Coaching for Leaders - Talent Management | Leaders
Get Moving on Your Vision, with Alice Ferris
(upbeat music) Hi, Dave Stohoviak here, host of Coaching for Leaders. Ever had really good intentions, but haven't quite put them into practice? Maybe you've even had a clear vision in your mind of exactly where your team and you should be heading, but you haven't quite moved on it yet. That's the story you're about to hear from today's guest and why she elected to apply for the Coaching for Leaders Academy. I've just opened up our Academy applications through Friday, September 13th, and in the coming days, I'm sharing with you a few conversations featuring some of our current and past Academy members, their stories in their own words of how they identified what's important, what they did to start moving, and what happened once they did. I'm sharing a chat today with Alice Ferris on putting intentions into actions. If you, like Alice, are ready to move on this, I hope you'll consider applying for the Academy by Friday, September 13th. Go over to coachingforleaders.com/academy. Now, here's my chat with Alice. I am talking today with Alice Ferris, who is a alum of the Academy and a member of our Coaching for Leaders Pro community. Hello, Alice. Always good to talk to you. Hello, Dave. Hello, hello. So, I'm so thankful for you taking time to chat with me, and you and I know each other, of course, but I was wondering if perhaps you could share a bit about your role in your organization for those listening. Absolutely. My name, again, is Alice Ferris, and I am the founding partner of Goldbuster's Consulting, which is a small consulting firm that works with nonprofit organizations primarily in the fundraising space. So, I've actually had this top of mind a lot lately because I'm working on updating my business plan. So, one of the things that we like to say is that we work with small and mighty organizations who really want to do a lot of things to change the world, but don't feel like they have the resources or support to do it. So, our job is to come in and make sure that those people who are crazily leading some mission-based organizations have the resources and support and community around them that they feel they need. I love the work you do, and nonprofits are so much the backbone of our society. And the currency that makes nonprofits work literally is fundraising and being able to bring that expertise. Thank you so much for the work you and your team do. My pleasure. Do you recall how you came across the GoChimp for Leaders podcast originally? You know, I'm one of those people that likes to learn a lot of things. I feel like I'm always trying to learn innovative ideas and figure out ways to apply them to the nonprofit sector as well as just apply them to my life. So, very often, I am on my podcast app and will occasionally just search randomly for a new topic. So, maybe I'll be listening to a different podcast. For instance, I listened to the HBR idea cast as one of my regular podcasts. And I'll do a search on my podcast app saying, "What's a similar podcast to this?" And I'm pretty sure that's how I found coaching for leaders is that I was searching randomly one day for something that was leadership oriented that's like the podcast I already listened to. And your podcast popped up. And the first episode I listened to, I don't even remember which one it was. But I appreciated the fact that, first of all, you're a very good interviewer. And I appreciate how much you actually listen to the answers that you're receiving and take that to build the next question. I never feel like you're going through a checklist to be able to get to the end of the interview. So, thank you for that. - Thank you for that. I really appreciate it. And you listened to the podcast I know for a bit because you told me at one point that you had heard me talk about the Academy and then something prompted you to apply. And yet you still had some reservations about it. You shared with me later, what prompted you to apply? And then what were you still concerned about? - Well, you're right. I did listen to the podcast for several years and I kept hearing your mini courses that you generally rolled out in advance of the Academy application. And I would take some little bits and pieces away from those little mini courses and then just kind of file it away. Then as you, I started to hear more of these and to learn more about the Academy. I started to get curious of, you know, really what is the Academy about? What is your goal as a coach and what are the participants goals as participants for the Academy and what could I potentially get out of it? And I think really probably late 2019 and then definitely throughout the beginning stages of the pandemic, I was just looking for a new challenge and a new framework, for instance, to think about my own leadership development and my own leadership skills. 'Cause I kind of felt like at a certain point, I had reached the limit of what I could do on my own with just reading and listening to podcasts and going to conferences and picking and choosing sessions that I went to. And I really wasn't feeling challenged or like I was getting a whole lot of my own professional development choices. So I had had a professional coach many years ago and I thought, you know, maybe it's time. Maybe it's time to get unstuck and kind of kick myself out of that. I know how to do this on my own. And maybe it's time to get some help. So your Academy mini course kind of came and dropped in my lap at a time when I was open for new opportunities. And I thought, you know, I'm gonna seriously think about it this time. - And you have shared with me that you were a little concerned that you had arrived at a place in your career where you had too much experience for this to be beneficial. Am I remembering that right? - Absolutely. What I was thinking about was, first of all, I've been in professional fundraising for over 30 years. And I attend a lot of conferences and professional development for my sector and very honestly don't feel like I get a whole lot out of it for the specific skill development for my field. One of the credentials that I hold is the Advanced Certified Fundraising Executive credential. I also chaired the certification board for three years, a few years back. So when it comes to the fundraising fields, I'm kind of at the top tier of what I can accomplish professionally. It's not to say that I'm not learning. I mean, the last couple of years, everything around artificial intelligence and chat GPT and the large language models, those are all things that are affecting the fundraising sector that I'm learning a lot about right now. So I'm not saying that I'm not learning new