our identity. Once it becomes our identity, we can’t flex anymore, “No, JR, this is how I lead.” Flexible leadership is about how to understand how to break away from that enough to be flexible in a moment and have some intelligence about how do I look at the current context and then how do I flex based on that.

Was there a particular moment, Kevin, that prompted you to choose uncertainty as the core theme of the book?

We spent as much time as I can remember on the title and subtitle of this book and we ended up with the subtitle of Navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence. I guess I’m really glad that uncertainty is in there because there’s so much of it. The core idea of the book ultimately is the willingness and ability to flex our approach to leading based on the context of the situation. I believe, and a lot of what I’m continuing to read since I wrote the book says that when we’re in times of uncertainty, while we know what we mostly want to do is turtle in or ostrich in, what we need to do is actually ride the wave.

That means we have to be flexible and not just locked in. While it wasn’t the overarching core idea, it’s a really important point and especially now in the world that we’re in, that’s more uncertain than ever. That’s not going to change either. What this book doesn’t do, JR, is remove uncertainty. What it does do is help us recognize uncertainty and move confidently anyway.

Leading Confidently Through Uncertainty: The Importance Of Having A Map

What does it take for a leader to move confidently anyway in the face of uncertainty?

The first thing is we have to have a map. If I drop you in the wilderness somewhere and say, “I just want you to get back to a road to civilization, I’ve asked hundreds of people this on webinars and stuff, some people say they want water. I say like, “I’m going to give you one thing, what do you want?” Some people say water. I say, “Let’s assume you got water.” They say, “I want my phone.” I said, “You got no cell service.” They say, “I want a map.” Absolutely. We need to have a map to know the lay of the land so we know what direction to move. If things are uncertain, we need to have a map that can help us say, “In the midst of this uncertainty, what does this look like?”

I am using the work of Dave Snowden who created something that readers might know of called the Cynefin framework, which is a way to say that some situations are pretty clear, some are more complicated, some are complex and some are chaos. Most leaders most of the time assume things are clear, operate as if things are clear or they’re in chaos. By the Kevin framework, we’re rarely truly in chaos when we are not for very long, but much more of our work and work situations now are complicated or complex.

We talk about none understanding the map to say, “What am I seeing? Where am I?” and going from there. All of that identity stuff is typically based on assuming things are clear and we know how things are and what the causes and effects are and best practices are awesome and all that stuff. That’s all true when the context is clear. I would propose that it’s less true than there than ever, which means that we have to flex our approach because the situation falls for it.

As Mike Tyson said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

We act as if we’re either not going to get punched in the face or there was nothing that we could do when we got punched in the face. I would propose that in times of complexity and complication and complexity, that we’re not going to have all the answers, but we have some things that we can do as leaders to understand how we probably need to lead differently in those moments to improve the odds.

If you think about it this way, JR, I don’t think most people think about leadership this way. Leadership is 100% about improving our odds of success because as leaders, we are in the business of outcomes and others and all of that are things we can only influence, we can’t control. If we’re thinking about things we can influence, one of the key questions we should always be asking is, “What can I do to improve my odds of success in having more influence or, or getting a better outcome?”

Lots of things that we talk about in terms of leadership development are ultimately about that question. If we say, “If we have more trust, if we have more trust, what do we have,” we have the ability to have greater influence, we improve the odds, we can get better results as an example. Once we recognize if things are truly complex, which means the system is unordered and we don’t know all the pieces, and we can’t know all the pieces, then we can at least say, “What can we do to improve our odds given the situation?” As leaders, we need to be thinking about that first so we can then help our teams think through that.

By the way, I’d like Cynefin framework, I also liked the outcomes. Others ourselves say framework. I guess you put odds in the middle of that as well, I guess, maybe intentionally, maybe unintentionally.

Not really. I do like alliteration, but you mentioned the three models. We say that leadership is ultimately about outcomes, others and ourselves, but it’s really about the other two. Who we are and how we lead has an impact on outcomes and others, for sure.

Yeah. It’s important that framework does not put ourselves in the middle. To me, that’s a very important concept that you do have to think about yourself, but you are just 1 of the 3 dimensions. As you say, the other two are more important.

It’s not really about us. It’s just that we can’t ignore who we are and how we lead because it does have an impact on outcomes and others.

