The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Flexible Leadership: Navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence by Kevin Eikenberry

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Flexible Leadership: Navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence by Kevin Eikenberry Amazon.com Kevineikenberry.com Become a more flexible leader with a revolutionary approach to applying leadership skills—while remaining steadfast in proven principles and your values. To succeed in a landscape more unpredictable than ever, leaders need a new perspective and a brand-new set of skills centered around what is missing in the models and existing tools: flexibility. Kevin Eikenberry, Chief Potential Officer of the Kevin Eikenberry Group, a leadership consulting company centered on a philosophy of lifelong learning, explains how to effectively harness flexibility in this guide for leaders at all levels. Outlining a new toolkit for those frustrated with their current effectiveness and confidence, Flexible Leadership teaches readers to: Become more situationally flexible and effective every day without compromising values or principles Understand the danger of using existing models to define (and therefore limit) leadership effectiveness Use the Flexible Leadership Approach, including the practical Flexor spectrum framework, to make wise decisions based on context—not on automatic responses Create an organization of flexible leaders and change the lives of others for the better The flexible leader has a clear mindset and increased confidence knowing that they can respond to a variety of situations with greater success, instead of being overly reliant on restrictive and complicated tools that can get in the way. Flexible Leadership is every leader’s guide to greater success in a world of increasing complexity and chaos.About the author Kevin Eikenberry is a recognized world expert on leadership development and learning and is the Chief Potential Officer of The Kevin Eikenberry Group (http://KevinEikenberry.com). He has spent nearly 30 years helping organizations across North America, and leaders from around the world, on leadership, learning, teams and teamwork, communication and more. Twice he has been named by Inc.com as one of the top 100 Leadership and Management Experts in the World and has been included in many other similar lists. He is the author, co-author or a contributing author to nearly 20 books, including Remarkable Leadership and bestseller From Bud to Boss – Secrets of the Successful Transition to Remarkable Leadership (with Guy Harris), The Long-Distance Leader: Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership (with Wayne Turmel). His next book (January 2021) is The Long-Distance Teammate: Stay Engaged and Connected While Working Anywhere. His blog is consistently ranked among the world’s best, most read and most shared on leadership.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com. Ladies and gentlemen, the Iron Lady sings. That makes it official. Welcome to the big show. As always, the Chris Voss Show is the family that loves you but doesn't judge you.

And, you know, as long as you're not evil, as long as you're a good person to other people, you follow the golden rule, we like you on the Chris Voss Show. So make sure you fit that category. And if not, maybe you need to listen to the Chris Voss Show and all the 2,300 episodes that are up there over 16 years and just figure out how to be less evil eh maybe i don't know try and go to good reason for it says chris voss linkedin.com for just chris voss don't be evil facebook.com for says chris for all the crazy places in the internet opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect

the opinions of the host or the chris v show. Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it is not an endorsement or review of any kind. Today we have a returning guest, another amazing young man to talk about his hot new book that's coming off the presses on March 25th, 2025, and it is called Flexible Leadership, Navigate Uncertainty and Lead with Confidence confidence Kevin I can bury joins us on the show today we're gonna be talking to him about his insights and everything else and he's gonna help make your life better he's gonna help you make you smarter and some of you might get better looking listen to the show

I'm not sure if the lawyers let me say that but so don't over promise man because I was really so much like what we. That's what we like to do, Kevin. We like to set our guests up for failure just by building them up. He's going to solve cancer always on the show. Look at this face. This face is not going to make other people look better. Just say it. Yeah.

