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SKOT WALDRON:
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of Unlocked, where we talk about unlocking the potential of people in order to unlock the potential of our organizations and ultimately humanity in general. I am Skot Waldron. Today on the show, I have Heather Younger. She has a book coming out called, The Art of Caring Leadership. It's not just the art of leadership, it's the art of caring leadership and we're going to talk about that angle quite a bit and why the whole heart thing, the whole caring thing, why it matters in leadership because I think and we hit on this too, we tend to think about leadership as achievement. As I've climbed the ladder, of I've gotten to this point based on producing results, but the caring part, the people part is a huge element that we cannot forget.
Now, Heather has a huge background. She comes from customer experience. She comes from leading sales organizations. She comes from this world of being a facilitator, of being a coach, a consultant, an author, of doing all these different things. And now she's really engulfed in this world of employee experience and creating employee loyalty through listening. I hope that you will listen to Heather and what she has to share with us today. It's going to be a great show. I'm super excited. Let's get started.
Okay Heather, welcome to the show. So good to have you. You have some exciting news coming up. You have a book coming out.
Heather Younger:
I do here it is. Ooh, here it is. I have to grab it because number one, it feels good to feel your own book. It feels really good. But this cover, I just love this cover. I'll love it to infinity. No matter how many other books I write, I'm pretty sure this will be my favorite cover.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay. Tell me about that because I went to school for graphic design. I owned a design firm for 11 years. Tell me about the book cover. I have never asked any author about their book cover before, but since you mentioned it, tell me about the book cover.
HEATHER YOUNGER:
Well, so because it's The Art Of caring Leadership, when I was talking to the designer, I was like, I want to have the play on heart because the subtitle is, How Leading with Heart Uplifts Teams and Organizations. And my podcast is Leadership With Heart so it's the foundation of this book. I was like, I want to have something with heart and I want something kind of artistic. They looked around and then said, "Okay, this is what we think it should be." I'm like, Oh yeah, yeah. And so what happened though, is I had this and maybe three other book cover options. And then I had people on Facebook and on LinkedIn vote. And even the men love them. I went to people specifically who I know don't like this, kind of aren't really a squishy hearts people. And I went to them and they're like, "No, that one right there." I was like, yeah, it's for me too, but I wanted to make sure you got your opinion. That's how the book cover came about.
SKOT WALDRON:
That's good. I always tell my clients, when I was designing a lot of things, it matters what you think a little bit, but it matters what other people think a lot more. I want you to like it, but I want your audience to like it better.
HEATHER YOUNGER:
Yes. And I think they do, like I said, even now when you see it and in the brilliance of it, especially when it's the light shining right on it, the colors just pop and yeah. It's cool. It's cool. I think everything inside of it also matches with the cover.
SKOT WALDRON:
Well good. Let's talk about that. You've got the heart of leadership podcast and that contributes. You've taken the ideas of your podcast and the topics in the podcast and now you've kind of put them into a book form. Is that the premise? Or tell us a little bit about that.
HEATHER YOUNGER:
Yeah. The caring leadership stuff is kind of, I've been living it and breathing it and talking about it way before the podcast happened. And so when I created the Leadership With Heart podcast, I just felt like I needed to have another medium to kind of socialize the message, get it out in a global way and just distribute it, that message about. That's what happened there. What happened is it got to episode 25, so I didn't have an intent to write a book, FYI, when I created the podcast. It was just the idea of having another medium to share this message. And so I was getting into episode 25 and interviewing these awesome leaders that either were hand picked by me because of things I saw out in the world or they were referred to me by people who listened to the show because I don't really recruit. I don't recruit in a way, I don't pay a service to do it. I see them or they're referred to me.
I'm on this episode 25 and I'm sitting here, I'm just gosh, dang it. This is so good. I'm geeking out, my hair on my arms standing up. This is so good. And then I'm like, I have got to put this into a book format because not everybody is listening to podcasts, even though there are so many of them and they're popular, a lot of people still just like plain old books. I was like, I need to write a book about it and I need to put these people in it. And so there are 80 of the people, out of the 160 something episodes I've done, are actually inside the book. And so it's not all of their stories or all of the interview. It's not that. It's not a verbatim. It's literally just quotes that I've taken and then I put my own thing around it. And so the context is I'm known as the employee whisper.
Basically in the end, the work we do at Employee Fanatix is all about listening to employees. I've read personally about 30,000 employee engagement survey comments and DEI survey comments and I have worked in about a 100 focus groups with employee. I already had that as a foundation about what it is they want. And then it was like, let me see the leaders who are actually giving it to them. And maybe not a 100% of the time, because it's not about perfection, but it was, who's actually doing this? I would gather the stories of the things they did but then at the same time I would gather the stories of what they didn't do, what they failed to do.