Flexibility Vs. Reactivity

When you think about flexibility in leadership, how does it differ from simply being adaptable or reactive?

It’s definitely different than being reactive because reactive is like it’s passive. Being a flexible leader, as I’m describing and as we’re talking about here, is a proactive intentional choice. That’s definitely different than reacting to a situation. That’s the first thing. How is it different from adaptable? If we looked up the two words in the dictionary or in the thesaurus, we’d say they’re pretty similar. I wouldn’t have as strong of a difference with adaptability as I would with being reactionary.

However, I think often when we think about being adaptable is well, we can adapt to a situation. I’m suggesting I want to adapt my approach in the situation. Given this moment and what I see here, what’s the best way for me to respond, for me to act, for me to communicate, for me to decide as a leader in this moment. I’d say it’s much closer to being adaptable.

How can a leader develop a team culture that embraces uncertainty rather than fear it?

I think the first thing is it’s hard to embrace uncertainty. Let’s get excited about uncertainty. What I think we have to do is we just have to acknowledge it. To me, that’s the key. As humans, when things are uncertain, our first reaction is buckle up, tighten up, hide, wait. What we want as leaders is for our teams to say, “Here it is. Let’s take a deep breath. Let’s think about how we want to go about doing this.”

Flexible Leader: As humans, our first instinct in the face of uncertainty is to tense up, hide, or wait. But as leaders, we want our teams to respond by saying, ‘Here it is. Let’s take a deep breath and think about how we want to approach this.

I think that there’s tremendous value in patience, taking a beat, that I think oftentimes, organizations aren’t really good at patience that we operate on the now, we operate on the urgent. What happens is either organizations or people get to uncertain. They say, “No, what are we going to do?” They freeze or they just barrel forward.

I believe that flexibility isn’t about now by the way, we could go, as a flexor, being fast and slow. There are times when it’s really going slow or slowing down and maybe doing nothing might be useful. There are times where we just need to rock and roll. That can be useful. The point I’m making here is that the ends of the spectrum, those two ends are rarely are perfect or best answer in a given situation. Somewhere in between.

What I’m suggesting that often, if it’s truly uncertain that we leaning a little bit more towards let’s think about this, let’s take a beat, let’s take a pause, let’s be a little bit patient, which doesn’t necessarily mean days. It might mean an hour, a minute overnight. It could mean one of those things, just so often we do. What do we do? We do react. We do something and a little pause probably to our advantage.

I think as leaders, anytime things are hard for people, whether it’s change, whether it’s uncertainty, whatever it is, the first thing that we need to do is just acknowledge it. Everybody, I know what you’re seeing. I know how you’re feeling. I’m feeling it too. It is our reality. Let’s talk about how we can move forward given the uncertainty.

Balancing Urgency & Importance

I think about there’s a piece of business wisdom, I’m not sure I subscribed to it, that says you should never make a decision until it’s urgent. I think the argument is don’t spend a lot of mental cycles on something that you don’t need to decide now. I get that simple example, “What am I going to order at the restaurant for dinner tomorrow night?” Really not much point in thinking about that a whole lot until I’m actually at the restaurant.

There are people that do.

Sure, there are people look at the menu and they’ve already picked it out and they’ve spent a lot of time deliberating over it. I guess that works for some people.

Some people in my family are like that. It just isn’t me.

I think there are people in every family like that. I think at the same time, you can’t always afford to wait until the last minute because at that point, you may have missed an opportunity. I think that’s where you get into the freezing and overreaction that has to come at the eleventh hour because you’ve lost the benefit of having some amount of time to deal with the situation.

A big issue with urgency is that lots of people are addicted to it. Everything happens in urgent because we’re just putting one fire out after the other and all day long is urgent. We have to find the balance between urgent and important. We have to deal with the urgent stuff. I was talking to someone. They have a construction company and an excavator breaks the middle of this project, they’ve got this contract, they’re going to have to deal with that.

In that moment, as a leader in this case, as a business owner, they’re going to have to deal with that urgent situation or, as I coach them, someone has to. It may not have to be them. The point is there’s going to be urgent things. What we as leaders need to be doing is stepping back enough to make sure we’re talking about and thinking about and deciding about or contemplating the important things.