He's going to neuter all your pets just by listening to the show. They'll automatically be neutered. Yeah, he's amazing. He's an amazing guy. let's get in kevin is a recognized world expert on leadership development and learning and is the chief potential officer of the cpo that would be of the kevin eikenberry group he spent nearly 30 years helping organizations across north america and leaders from around the world on leadership, learning, teams, teamwork, communication, and more. He's been named twice by Inc.com as one of the top 100 leading and management experts in the world and is included in many other lists. He's the author, co-author, or contributing author to nearly 20 books. Boy, this guy's got a lot of

time on his hands. Wait, he can't. He's doing all this other stuff. Welcome to the show, Kevin. How are you? Chris, it's good to be back. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you back as well. Give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find out more about you? KevinEikenberry.com, K-E-V-I-N-E-I-K-E-N-B-E-R-R-Y.com. Add slash flexible after that to learn more about the book in terms of lots of ways to get there. And add slash gift after that and get a free gift. Maybe we can talk about that. Free gift.

So do we need to put that on the website for the special? Awesome. KevinEikenberry.com slash gift. Slash gift. So you get some free stuff. So let's start at the top of what I promised people. How are we going to cure cancer? No, I'm just teasing. Give us a 30,000 overview. What's in your new book, Flexible Leadership?

So here's the thing. For the last 100 years, smart people have been trying to figure out how to help leaders get better. What have dumb people been doing? No, I'm just kidding. So here's the thing. I had to get that. We've worked at it really hard, and a lot of people have come up with really good stuff, and it hasn't always done what we wanted to do. And so one of the things we've done is we've built things like styles and done us built assessments and strengths and all that stuff.

And all that stuff is great. There's reasons why we built them. And ultimately, in many cases, they're actually getting in the way because people a style is useful until it's not. And what I'm suggesting is we have to get past style and think about how we can flex based on the context of our situation rather than leading into a specific style that we have been told or come to believe is the way we lead. It's all about the leading, as it were, in the thing. So what was the proponent that made you want to write this book? What was missing out there? Were there just a lot of leaders who weren't being very flexible? They weren't doing the yoga in the morning?

Or what was going on? Let's not take this to yoga because I'm not sure I qualify that. But let me say this. I've been at this for 30 years, and we've had the chance to help a lot of leaders. And if you're listening, chances are, hopefully it's not you, but chances are you've had a boss that you said, yeah, not so much. Not don't want to have that one anymore. And so, you know, listen, being a better way to think about leading more effectively, then that's a good use of time.

You mean I can't just send an email to everybody like Twitter and stuff and Elon Musk and just say, hey, you all have to justify your jobs next week or we fire you all. Is that good leadership? Let's just say that while email is a fine tool it's not not everything ought to be done on email that's true i don't have any problem with people being able to describe what they did if it's really hard to come up with that that might be a challenge yeah but i'm not but i'm not necessarily saying that the way they went about it was the most effective but but asking that question i don't know what they're asking that question yeah nothing wrong with asking that question. Yeah. Considering how well X is doing, I think it's pretty obvious how that worked out. I think X is basically bankrupt at this point.

They're working on a new round of funding, and I guess a bunch of banks are going to just shit their stocks and give up on them and be like, whatever, write this all off. Anyway, how not to run a business or how not to lead. But leadership's a tricky thing. Like you say, there's a lot of work that goes into it. A lot of people just think that you just get the title leader and then suddenly you're like, I don't know, Marcus Aurelius or something. Or, you know, it just comes to you from the title.

I used to keep a picture on my book. I think it was a black wolf, one of those really dark black wolves with the piercing eyes that I love so much, the wolves. And it says something to the effect of, I still have it in storage somewhere. I don't know why it's not here. But it says something to the effect of your title doesn't make you the leader. You have to earn it every day or something to that effect. You basically have to earn your job and your title every day. And that's, you know, I had it on my desk at the time to remind me that just because I was the CEO and the booths, the bookstops here, all that crap, that that didn't make me a good leader. I had to keep working at it and keep

earning my, you know, people's, they're the right for people to follow me, I guess, really. I think it's exactly, I tell people all the time that leadership is much more of a verb than a noun. And if no one's following you, you're just taking a walk. Yeah, you're just barking at the wall. Yes, we have titles, and many people listening probably have the title of leader, manager, supervisor, boss, whatever. And yet that by itself doesn't make us a leader to your exact point. And oftentimes we got promoted because we were really good at certain things. And so we thought that all we had to do is have all the right answers.