In my interviews, it's always about, now you need to tell me about a time when you weren't so great, when you weren't so caring or lead with heart. And then they share those stories and there was so much brilliance. I'm like, ah. Then how did you come out of that? And then so people could listen and be like, wow, there's solutions to be found here in other people's stories. And I just thought, it's just, I'm sold. And so, there you go.
SKOT WALDRON:
Tell me about one of them.
HEATHER YOUNGER:
One of the stories?
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah, one of the stories, is there one that stands out?
HEATHER YOUNGER:
Well, there's a lot that stand out, but there's one, I can tell you one. One is Cynthia Grant. She works for a nonprofit mental health organization now. Is kind of a VP of clinical care. But when she was growing up, both of her parents were addicted to substance. Substance abuse, there was physical abuse, there was oh my gosh, joblessness. And she and her brother had to kind of deal with it. And she ended up basically having to step up and be mothering her parents and mothering her brother at school, wherever. And so she gets to the point really where it's like, so this is one of the chapters in the book is about helping your team build resilience. She gets to the point where she obviously has kept it a hold of herself, because at some point Department of Human Services removes she and her brother from their home.
And so in the end now, how I met her, let me tell you how I met her in the alcohol swing back by, I was at an award ceremony for one of my clients who best place to work and it was a particular leader that I was coaching. And I was watching all these people go up on the stage and Cynthia went up the stage and she said something and she was talking about her team who was in the audience. And she said, "And I love them." And I was like, you are coming on my show. That was the thing that got me interested because who does that in the middle of a forum, talk about, I love these people?
I brought her on, she told the story and then she just says, "Now all I do, I was caring for my parents, I was caring for my brother, I was caring for myself. It's unfortunate, but now I care for everyone else. And it's who I am. I show up as this person who cares for my team members, cares for the customers or the clients that we have. I'm just always in that frame. And I find that to be my duty. And it's the thing I feel like I'm called to do." And I was like, ah. And as she's telling this, I have a lot of adversity in my background so a lot of the different stories and things that she's sharing, my mouth is dropping. That was probably the first time my jaw was like, as she's telling the story way more detailed than I am here. And then I'm like, "Do you realize you and I have so much in common?" I was like, "I just did a Ted Talk on transforming adversity into opportunity." And she's like, "Really?" I'm like, "You have got to go. You and I have so much."
That was a good one, but it was this idea of just taking all of this heartbreak and all this stuff and turning it to this leader who just expresses care so definitively is awesome.
SKOT WALDRON:
Tell me about why you take that angle. That gives us a glimpse into the idea of caring and what leadership and the heart part of it. But some people think about leadership as a very tactical thing. It's do these things, there's this process and use these tools and you'll be a great leader. You're taking this very, almost this touchy, feely heart part of it and pulling that in. Why is that so important for you?
HEATHER YOUNGER:
Well personally, I experienced caring leadership early on, but I also experienced the opposite. I kind of, I know the difference. I can tell the difference. I had a lot of rejection. I was an outcast in my own family because of my background. My mom is white and Jewish and my dad is black and Christian. And during that, my mom's family was not at all happy about that union and did not allow me to go to any family events. I just wasn't public. I was very hidden. Let's just put it that way. And I had this one aunt who would show up in a different way. She chose to show up differently. She went to my law school graduation. When I was younger, we moved away. She sent me every year, a big box with eight gifts in it to unwrap for Hanukkah. She always made sure to try to keep me connected to the family, even though it was very obvious that I was not.
And so early on, I could see what caring looked like in a leader, not necessarily in the workplace, but just in my life. And it kind of, it's so funny because this is a recent story that boiled up for me as I was starting to think about, besides my mother. My parents look cared for me, it was not like I came from some house where they were beating me all the time or anything. But as I think about what was happening around me and there was a lot of stuff besides even that, but I think, wow, what were my earliest times? And I think about this aunt. I think about that aunt who did that for me over those years and sometimes okay, so what did she do? And why did she do that? And so then it just start to boil. It was like cares, it's true care.
And I think the other thing is I've been in so many workplaces where team members are so confused because they don't understand why their leaders aren't communicating with them. They don't understand why they aren't showing appreciation and they're hiding things. And they just don't like what's happening to them and I don't like it. They come to me as this person, they trust me. They come to me then I'm just like, I'll try to see what I can do, but what can I do?