You mentioned that I wrote this book. I’ve written a bunch of books. A lot of people say, “Kevin, how do you write a book?” I said, “The first thing you have to do is you have to start writing.” They look at me like, “Thank you a lot. Thank you so much.” I’m like, “No, you have to start writing.” It’s just like any project, like how many people didn’t study for the exam at college or university until when? The day before. That’s living in urgent. That doesn’t always service. We have to be able to manage and urgent. If we live there as leaders, we are not serving ourselves or our teams.

You say some people are addicted to it, but most of the people around them do not want to spend their whole life living in firefighting mode. It’s exhausting.

Yeah. There’s a lot of people that would say, “I don’t like to do it,” but they haven’t figured out how to get out of it. When I say addicted to it, some people love it and some people may not love it, but they don’t know any other way. As a leader, we can be the person that doesn’t give people the chance to see any other way because they’re watching us.

If we are always in firefighting mode or if we like it and they keep bringing us the fires, like if someone comes into your office for those of you reading and they’ve got a problem and then you immediately jump into helping them solve it. The next time they have a problem, what are they going to do? They’re going to bring it to you because, number one, it’s easier for to let you do it. Number two is you’ve taught them that’s the way the game is played here.

Leading With Flexibility: Knowing When ‘It Depends’ Matters

Those same leaders will say to me, “People are interrupting me all day long.” I say, “What are you doing when they walk in?” You’re teaching them how to work with you. I’m not saying there aren’t times when we don’t have need to be decisive, but if that person comes in with that problem and instead of saying, “Here’s what we’re going to do,” says, “What would you do if I wasn’t here,” or, “What are our options,” or, “What would you recommend?” You do that the next twelve times someone walks in, guess what’s going to happen?

They’ll stop coming in because they’ll figure it out.

When they come in, it’s something we really need to talk about, which is what you really want, isn’t it? If you’re having regular one-on-ones with your folks, you start to teach them the difference between truly urgent and just, “I just thought of it,” because what happens is people bring what they’re thinking about to you and now it becomes your urgent. I had this thought. I go down to the boss, the boss says, “You know this is so.”

That’s why everyone that works reports to me, if you will, I don’t love that language, but it’s the fastest way to talk about what I’m saying. I have one-on-ones with everybody on a regular basis and they all have a way to keep track of. I have a way to keep track of with everybody. They all have a Kevin list. What’s on my Kevin list? If something comes up that can’t wait until next Tuesday, then we’ll need to talk about it.

Send me an email, drop down the hall. There’s hardly anyone down the hall, but you know what I’m saying. We can talk about them all at once. They may not be big, they may be important, but now they’ve had a chance to continue to think about them. When we come together, we’re in a much better chance and perspective to get a better result.

I was thinking also just your point from earlier about people being addicted to it. The problem in a lot of cultures is firefighting. It’s heroic. It gets rewarded.

Yeah. By the way, when you’re wielding the hose, you’re not thinking about prevention. You’re only thinking about putting out the fire, which is the problem, because we never move to the important of solving it or figuring out why this fire showed up. We just put it out.

You have those conversations like, “I need to invest in something. I don’t want to spend the money right now. I need to invest in something or something’s going to break. I don’t want to spend the money right now. Something broke. How did you let that happen?” That conversation plays out in companies all over the world.

All day long.

If somebody came to you and asked for one actionable step to start becoming a more flexible and confident leader, what would you recommend?

When someone comes to you with a situation problem query or you’re thinking about something and you say or think these two words, “It depends.” You are in the moment where you can choose to be a flexible leader because when we say it depends, then the actual question is what does it depend on? That helps us survey the context more because if we don’t say, “It depends.” We just say, “What should we do?” We go to our memory bank and we go to our natural response, our learned response, our prescribed leadership style from the assessment we took and then we pull it out and we do that thing, automatic habit. Habits are awesome until they’re not.

Here’s the thing, if we say it depends, then we have to stop and say, “What does it depend on?” Based on that, we might do something slightly different than we would’ve done naturally. Maybe when we do that, we still do what we would’ve done naturally. Now, we have a better shot at that’s going to be. From that perspective, I believe every leader has been flexible because they’ve said, “What does it depend on?” They’ve thought about it and say, “Maybe we ought to do this this way instead of that way,” or, “Maybe we ought to get a little more information,” or, “Maybe I ought to quit talking and start listening,” or whatever it might be.