And guess what? The world's too complex for us to have all the right answers. Yeah. And leadership, I'm 57. I'm still learning to be a good leader. I'm older than you and so am I. So we're in the right answers. Yeah. And leadership, I'm 57. I'm still learning to be a good leader. I'm older than you and so am I. So we're in the same boat. Yeah. I mean, it's, I don't ever see me becoming a master of becoming a great leader. It's, you know, I'm still learning stuff every day. This is why we have the podcast. So I can have people like

you on who can, you know, tell me about what good leadership is then i should stop yelling at people every day i'm still working on that you know the mass firings i'm always doing on wednesdays that's always a good day to do mass firings i found i had i have an employee that she she works remotely while my team is mostly remote and do you want me to fire her no i'm just kidding the first time that she came here like everyone was coming here for a meeting and so i thought we ought to have like donuts, right? So everyone's showing up from across the country. And I go into our office, go into the kitchen and have a donut. And she gets this funny look on her face.

I'm like, Adrian, what's the problem? She goes, the place I used to work, the only time there were donuts in the break room was the day someone was getting fired. I said, Adrian, no one's getting fired today. It's fine. But I have never, I might have bought a bagel since then. But if Adrian's no one's getting fired today. It's fine. But I have never bought. I might have bought a bagel since then. But if Adrian's going to be there, don't buy donuts anymore. You know, things happen and people have connections to them, right?

Poor gal. She's going to trauma. No more donuts at the Kevin Eikenberger. She's going to trauma. And you're just trying to give donuts out. And you're triggering her prior job trauma. I only did it once. I was unaware. See see i was flexible enough to

change the menu in the future that's why you give them pizza and then fire them that's what i found works there's a lot of joke references that on linkedin that you're always joking about you know oh hey can we get a raise and they're like no can we get so we but we got some pizza for you it's like wow thanks all right i just saw i think i just saw a thing uh on facebook where they you know they just fired thousands or maybe tens of thousands of people in the last year and they just gave all the executives a 200 plus 200 bonus they really care about their employees over there at Mena. Doesn't send a great message, does it? Almost as much as they do at running an ethical, integrity-based social media site.

But I don't know. I'm sure they'll work on Miramar and start a few more whatever genocides. Thanks, Mark Zuckerberg. You're great. Anyway, enough about him. So talk to us. We'll get back to the book here. But talk to us about your history. People always like to hear the bio of the person themselves what was

your journey through life how did you grow up maybe what were some of your influences in childhood um you know what what cut you down this road of getting into leadership and running your own company and consulting well I am yeah I grew up on a farm in Michigan and was involved in our family business, both the farm and an ag business at the same time. So you saw entrepreneurs early on then? A hundred percent, both in the family and all around us. And so that had a huge impact on me growing up.

I went to school at Purdue and studied agriculture and really didn't, and really for't, and really for me, for a long time, I thought I would go back home and we would build some of those businesses that didn't end up happening, which is just the way things worked out. But once I went to work in corporate America, I knew to your point, Chris, that I really wanted to work to build my own company. And in a story longer than we want to spend here, I figured out that doing the kind of work I do now is what I was put on the planet to do. So I was at Chevron for about eight years.

During that time, I was in sales and marketing roles, eventually found myself in the training and development world and about 31 plus years ago left to start the company that we now call the Kevin Eikenberry Group. And that's the very short version of the story. Well, I'm glad you kept it short because we only have half an hour on the show. So anyway, the synopsis, folks, you can read it, but you read his books.