And it came to a head for me as I was working in an organization several years ago that was going through a merger of companies and the culture started to go downhill and nobody was paying attention. Nobody except for me, obviously, because what happened is I went to the head of HR and I asked them, I said, "Listen, we've got to do something about our trust. A trust that's going downhill. No one knows who anybody is. Their titles are all very similar. People are afraid they're going to be laid off. Who's going to take their job? It was just nuts. We had to do something about our engagement and our trust." And she said, "You're right. You should go do something about that." And I was like, I don't even run HR. I was running customer experience at the time, but because I was so hyper-aware and people were coming to me, somebody had to do something and I was being drug down too. I could sense that my spirits were going low and you can see I'm kind of an upbeat, hyper kind of person to begin with.
But I was just like, ah, it was taking a lot out of me. And so I just decided to do it. And we created an engagement council, created with all these cross-functional people and just started to break down walls by doing different events that would make them get to know each other and not have as much fear about people that were coming in. And then there was a layoff and I was one of 200 people laid off. And I realized though, just during that time, I'm kind of shortening the story, of course and all the tactical stuff, as you talked about around that.
As I got to that point, it was an owie, but I had a lot of time to reflect, obviously during that unemployment time. And I realized that I reached that time and I was at that place and I was requested to do that thing right at that moment. And that someone had to be the voice for the people to go back to the leaders who could do something about their experience. That's where caring leadership really boils up from. It starts kind of early and it just over the years and kind of impetus is that one thing that happened.
SKOT WALDRON:
That's really powerful. And I know that at times, it's rather difficult for some leaders to draw that out. They have to be really intentional about that aspect of leadership. Because maybe some of them have gotten to where they are by not necessarily caring, but by producing and by just grinding and just being driven and getting to where they've gotten to by winning. But the caring part has to be there. Let's talk about that. Let's say I'm a leader, I've plowed through my life, I've gotten to where I've gotten to by climbing the corporate ladder. And I'm there now and I've just performed, perform, perform, perform, benchmark, benchmark, benchmark. What does the caring part do? If I've never really focused on the caring part why should I care about it now?
HEATHER YOUNGER:
Well, I guess the thing I would ask is as you were going up that ladder and you were doing the one rung at a time at a time and developed, grabbing the plaques and the awards and all those things, who was around you at that time? Were they still there at the end of that journey? The idea here is more about loyalty and retention and less about here's what I was. I don't think this is an either or situation. I think leaders have to produce, they're in charge of projects, they lead people and why can't you do both at the same? Why can't you be in charge of projects? Why can't you achieve and grow while at the same time, uplifting other people? I can tell you this, I've done it. I'm doing it. It's possible.
And what you get is people willing to go over and then dang above for you. It's crazy. I'm seeing it as I'm doing this book, and I'm going this tour and I'm doing this stuff and I'm seeing my team and how they're showing up. And of course I show appreciation and the things I talk about I had to live it out or be super hypocritical. And so but I'm seeing how they are just standing themselves. They were just like, "Nope, I'm going to do that. I'm doing that. I'm doing." And they're taking things underneath their own. They're being innovative. They're taking the ownership in things. It's my company, but they're owning all of these things. I think that's the kind of stuff you get. You work less hard when you have a team that's fully engaged with you, they are fully on board with you. You work less hard. All that work you did to get the top, I bet you worked three times harder in your had to.
SKOT WALDRON:
That's a good point. And I love your journey because it resembles mine a little bit. I come from brand strategy, doing design and external communication work with customers and clients. That's my background. And I was always about how do we create more customer loyalty? How do we create more loyalty so there is no other? They want to keep buying from us. Retention, retaining those customers is really important. You come from your customer experience background, of dealing with those customers and solving problems and resolving issues.
HEATHER YOUNGER:
Retension's all about it.
SKOT WALDRON:
It's all retention.
HEATHER YOUNGER:
It's all the same thing you just talked about. Yep. And relationships.
SKOT WALDRON:
You and I have shifted over to the internal side. I call it internal brand development.
HEATHER YOUNGER:
I love it.
SKOT WALDRON:
We talk about creating loyalty within our organizations first, because that is ultimately going to lead to loyalty outside of our organizations.
HEATHER YOUNGER:
It is.
SKOT WALDRON:
Now you talk about employee loyalty quite a bit. You wrote a book, your first book, The 7 Intuitive Laws of Employee Loyalty. And how does employee loyalty play into this whole mix of what you're talking about now?