To me, that’s where we start, number one, to know that we have all done it. A lot of times, we hear, “It depends,” but we don’t really stop. That’s what we say in the flexible leadership approach. The first thing is intention. It takes intention because the minute we operate on auto response habit identity, we’re not flexible. We’re just doing that thing. We’re taking that approach. “This is reminding me of twelve other times I’ve done this, so that’s what I’m going to do again.” That’s the antithesis of flexible.

Yeah. I was thinking at one point when I was reading the book and you talked about habits and how habits put you on autopilot, I was thinking about the fact that a lot of things that are involved in being a good manager involved habits. Doing one-on-ones, offering coaching and feedback, making delegation a regular. I guess it got me thinking a little bit, Kevin, about where do you draw the line between the things you do want to put on autopilot and the things that you have to be cautious not to be on autopilot because that’s where the change in the risk is.

Let’s just take an example. One of those things that you mentioned is one of my favorite topics, one-on-ones. Here’s what’s on autopilot. You have them. You have them at a regular cadence. You have a general approach that you take to doing them. I would propose let’s talk about non-work. Let’s talk about your list. Let’s talk about my list. Those things are going to stay the same. Once that person is across the desk or on the Zoom call with you, maybe things are different or maybe they’re in the middle of a big project and we’re not going to get to your list at all.

Hopefully, at least some of the times in those one-on-ones, we’re going to talk about bigger picture, longer term coaching stuff. Not just the daily work, but maybe right now we need to stay on the daily work because they’re trying to finish this project that’s flexing. You didn’t get to all my lists. That’s okay. It’s flexing. If we’re taking their list first, maybe that’s all we get to. While I think we should talk about the non-work, something beyond work and weather for if it’s a 30-minute meeting 3, 4, 5, 6 minutes ought to be non-work, maybe I have a member of my team this weekend just as we’re having this conversation. We got a hole in one.

They showed up on our Slack. Everybody on the team saw us, saw the pictures. Now when I have my next one-on-one with Adrian, we’re going to talk about the hole in one. I want to know all about the hole in one. We’re going to spend longer on that probably than the agenda might say we should. That’s being flexible.

Flexibility is about big stuff, but it’s also about little stuff like that. It’s about what does the context tell me about what’s important for us to do right now. If someone just had something catastrophic happen in their family. I have a team member who lost a daughter in a car accident, so 100% unexpected, and instantly, her world changed. First of all, we didn’t have a one-on-one for a month and we had conversations.

We didn’t have a one-on-one for a month and we didn’t have a one-on-one the way they used to be like they are now for multiple months. The world was different. The situation required, or I believe required me to lead differently. Not forever, but for now. Those are just examples, one on the fun side and one on the not so fun side of how you would flex on the one-on-one. A lot about leadership’s not changing, like we’ve got to have one-on-ones, but how we do it and how often we do it might need to flex based on the situation.

Mastering Remote Leadership: Lessons In Patience, Presence, & Connection

Let’s talk a little bit about remote work. You mentioned doing these one-on-ones over Zoom potentially. I know you’ve been focused on this topic since before the world had COVID and a need for remote and hybrid work. What actually got you into wanting to focus on this?

Part of it was I had a remote team and so I needed to be learning how to do it better. I had one for a long time. The second part was that we were seeing more and more questions from clients about that. It’s hard for us all now to remember what it was like before COVID, in a way, and yet, we were already moving in the direction of remote work some of the time, distributed work.

I can remember walking through office buildings and I say, “It looks like you’re doing some hybrid work here.” We used the word hybrid long before anyone else did. I wish that we could say we were the ones that came up with it. We weren’t. We were using it, but it’s not because of us. I said, “It looks like you have a lot of hybrid, you got people working from home.” “No, everyone we’re here every day.” Why all these empty desks?” “They’re this, they’re that.” It was happening before, but it was mostly as an exception, not the rule. Of course, in one day, it became everybody’s rule.

We were doing it partly because I was working on it because I needed to get better at it as a leader. We had clients who were asking us about it. That started to do it and we started to really lean into it realizing that that trend was coming. A couple years before the pandemic, we released The Long-Distance Leader, which is where the 3.0 model that we talked about earlier was first published in that book.

What did you learn personally? This is a quest of personal knowledge building for you. What did you learn about what you needed to do to manage your remote team better?