I'm sure the history's in there somewhere. Now you talk about flexible. What is, you know, why is that important? How does flexible apply? Can you tease out a little bit of the importance of what this flexibility means? Clearly it doesn't mean that I need to know how to do downward dog and yoga. It doesn't. So here's the thing. Most, many leaders would say, wait a minute, Kevin, aren't I supposed to be consistent and stable? And

are people supposed to know where they stand with me and all those sorts of things? Do you really want me to be flexible? Shouldn't I be consistent? To which I would say, think about in your mind's eye for a second, a tree, which you would say a tree is highly consistent. It's highly stable. It's not moving. It's staying in the same spot until you look at the branches and the breeze and you say, it's also flexible. So a tree is both consistent, stable, strong, and flexible. It's strong because of its roots. And so for us as leaders, we need to be rooted too, in our principles, in our values, in the mission of our company, in our goals. And yet we need to be flexible in how we get things done. Because compared to when you and I first, Chris, went into the workplace, the world's a lot more complex. 1820.

See, I didn't give a date for you, sir. Although we've already established that you're younger than me. I mean, are you sure about that, really? Based on the age you gave me a little bit ago, I think so. Oh, did I tell you my age? Yeah. So here's the thing. We need to be both flexible, consistent and flexible, which is a big idea in the book, which is that the world is not an either or world. It's a both and world. Most everything in our world has a variety of possibilities and options rather than there being solely a right or wrong answer. And back to where we started earlier, you know, so often we got promoted because we were good at having right answers. And so sometimes leaders think that's what I'm still supposed to have is all the right answers. I'm laughing because my audience knows this joke on the show that I, you know, I learned very early on. I had some, I had about four or

five home runs right out of the gate. And i seem to be like a like this is this prodigy sort of thing and then all of a sudden i started whiffing and striking out and shit wasn't working and i learned very quickly that i am not the purveyor of all the greatest ideas in the world and that you need to have you know good people around you a learning organization a healthy environment culture that culture that can help generate new ideas and make a safe environment for people to have those ideas. And maybe that's a part of what you mean by flexible and maybe also being flexible and adapting to innovation, new technologies, et cetera, et cetera.

100%. So it's really about recognizing what's the context of our situation. So when we think about flexible leadership, we say intention plus context plus what we call the flexors. And I just sort of hinted at that idea that we've got two ends of a spectrum and the ends are seldom the right answer. The right answer is usually somewhere in between. And so without question, we, I believe that as leaders, for us to be successful in a world that's more uncertain and more complex than ever, that we have to be willing to flex our approach. Because if we don't, we will treat things as more simplistic than they are. And

we'll end up with dominoes falling in directions we weren't expecting. Ah, it's quite funny how the world changes so quickly. I mean, it used to be that you could bet that if you started a business and kind of had a successful business model, you could get a good 10, maybe 20 years out of it. Some people, you know, car makers up until the 80s, you know, kind of ran the same program for so many years. And then, you know, in a world that's moving faster and changes are

happening, you know, maybe one of the flexibles is AI, right? Automated intelligence, artificial intelligence. Obviously, I don't have enough of that. But the world's changing so fast now. And so you really, you really have to have downward dog yoga to be flexible as leader, I think. Yeah, we just have to be willing to take a moment and go beyond our natural response. Because what we've done before, what we think our style is, as we said earlier, Chris, and what our natural reactions, responses and learned responses are, might not get us the best result in a world that's changing. And even in a different, so let's just take a super simple example, like how you would interact with and lead a meeting of a team like my team, where everyone

here has been here a year or longer, some way longer, how I would interact with and lead that meeting probably ought to be different than if I was leading a meeting with a bunch of folks that didn't know each other or know me well. And yet, most people, that's a super simple example, right? And yet, most leaders would just sort of go into it and here's how I lead a meeting and not look at the context of the situation to say, what might I need to flex? Maybe I need to talk less. Maybe I need to ask more questions, whatever that might be based on the needs for that meeting and the overall context of that meeting yeah i mean i just run everything like the like that sergeant from full

metal jacket and just bark at people and that's that's really how it works for me how's that working for you now everyone quit it's just me i just yell at me i fire myself every day and then i just keep showing up for work and i don't know the pay is good you know but someone should clean around here that's all i'm saying we need we need a thing we need we need some janitorial services around here and someone needs to flush the toilets for christ's sake anyway i'm just doing jokes people uh enough filler for joking. AI, a good example of probably being flexible for leadership is Apple had the famous situation where they came up with the iPad. They developed the iPad, but they realized that if they put the iPad out, they were going to eat their own lunch for their iMac sales.