HEATHER YOUNGER:
Well, in the end, my north star are employees. Everything I do, whether I'm talking to leaders, doesn't really matter who I'm speaking with. It is, my heart goes out to the people who are kind of the underdog. I was that way with customers too. When you're not at the table, when you're kind of the underdog, which as you can see was my story. That's my kind of origin story. And so for me, it's the employees who are the underdogs and my heart goes to them. Everything I do is about that. If I'm training leaders, it's about employee loyalty. It's about keeping your people with you. It's about doing what's right for them that makes them feel filled up, that makes them feel like their work is meaningful so they want to stay with you. That is really the end of it.
That's the start and the stop for it for me and for Employee Fanatix. That's why we call it Employee Fanatix. It's kind of a double thing where you create employees who are fanatical and then you also are fanatical about your employees. It's two, kind of a double entendre or whatever they call. That's what that is. And that's what it's about. It's all about employee loyalty. And when you get the loyalty and the retention, number one, it costs so much money to recruit new people. To have new talent coming in, training them, I know you know, who are listening right now, how expensive this can be if you've ever looked at the bottom line for that. But then, like I just said, it's so much harder when you do it alone. Why not do it in an environment that's caring? Why not do it in an environment that uplifts people? That really takes them, takes the nth degree strains from every single person, that lets them stretch beyond what they thought they could do. Why don't you create that environment?
That when you do that, you're going to get more innovation, you're going to do more customer satisfaction. Your ROI is going to be huge. I tell stories about that in the book too. I refer back to seven or eight stories of people I spoke to where they gave me their numbers and talked about how their numbers, it was a 200% increase in ROI. One publicly traded company talked about the market cap going up by up to over billions. And it was just changing this philosophy of like you were saying, the people first, the internal view of things and how are we meeting those people who drive the business forward right where they are?
SKOT WALDRON:
So smart. What are some of the ways we can do that? Yes, it's about heart, putting our heart into it, caring, being interested before interesting. Those types of terms, but what are some of the things that you suggest in the book or some ways that we can go about putting this into action?
HEATHER YOUNGER:
Well, it's interesting because, so the book itself, this book is actually an attempt to turn this nebulous concept of care into something that you can put your hands around. And it gives you a framework that says, "Oh, I do these nine behaviors in more consistent ways and I get these kinds of results. Wow."
One of them would be as kind of this podcast, your podcast, the idea of unleashing people. Unleashing the greatness within people. And so that is allowing them opportunities to shine, putting understanding, uncovering for yourself what your team members' strengths are by doing either assessments or asking them or asking other people or watching them from afar and finding out what their strengths are and putting them in their position to shine, using those strengths. Don't put them somewhere else and don't just let them leave either. Work on maybe looking at talent mobility, how do you let them move within the organization in a place where they can shine? If it's not in your team, where else can they go? You want it because it's too expensive to bring new people in and you want to keep those people so they can use all of their assets. All of their brain power for the benefit of your organization. That's a big one.
The other one is obviously in this space is recognizing people, making people feel important by showing true appreciation in very consistent ways. And it can be little ways and it doesn't have to be expensive ways. It could be just note cards. But before you do that, you have to uncover what the motivations of your team are. Each person is motivated by different things. Some people do like money in contests and some people like just to be on committees and feel like they have authority and there's different types of motivation. And so uncovering what those are first and then going about doing that consistently.
Gallup says that if you do not recognize employees every seven days, then they basically don't even remember you ever recognized them. You may be thinking you're doing a good job, but if this week you didn't say, "Good job," kudos for a specific reason on that project where you did this, it's as if they don't even remember you did it at all. That's scary but I think there's a way for us to set that up in my first book, I talk about this idea of crowdsourcing recognition, where we set up different ways of recognition to happen for our team members. It's from us, the manager, it's the customer, it's our coworkers, the executive leaders. How do you layer in those types of recognition for your people? Whether you're someone who has control over the entire structure or what do you do inside your team to do that? If you don't have kind of the C-suite role in your organization, how can you do that? And asking yourself, what are the ways we can do it? Can customers do it? How can we do that? What way can we?
Because it's about, you talk about intentionality and it really is about being intentional as a leader and about owning your own sphere. And if you can own your sphere about here's my circle and I can control this little team of four. Okay, what are you going to do for that team of four? Because if every leader own that sphere of the team of three or four they had, the organizations around the world would be producing way more, employees would be the way less stressed, way less burnout, way less mental health issues because of it. Yeah, those are some of the things. I can go on and on, as you tell, I'm just a little excited about it.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah, that's what I love. I love it. The energy is amazing. Thank you. Basically your energy looks like the cover of your book.
HEATHER YOUNGER:
I love that.
SKOT WALDRON:
That's so good.
HEATHER YOUNGER:
Awesome.