One of the things I learned, one of the key things in that book is one of the things I’ve actually already said. A lot about leadership hasn’t changed. We’re not going to throw the baby out with the bath water. Human dynamics and human behavior aren’t changing as rapidly as some people want to think. Again, I couldn’t have talked about it then like I can now but what really changed was context. One of the things that I learned was I needed to be more patient. Another thing that I learned was I needed to get my team, this goes way back, getting them all used to being on these cameras like you and I are on right now.

In the first edition of The Long-Distance Leader, that was a big thing, convincing people to get on their cameras, etc. Of course, at some point, then everyone was on them, at least for a little while during the pandemic. Now we’re back to people to want to have their cameras on again, which just means that human nature is human nature. I learned a little bit about patience. I learned a lot about team building and how do you build a team at a distance over the long haul. I think another thing that we’ve been very intentional with trying to use all of the various communication tools that we have at our disposal that all of us have at our disposal and try to get really intentional and, hopefully, wise about when to use which ones.

Certainly, we all learned that you have to allow more time for that team relationship building because it’s not like you get everybody in a conference room and while you’re waiting for everybody to show up, you’re talking about the hole in one that somebody may have hit over the weekend or some kid’s sporting event or something else that’s gone on. Everybody gets onto a Zoom call and a lot of times, there’s like silence until somebody calls a quorum and gets the meeting going. You miss those things.

Can I take that as an example? This is one of the things that we coach people on and train people on all the time. Number one, if you have people there and they’re just sitting there waiting, you did one thing right. That means that the person running the meeting wasn’t the one that could open the meeting room up. I always say that if you’re going to have a Zoom or Teams or whatever meeting, think about it like in a conference room.

If you walk into the conference room, people walk in as they walk in. When they walk in, what did they do? They started chatting. Whenever you can, you open the meeting room five minutes early. Sometimes as a leader, if I’m the one that opens it and people start chatting, sometimes I’ll just give myself an excuse to not be there. Even though I think we have pretty good relationships on our team and all that stuff, there’s something to be said for them to be able to talk without me there.

Sometimes, “I need more tea,” whether I do or whether I don’t, or, “I’ll be back in a second,” and then I just let them go. I can tell you that sometimes, I am a big believer in starting a meeting on time, but there have been times when it’s time for the meeting to start and that natural thing is happening, the best thing I can do is let it go from 3 or 4 minutes. Not forever because it doesn’t get the chance to happen as often and there’s things that we do in our monthly team meeting, on virtual team meeting to try to do some more of that.

That’s just a small example of that’s not really doing it different than it was before, except you’re thinking about what isn’t changing human dynamics, the need for that to happen and then making space. We have this monthly meeting. Everyone’s counted for 90 minutes. It rarely goes more than 75 minutes. Sometimes it doesn’t go more than 65 minutes. It’s on everybody’s calendar, including mine for 90 minutes.

How many of you have ever been in a meeting? I’m listening, talking to all of you. You’re listening. Have you ever been in a meeting and the hardest thing was finding a time to talk to someone. Something came up in the meeting that you need. You have an action item and you need to work with someone else in the meeting. The hardest thing is finding another time to talk to that person.

If you can walk out of the meeting with them, you can figure that out on the way out. If you’re on a virtual meeting and the meeting ends, so what we do is by having that space, then people know that if they need to have that immediate call, they can do it right then. That also keeps us from having back-to-back meetings.

One of the biggest complaints that we hear now during and post-COVID is the meetings go right up into the hour. The meeting starts immediately. I don’t even have time to go to the bathroom. By scheduling it longer, we actually get more productivity out of that time because. If people get extra ten minutes back, no one’s complaining. They can go back to work on something or they can stretch their legs or whatever.

It is true that having even five minutes at end of the meeting for people to just do the individual next step planning with others, it just makes it much more likely to happen than if they then have to find another block.

Just have that conversation. Now it’s two days later. That’s just crazy.

Rethinking Performance: Developing People, Not Managing Them

How should leaders think about performance management differently or the same in the context of a remote work environment?

Number one, stop calling it performance management. No one really likes to be managed in performance development because isn’t ultimately what we want is for people’s performance to be growing and developing and changing. Management implies what? Fixing, overseeing, supervising. I’m not saying that we don’t have to sometimes do those things. Don’t misunderstand me. The first thing I would change is quit calling it performance management.