And they had to make a decision to like, do we cannibalize their own iMac sales by putting this new innovative product out or do we wait for a competitor to put it out and cannibalize ourselves so they decided that it was better for them and so they did it it was a hard decision to make you know and then the opposite of that you can see and I believe it's the Kodak example where Kodak was you know making all this money doing film and print and real and they were the ones that developed it the original digital right yeah and they're like yeah i don't know that's going to cost all our sales man what the hell we can't be doing that and then they went bankrupt yeah it's just and then you know they they were on they had the cutting edge they had the innovation that was going to be the innovation.

And they were like, nah, let's not do that. They were afraid to try that. But I think the thing would be is that most would say, why would I want to cannibalize what's going so well with high margins and all those things? But the context is that the world was then is now changing. And so while that might have been a fine answer at one point, is it still a good answer in a changing world? And I think that's part of the idea of the book is to say, what does the situation tell us? And how does that lead us to think differently than we might have in the past, even five years ago? Yeah.

The same thing has happened with, I think, leadership. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the styles of what employees expect or the culture that employees expect. You know, millennials brought their own sort of versions of what they expected to the employment base. And companies had to adapt to them. brought their own sort of versions of what they expected to the employment base and and companies had to adapt to them um and then you know gen z has brought their own some of the things they wanted was you know feeling like they they have a bigger impact in the world and and what they're doing at companies feeling like things really matter um maybe in the big picture of things you know what are we doing what are we doing are picture of things. You know, what are we doing?

What are we doing? Are we putting plastics in the ocean? Or what are we, you know, what are we up to there? Causes, different things like that. I'm sure Gen Alpha is going to have its own demands of what it wants. And certainly, you know, leaders have had to change to more kind of empathetic, sort of, you know, more of the carrot instead of so much the stick, where I think in the past, you know, we kind of had that, you know, more of the carrot instead of so much the stick where I think in the past, you know, we kind of had that, you know, do your job or we'll fire you. And we really don't

care if you don't like the paint color on the walls and there's no daffodils or flowers out in the garden. It's just empty cement. You know, people, you know, they tend to care about things a little bit more about, you know, the culture and the environments they're working on and how they feel about stuff. And so leaders have had to adapt to that and been like, okay, how do we empathize with people better? How do we try and get the best out of them for their human nature as opposed to just yelling at them all day long? So let me frame what you just said, Chris, in the frame of what we would call one of these flexors, right? So one of the flexors that I talk about in the book is the idea, do you want to lead for compliance or commitment? And most people say, well, I want to lead for commitment.

And if we overgeneralize just a little, we would say that the younger generations would say, we want to be more committed. We don't just want a paycheck alone. We want to be more committed. So we would all probably say, well, we want to lead toward commitment. And I would say, okay, generally speaking, that's okay. But guess what? There are some times and some moments when all we want and all we need is compliance. Now, if we stay in that moment of chaos, when people just need to say, boss, tell me what you need us to do right now. If we stay there, if we stay in command and control, that's not going to help us reach our goals either. We've got to be willing to slide that direction when needed, even if that's not where we want to be or want to stay, there are times. And here's the other

interesting thing about that particular flexor, Chris, and that is that while most every leader I ask in all sorts of sessions, which do you want to be? Do you want to lead for compliance or commitment? Almost everyone will say commitment, but all of the research as well, most people are simply complying. So even if that's what we profess to want to do, we're not doing it very well. And really, the question is a false question, because it's not about compliance or commitment. It's about compliance and commitment. And so what we get people to think about, once I can help leaders think about the fact that both can be true, we got a much better chance of success as the situations require us to flex. Be flexible and learn to flex.

