We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lyndsay Dowd a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Lyndsay, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear from you about what you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry and why it matters.

We are at a major crossroads where it comes to leadership in corporate America. We saw people leave their jobs in droves in the Great Resignation and many people left their jobs with none to go to. They were fed up. They deserved better, and this was a grand way of the masses declaring this is not how we want to be treated. The entire world has modernized around us yet leadership practices have been slow to evolve. Once referred to as soft skills, and often thought of as nice to have traits, I refer to them as power skills.

Power skills help shape “just a job” to careers that people are proud of. The old methods of intimidation, embarrassment, domination and aggression are not motivating styles and actually do the exact opposite, leaders must understand that, in order to get the best out of their teams, they need to provide opportunities for collaboration, connection, and psychological safety. They need to inspire and understand who their teams are so they are in a better position to advocate for them.

When you take this approach as a leader, you will see results. You will see greater engagement. You will see better performance. You will see risk taking, innovation, and new best practices evolve. Your teams will connect better and you will be in a position to build trust. All of this can create an environment of fun, and when your people are happy, they are six times more productive.

A great example of this is when I was managing one of the largest accounts we had at IBM. I had a $150 million quota, and a very large team of 50+ people. The relationship with this client was complicated and had lots of strings attached to every move we made. I got a new boss, and as I was explaining to her what my strategy was to try and change the way we had been doing business. She stopped me and said, “Girl, I’ve got your back. Now fly!”

That goosebump worthy quote put incredible wind in my sails, and gave me the fire to embolden my team to think differently. We approached our client in new ways and built new relationships. The once disinterested C-Suite began to engage with us. We closed the largest deal and our history with this client – over $23 million and completely changed the relationship between us.

This is a prime example of how impactful a leader can be to their team. When you give your team the space to do the job they were hired for you are giving them space to do their best work. When people feel supported and psychologically safe, they can create magic. Leaders must understand they must model the behavior they want to see. and when you build irresistible culture, it yields results in so many ways.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a Top 10 Coach featured on Apple news, the 2023 Award Recipient of the Innovation and Excellence, Business Coach of the Year, a Speaker, soon to be Author, Founder and have a 25+ year sales career. I am an accomplished leader, decorated seller and have successfully managed large, diverse, high performing sales teams. 23 of those years were spent climbing the ranks at IBM.

I have devoted my career to transforming leadership as we know it through building positive culture and trust to get the best results from our teams. I am a thriving coach focused on sales, leadership, career and culture. I also host the Top 10% globally ranked Heartbeat for Hire podcast and am a frequent guest speaker on live and recorded shows. I have been featured in Fortune Magazine and is a partner to a number of organizations including The Maestro Group, Career GPS, hr-4U Inc and the Sell Me Your Story Workshop.

You may wonder what prompted me to move away from corporate America after 25 years. After spending 23 years at IBM, I was ready for a change so I decided to leave and end my family’s legacy of over 105 years of service to Big Blue. I chose to go to another company and take a step down from the role I was in at IBM. I was still managing sellers, but realized quickly the challenges of learning new products and processes were not the only challenge I would have because after six short months, I was fired. This was easily the most shameful, disappointing, and devastating moment of my career. After a month of licking my wounds, I asked myself, “What am I good at? What do I love to do and how can I help people the most?” What I knew better than anyone was how to create irresistible sales culture that drives results. I knew how to teach other leaders how to build it, and that is what inspired me to create my company Heartbeat for Hire.

Today, I coach leaders and leadership teams on how to build a thriving culture. I am a regular speaker who engages my audience with enthusiasm, inspiration, self deprecating stories, humor, and cautionary tales. If you spend any time with me, I will recount examples of incredible leadership, and disastrous ways of not to lead.

If you are a leader, and you recognize that your teams aren’t as responsive as they used to be, your attrition is high, your engagement is low, there is no sense of joy within your corporate environment. It’s probably time you take a look and see what could be causing the problem. You may have a toxic leader in your midst. You may need to modernize your style. But the most irresponsible thing you could do is ignore it and watch your best people leave for greener pastures. If you’ve been doing it the same way for 10,20 or 30 years you likely have room for growth and this is where Heartbeat for Hire can help.

I am a graduate of University of Colorado, Boulder and have completed sales and management courses with Harvard, Duke along with dozens of other courses throughout my career.

Any advice for managing a team?

The best leaders recognize that they should surround themselves with people that are smarter than they are. These same leaders also recognize that they need to give the people they’ve hired the space and room to do the jobs they were hired for.

Modern leaders are OK sharing vulnerability. Celebrating failure and admitting when you’re wrong shows that you are human. You make yourself relatable when you can admit there’s a better way of doing something. My entire podcast is focused on stories of resilience and growth. There’s an entire movie industry based on people rising from the ashes, and realizing their potential. Business is no different. Employees crave stories from leaders who have emerged from a difficult situation or a colossal failure, and turned their circumstances around.

The antithesis to this kind of leadership is micromanagement and that is the fastest way to kill your teams’ soul. To micromanage is to say to your team, I do not trust you—I do not trust you to manage the process or do what I am asking. It also makes no logical sense. If you hire someone you believe can do a job, let them do the job. And if you don’t trust who you hire, then you need to fix your hiring process.

Another critical power skill is creating an environment of fun. Don’t underestimate how important laughter and joy is to the workplace. And as a leader, you should be providing opportunities for connection. I always say it’s a lot harder to be a jerk to someone after you’ve met them so changing the way your teams view each other is vital.

A great example of this is when I had to lead through the pandemic, and our entire life was on zoom. I recognized I had a number of teams who didn’t know one another; some were from acquisitions, and they really didn’t have any reason to invest in each other. I needed to give them a reason to care about their teammates. So I leveraged this fun web service called Kahoot. This is a multimedia, multiple-choice quiz where I asked each of my employees to send me an interesting fact about them that others on the team did not know.

One of the questions in the quiz was, “This person has visited every major ball park in North America except one.” The answers included three men and one woman. And naturally everyone guessed the men. But the correct answer was Marsha. This was an eye-opening moment for the team. Marsha was no longer just one of our technical reps. She became extremely interesting and every call with Marsha started out talking about her journey to all of these ball parks. But this wasn’t isolated just to her. There were 39 other questions that everyone remembered about each other. We were no longer strangers and we were in a much greater position to collaborate. This set us up for building some of the best practices that would help us crush our numbers quarter over quarter.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

If you’ve been reading this, for any amount of time, you would recognize that demonstrating growth is a major piece of what I teach. One of the best examples in my own career came from my very early years at IBM. I was extremely excited and energized by the role I had- excessively so. That excitement and energy emboldened me to seek out my boss to tell her all of the things that I thought were broken and processes that needed fixing. I sat myself down in her office and listed numerous things for a good chunk of time over a couple of days. My very patient manager said to me, “Lyndsay, you are very astute to notice all of these things that need fixing. However, you haven’t brought me any solutions.”

Mortified, I recognized I had become the girl who bitches. I was embarrassed, but I recognized with her guidance that there was a better way to provide feedback. This would be a practice I adopted as I manage teams for the rest of my career. I always left the door open for feedback, but cautioned my teammates to only bring me feedback when they had solutions to suggest. This practice helped my team think critically, problem solve, take initiative, ask questions and collaborate.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://heartbeatforhire.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lyndsaydowdH4H
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LyndsayDowdH4H
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lyndsaydowdh4h
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/lyndsaydowdH4H
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lyndsaydowdh4h
• My Podcast: https://heartbeatforhire.com/podcast