No one wants to be managed, no one really wants to be reviewed but developed, most of us most of the time. I would change the language first. Beyond that, if we’re doing the one-on-ones, I’m so glad we already talked about that, if we’re doing those on the regular, then when we have the performance management, whatever you want to call it, conversation, there should be no surprises, which is one of the biggest problems with them.

The second thing is we take a lot of the stress and anxiety out of them. The third thing is if I work for you and this is about me, ultimately, then I should be an active participant in this conversation. It’s not something you’re doing to me, it’s something we’re doing together. Those would be the first things. Those things can all happen, virtually or not.

I will say if you have people that don’t like the camera, I had a person for that was on her team for a long time, didn’t really love the camera, and sometimes had a situation where she didn’t have great broadband so she wasn’t always on camera. For some kinds of conversations, we need the richness that comes with this. Right now, if you have a hybrid team and you can have your one-on-ones when on the days that people are in the office, then by all means, try to do that.

Everything else being equal, the single best way to have a one-on-one conversation is in real time, face-to-face, across a table, or beside each other. What you and I are doing right now is the next best thing. We all know it’s not quite as good, but it’s a whole lot better than just doing it on the phone or doing this without the cameras on. I know you’ve done 150 some episodes of the show and I don’t know the history, but I know my history on our show, The Remarkable Leadership Podcast is we were using Zoom from the beginning with the cameras on, even when all we were recording was the audio. Why? Better conversation.

I know that you’re doing both now, but I don’t I don’t know what you always did. The reality is that we all know that the richness of this communication medium makes it so much better. If we’re having those performance conversations, the formal or the informal ones, the more often we can do those with the cameras on, the better. If your team is hybrid, try to have those when you’re together.

Flexible Leadership In Remote & Hybrid Work

Bring together the two things we’ve talked about so far, the flexible leadership and working in remote and hybrid environments. What does it mean to apply flexible leadership in the context of a remote or hybrid work environment where you may have more uncertainty because you just aren’t with each other as much?

We’ll flip it around to say that if you are leading remotely, hybrid, distributed, however you want to say it, if you’re leading a team that’s not altogether in the same place every day, and then I’m hoping you’re flexing at least a little bit. If you’re leading now in that situation the same way you were leading for the lockdowns, the world has not conspired to be closer to your favorite ways to lead.

Hopefully, nearly every leader on the planet flexed admirably. In the first month of the pandemic. People knew like, “I had to,” but the tug of identity and the tug of what I like and the tug of comfort has taken many people back. That’s even some of the reasons why what’s happened with the ongoing vacillation of how many days in the office and all that stuff. By the way, making remote work all about which days we’re in the office is missing the point at the end of the day.

I think that we all got a glimpse of the fact that we can flex because we did for walk because we had to. That doesn’t mean that everyone has stayed there. Actually, one of the interesting challenges in our business is we have this part of our business built around The Long-Distance Leader, The Long-Distance Team, all that stuff to the books.

Here’s what is being said by a lot of people. “We already did that.” “How’s it working?” “Not necessarily working great. We did the training and we’re okay.” “Are you?” “There’s an awful lot of discontent, awful lot of frustration and certainly employee engagement has not gone up and trust and leadership hasn’t gone up.” Whether you want to say that it’s because of remote or whatever, the reality is that the need for us to continue to flex and get better absolutely exists.

Kevin’s Career Journey

Before we run out of time, I wanted to ask a little bit about your broader career journey. I know you majored in agriculture. Somehow you got yourself into this. How did that happen?

I grew up on a farm and we had a farm-related business as well. I had this entrepreneurial part of myself, I suppose. Very short version. After college, I went to work for Chevron in the chemical business. I was in the fertilizer business for a while. While I was there, happens to many people, once you’re in your job, you get a chance to try something, then you like it and then you did okay. They let you do more of it. That was for me, very early on, chance to do some training.

I had done some teaching when I was in graduate school. Maybe there was already a little inkling in some of that. Fundamentally, I went to work for Chevron, knowing that eventually, I would work for myself. Six years later. I found my way into a corporate training group for Chevron Corporation worldwide. During the next couple of years, I figured out that doing the work that I do now, which is broader than just doing training, was what I was put on the planet to do. I left Chevron to start the company.