Because yoga is not required. Yoga is not required. I think you should have put that on the book, but then you might have gotten sued by the yoga union or something. The union, those people over the yoga university or something. I don't know. I'm just making a sub up at this point so learning to become more situationally flexible you talk about the book and and of course having an organization that's flexible i remember reading pig or singh's book on the fifth discipline on how to create a learning organization yeah and so having employees having management having staff that are good to be flexible too because you know we've all heard that with the parable of the who moved my cheese and you know people get so rigid or get so used to doing the same thing and then when you technically move the cheese move their

cheese to something else or require them to do something more they have to learn a new skill it it can be challenging to people. Because like, what? Hey, I got good at this. I mean, I got to learn something else. And so teaching your employees in management to be flexible as well can make it so that the company's more agile.

Yeah, for sure. And you know, here's the thing. If we have gotten ourselves locked into the way we do things as a leader, that's gonna be very difficult for you to flex. The first piece, as I mentioned a second ago, is this intention. So being willing to say, perhaps there's another way to do it. Perhaps I ought to consider another way to approach this particular situation beyond just the one I've always used. And quite honestly, if we want our teams to be more flexible, one of the very best things we can do is to show them by

our example. Yeah. Setting a good example is another aspect of leadership that's really important. You see a lot of people, leaders that sometimes will be hypocrites, they'll talk out one side of their mouth and out the other. They'll put out PR statements about how we're going to be a good ethical company and we care about people. And by the way, 20,000 of you are fired today. And you're like, what? You said you cared about people. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And so the PR never seems to match sometimes what the leader is supposed to be. And like you said, people see what leaders represent and not so much what they say, but what they do. They watch our feet more than our lips, Chris. Even if we're working remotely, even if they can't see our feet, they still pay far more attention to what we do than what we say. Yeah, I have an OnlyFans for my feet, but that's a different thing. I was reading that joke earlier on Facebook. Yeah, they watch your feet more than their mouth that's interesting they watch what we do you know parents are the same way i mean you know my parents would say

don't lie and then we would catch them lying and we're like ah hey you're full of shit you know and so it's real important as leaders that we exemplify that and we lead in a way that shows, you know, we mean what we say. We walk or talk and talk or walk, as it were. I agree 100%. Anything else we want to tease out about the book to get people to pick it up that maybe is pretty pertinent? Yeah, so what I would say is that if you'd like to be a more effective leader, if you get frustrated sometimes that the way you're leading isn't necessarily getting the results that you want, then I think that you will, I believe that flexible leadership is a way to help you think about leading your role and doing

the work a little differently, which can lead you to better results. And I hope that you'll go to kevineikenberry.com slash flexible, where you can learn all about how you can get a copy, get two copies. Best thing you can do, Chris, is get two, get one for you and one for someone else. So you can learn and learn it together, be thought partners, be peer coaches to each other as you go through the process. I know it sounds self-serving to say to buy two copies, but really at the end of the day, what I want people to do is to become better leaders. It's the only reason I wrote it. And the best way to do that is to do that, to walk that with someone else. So I'd encourage you to do that. And there's ways to

get, do that and get some free bonuses for doing it. And one last thing, Chris, if people go to kevinikeenberry.com slash gift, we're going to give them a free gift of our masterclass on building your confidence and the confidence of others. There's some stuff on that page about the book as well. But kevinreichenberry.com slash gift. There you go. Thank you very much for coming on the show, Kevin. We didn't solve cancer, but we sure learned some really amazing stuff that maybe those great leaders will go solve cancer.

Thanks for having me. See how I brought it all around there? Thanks for coming. Thanks, Ronnies, for having me. watch for the prior show what was the name of the book that we had you on for prior the long distance leader ah the long distance leader it sounds like my first 10 marriages anyway thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe we'll see you guys next time