SKOT WALDRON:
So good. It mirrors really well. You're offering the audience, there's a cool free offer you have on your website. It's a free mini course for people if they want to go there, called Expanding Influence. Tell us a little bit about what that is and where they go to get that.
HEATHER YOUNGER:
If you go to heatheryounger.com, there'll just be a popup where you can sign up and get that mini course. And it also comes with a workbook. You watch the course and you actually fill out some of your own questions, a digital workbook, PDF fillable. And so that helps you. I created it to be honest during the pandemic, now, but in the early on days where people were feeling way out of control, just having no control of what's happening, I feel like we may be loosening up a little bit more, but it was really about how do we expand our influence during kind of tumultuous times? How do we do that? And so I just, I'm going through, it's only a 10 minute course, but you just go through the little course and then at the same time, you're writing down, answering questions for yourself. And hopefully at the end, you'll get to the point with of thinking about what you currently influence and what it is you'll get to the point where you can influence if you do some of the things that I recommend in the course.
SKOT WALDRON:
Very cool. Okay, well, thank you so much for that. That's really cool. And better yet, where can people get the book? It's not out right now as of today, but it's coming now.
HEATHER YOUNGER:
Not today.
SKOT WALDRON:
And when you hear this, maybe it will be out by that time, but where do we go to get it?
HEATHER YOUNGER:
It'll be out on April 13th. You can go everywhere to get it. Obviously Amazon is the easiest way to go. I would say, so it's called The Art of Caring Leadership and you can either go directly to Amazon and get it or you can go to my website, theartofcaringleadership.com. And it actually has bundles, free bundles, depending on how many more, if you wanted to buy a a packet of 10 for your team, there's some free downloadables, there's some bundles of things you get for free when you buy more bulk. I would just recommend going there because there's some free downloads that you don't have to buy anything for. There's the first chapter of the book if you'd like to go there to just read that first chapter. And then of course there's the bundles for ones who want to go from 10 to 50 and more books for their team.
SKOT WALDRON:
Very cool. Yeah. I saw that, the free chapter on your website as well. That's really cool. Good offer. I'm really grateful for you being on the show and sharing your wisdom with us. And it's all about heart. I always tell people as a brand strategist, always saying, "Hey, there's two reasons why we purchased something and first our logical brain processes, the check boxes. We make sure that we like that thing. It has the right features that we're looking for. And then we actually experience that product and our heart gets pulled into it."
And that's how we make decisions. And that's how we decide to get married. That's how we decide if we like that movie or not. And that's how we decide if we buy that car. And that's how we decide if we want to be loyal to that job and that person and that boss. And so I really appreciate that, that perspective of you've got to have the heart and the mind into that to make sure that you're actually getting what you need to out of that. Don't mean to leave with the last word there. Is there anything else you'd like to say and drop on us before, before we break here?
HEATHER YOUNGER:
I agree with you, Skot. This is all about emotions. Every single thing I talk about leads back to how are you making your people feel? And you get to choose how you make them feel. I think that would be, I would love that to the final message. If you can think that and kind of reflect on that, how are you making them feel now? And what ways can you be different? Do things differently, show up differently for them that can make them feel a lot more positive.
SKOT WALDRON:
Beautiful, well done. Well, good luck with the book launch coming up and the tour and everything that's going on with you in your life and getting your kids to all their sporting activities. Have fun with that.
HEATHER YOUNGER:
Thank you.
SKOT WALDRON:
Thank you, Heather, for those insights. I can tell that Heather, why she has this title employee whisper. She has really, she's digested data, she's understood the stories, she listens and talks to leaders all the time and all of that information has really empowered her and informed her of what it takes to create employee loyalty. Now she's sharing that with us in this new book, The Art of Caring Leadership. Go get your hands on a copy. Pre-order, do whatever you need to do. Again on her website you can order those bulk orders and get some freebies. Thank you for offering that, Heather, to the audience.
Hope everybody was able to get some insights about why caring is so important. What happens when we don't care in leadership. I think that we've all experienced that at one point or another in our lives and it's not good. We're probably not at that job anymore. And if we are at that job where there isn't caring, then we're probably thinking about leaving that job. Am I right? Let's instill that idea of caring into our leadership, into our teams, create employee loyalty. It's going to help us generate more revenue and more cohesive cultures going forward. I'm really grateful. Thank you, Heather, for everything. Good luck with the launch. If you all want to find out more information about me, you can visit skotwaldron.com. I've got interviews on there. I've got a bunch of free resources for you on there as well. You can go to YouTube and search for me there on my YouTube channel. You can like, subscribe, share, comment, do all those things. I really appreciate it. Thank you for listening. I will see you next time on another episode of Unlocked.
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