You were an early adopter in this space, in the scheme of things.

I guess in some ways. I don’t really think about it that way.

Coaching and development and all of that stuff just massively grown over the last few decades. I think back to the early ‘90s when you started this, and I was at that point in grad school and then working for a consulting firm, it was still relatively unique for people to get any real focus on development. Certainly, the coaching industry was in its nascent stages at that point. What’s ahead for you and what’s ahead for your business?

I said a second ago and in passing that this was the work I was put on the planet to do. I feel very blessed to be able to say that with great confidence. I’m about to have a birthday, as it turns out, and that’s the time that a lot of times, people start to think about those kinds of questions. I have a number of close friends who are roughly my age that have decided to retire.

I just wrote another book, so I guess I’m not planning to retire anytime soon. I’m doing my life’s work. Our business might continue to morph and change. I don’t even know exactly what that will look like in the future, but I do know that the work that we do is not going away. The need for the work that we do is not going away. Even if the way I do some of it and how I spend my time might evolve, I doubt I’ve written my last book. Maybe JR at like episode, I don’t know, 254, I’ll be back.

Fair enough. You’ve written a bunch of books. You crank them out very quickly. It is not an easy process to write a book, so I tip my hat to you, not that I have one, but I would tip my virtual hat to you. Any last advice you want to offer our audience, Kevin?

I’ll give you some advice and I’ll give you some resources. The advice is that if you liked any of these ideas about being flexible, remember two things. Number one is flexibility is actually a good thing. It’s not the opposite of consistent. We can be both consistent and flexible. Consistent in our values and in our whats and in our whys, but flexible in our hows. That means that we have to be intentional because otherwise, we’ll just do what comes automatically. We have to make intentional the new habit fundamentally.

In terms of resources, if you found this useful, you can go get the book anywhere you where find books are sold, as they say. You can also go to FlexibleLeadershipBook.com where you can learn all about it. You can get a sample chapter and a bunch of other stuff. If you go to KevinEikenberry.com/gift, I have a gift for all of you. The gift is a masterclass that I wrote a couple of years ago about confidence, which is the other word in the subtitle that we didn’t talk a lot about really as much. It’s a masterclass on how to build our confidence and build the confidence of others. We sell it all the time because you’re here, you can go and sign up for that, get access to that for free, and we’d love to have you do that.

All right, sounds good. We’ll wrap there. Thanks for doing this with me, Kevin.

It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, absolutely.

—

Thanks to Kevin for joining me to discuss his new book, Flexible Leadership, as well as remote and hybrid work, and a little bit, at the very end, about his own career journey. As a reminder, this discussion was brought to you by PathWise.io. If you’d like to take control of your career, you can join the PathWise community. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the website for our newsletter, follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks.

Important Links

• The Kevin Eikenberry Group
• Remarkable Leadership: Unleashing Your Leadership Potential One Skill at a Time
• Flexible Leadership: Navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence
• The Long-Distance Leader
• The Remarkable Leadership Podcast
• The Long-Distance Team
• Free Gift from Kevin Eikenberry
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram
• PathWise on TikTok

About Kevin Eikenberry

Kevin Eikenberry is the Chief Potential Officer of The Kevin Eikenberry Group, a leadership and learning consulting company that has been helping organizations, teams and individuals reach their potential since 1993.

Kevin has worked with Fortune 500 companies, small firms, universities, government agencies, and many companies and organizations you know well, and with leaders from at least 43 countries. He has twice been named by Inc.com as one of the Top 100 Leadership and Management Experts in the World and 100 Great Leadership Speakers for Your Next Conference. The American Management Association named him a “Leaders to Watch” and he has been twice named as one of the World’s Top 30 Leadership Professionals by Global Gurus.

Kevin is a prolific writer and speaker, and the bestselling author of Remarkable Leadership: Unleashing Your Leadership Potential One Skill at a Time. He has a new book, Flexible Leadership: Navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence, that we’ll be talking about today.

Kevin and his family live in Indianapolis, Indiana. Growing up on a Michigan farm, Kevin says he learned some of his most important leadership lessons working with his father. Kevin earned a B.S. with honors from Purdue University, collects antique John Deere tractors, is an avid reader, and loves his family and his Boilermakers!