tactics or not learning new skills in fundraising 'cause I definitely am. But what I had seen was that as I tried to learn more things, I was pulling more things in from other sectors. But at the same time, I felt like, I've been in this for a while. I've been in my profession for over 30 years. Can I actually gain from a professional coaching program, which is how I felt the academy was going to benefit me? Can I actually learn from that? Especially since I, as I looked at some of the background materials that you posted, it seemed like it was for someone who was at a large corporation who was a beginning middle manager who wanted to learn how to grow into that management level position. So I really, I seriously did have some questions as to whether the academy was for me. - Yeah, and it's so interesting to hear you share that because of course, as you know, that's not my intention. But just that, every one of the reasons I'm so glad you're sharing this because it's interesting how it's just such a great leadership lesson for me. Like how you put something out into the world with the right intention and it can land so differently for so many different other folks. I've had almost the entirely different conversation with someone else recently of like, oh, I wasn't sure this was, I was qualified enough to be part of this, even though they met all the qualifications and it's really fascinating where things land, you did decide to do this. You decide to apply, you decide to accept the invitation and you know, after being accepted. What did you hope to get? - I think once I decided to pull the trigger on the application to the academy, it was because I kind of felt stuck. I felt like everything that I had been doing was getting me to where I had gotten, if that makes sense. And that if I was going to get to another level in my professional development and in my career development, that I needed to do something different. 'Cause you know, there's that old saying and my business partner quotes this all the time saying if you do what you've always done, you get what you've always got. And he said, well, that's a lie. Because if you keep doing it, at some point it stops being productive. It's at some point it stops advancing you because you get into a rut. And I kind of felt like that's where I was. So what I was hoping I would get out of the academy was some kind of momentum, some kind of acceleration of what I was trying to do. And also some accountability of, okay, yeah, you say you're doing that thing that you know you're supposed to do, but are you really, are you really doing that thing? Or are you telling yourself you're doing it and you're not? So those are the elements that I kind of wanted to get out of the academy is the, how can I have that level of somebody saying, you know, Alice, the reality check, you're not actually doing that. - As you know, we spend so much time at the start trying to get intentional about what does the future look like? Two to three years, we all craft a vision, we work on it together, we teach each other what's important to each one of us. And then we zero in on three focus areas. What did you decide to zero in on when you got to that point of like, okay, this is where I really wanna focus my time and accountability. - The thing that I found interesting was that going through that exercise of creating that longer term vision and creating the narrative, I had already done that. I had done it to myself in another exercise that I'd done listening to probably some podcast, honestly. And I don't think I was actually doing anything to really move towards it. I had this vision very clearly in my head, but the action steps that were required to move towards that vision, I hadn't thought a whole lot about. So as I was crafting this vision, I think part of the number one thing that is still very clear to me, and frankly still part of my longer term vision, is this idea of since I own this company. And even though it started as just me as a sole practitioner and my business partner came on with me about five years into my practice. And now we have a team of actually now 10 people. The thing that I have really enjoyed doing is actually the business of the business, creating the business plan, creating the vision, creating the value statements, creating the growth strategy. All of those things are the pieces that I've really liked. And I also liked doing the delivery of the actual service to the right client. And my challenge that was happening during the academy and still continues to challenge me is that I'm really caught in the weeds very often in delivering the service to the client, as well as running the business of the business. So when I crafted that vision, one of the key things that I thought about was, how do I get myself more out of that day to day? Because I have a 20 at this point, 24 year old company and I'm still involved in a lot of the day to day. How do I pull myself out of that so that I have the ability and the bandwidth to be able to focus more on the longer term vision of the company? The other thing that I talked about in the academy, which again continues to be a work in progress is my relationship with my business partner. Because as you go from a sole practitioner to a partnership, that's one leap. But then going from a partnership to a small company is in many respects a much larger leap because you're dealing with a whole bunch of new personalities. And we've made some mistakes in hiring people. I talked about some of them with my academy cohort. And we've had some personal differences as essentially the mom and pop of the company. And how do we separate our personal friendship with our company relationship and then also talk about our company relationship with the rest of the organization? And so as we've grown, we've had to talk about it a lot more. And so one of the things that I spent a lot of time focusing on during the academy was being more intentional about my communications with my partner. - You said something a bit ago that really resonate with me maybe because I struggle with the two analysts of thinking about futuristics, my number one on my strengths finder. So I'm like you thinking about vision, the future, all that. But sometimes it's like the actual doing stuff then like, okay, are you really doing it? That's where I struggle. And I'm always saying in the academy, consistency over intensity, small things, small steps, five minutes a day. When you got into the tactical aspect of this, like, okay, where do I start? What am I gonna do as far as a daily action? What did you decide to do? - You know, back to the strengths. My top one is a Cheever. And also I have since become a certified facilitator for the working genius model with the table group with Patricklyn Choney. And my top genius is tenacity. So the idea of breaking down the daily action was actually not hard for me because it is one of those things that I do on a pretty regular basis of what's that one thing that I can do. And the thing that I started doing during the academy that I'm still doing as an alumna of the academy is I put a little checklist thing on my to-do list for every day, daily check in with Jim, who's my business partner. Because what I realized was that if communication was part of my challenge sometimes with my partner, if I didn't intentionally reach out to him on a daily basis, we wouldn't necessarily communicate. And when we were, when it was just a partnership, we kind of had to do that because it was the only way to get the work done. But now as a larger company, there were so many things that were being delegated to other people that there were things that he just didn't know was happening in many respects. And so when I assumed that he would know something about a project or a client or something else that was going on and he didn't, that was frequently on me, not on him, because I just didn't tell him about it. And I'm just so much in the day-to-day managing the team. And he's not that he just wouldn't know that that was either taken care of or it was in progress. And then he would be frustrated. So I added as my daily action at the beginning part of the academy to just do a daily check-in, even if it was 30 seconds, to say, "Hey, here's what's going on." And I didn't tell him about it. I just started doing it. And I will say it took him until I'd been doing it for about six months, maybe. For him to say to me one day, "You know, did you add some checklist thing to your daily to-do list to check in with me? 'Cause I feel like you are checking in with me every day." That's awesome. I'm like, "Oh, I'm glad you noticed." Isn't it interesting how long sometimes though it takes? We start doing something. We try it for three or four days or a week or two. And we're like, "Oh, no one's noticed. I'm especially in leadership." Like, no one's noticing, no one's understanding. Like the vision I'm articulating. And then seven months later, someone will be like, "Hey, haven't you been saying something?" (both laughing) Yes, absolutely. (both laughing) As you got really intentional about doing that with him, especially, what happened? Like, you know, a few things happened. I think one is, I have said many times, and Jim and I've been working together for almost 20 years. I've said many times that my communication with him is better than anyone else I deal with. Because maybe because I came at it as an adult, and maybe because of some of the leadership development tools that I've integrated into our relationship. But I feel like Jim and I have an ability to address difficult topics in our communication that I have difficulty doing with everyone else. And even a case in point, we were on a extended drive to get from Flagstaff, Arizona to Tucson, Arizona a couple of weeks ago. And we spent most of that drive addressing a fundamental disagreement that we had about a brand identity of the company, a certain element of our brand identity. And yes, we both get frustrated at moments in the conversation. Yes, we both wanted to just stop talking at different moments in the conversation and just do. But we got through the discussion, and we both had an opportunity to share things. Because even though we still already trusted each other, and I will say he's my best friend, so we're very good at communicating for the most part. I think that the intentionality of me communicating with him on a daily basis has opened that up even more. And it gives us the opportunity to bring up difficult topics without thinking, oh my God, after this we're gonna have a huge fight and we're never gonna talk again. Because I have to talk to him 'cause it's on my checklist. Yeah. (laughs) Exactly. When we talked about this conversation, you said to me, I need to mention acceleration. What's important about acceleration for you? Well, like I said earlier, I think I was pretty stuck in my own development. And also back to the idea of thinking that the academy wasn't for me because I had too many years of experience to apply to this academy. I think part of it was that mental block of, I know everything. (laughs) It's that idea of I have seen so many different leadership and coaching models. And I myself deliver professional coaching to the non-profit clients that I work with. So how could someone else deliver the same tools that I know to me and be helpful to me? And what I discovered was one, yes, you can benefit regardless of where you are in your career from the academy because the input from both you Dave and my cohort members who were in completely divergent fields from me and in our particular cohort in many different countries with actually the majority of people in my cohort were in Europe. So having that perspective from other people outside of my little bubble of people that I normally deal with really kind of helped me analyze what I was already doing and kind of shake me out of that stuckness and say, okay, yeah, maybe this thing that you were trying, maybe there really isn't working and you should just chuck that and try something else. So I think what it did was that it allowed me to take all of these different things that I was trying and window them down into something that might work and also give myself the grace and the permission to say, hey, this is not working. So I'm gonna get rid of it so that I can focus my energies on what's actually working. And so that allowed me to accelerate my progress because I think I totally could have continued plotting on on my own without being a member of the academy and making some progress. But it would have been scatter shot. It would have been one of those things where I was holding myself accountable so I could kind of let it slide. But with other people holding me accountable and other people telling me, you know, hey, Alice, that's clearly not working. Maybe you shouldn't do that. Really allowed me to, like I said, focus in on the stuff that was actually working and make my progress much more quick than it would be if I just continue to go on my own. - I've always thought the people who show up for academy and seen how successful they are that they're gonna, the people coming to the academy are gonna be successful regardless, as you have been throughout your career decades now, right? I've always seen my job is not to change that trajectory but to speed it up. You know, let's help people get somewhere faster than they would on their own. And if it would have taken you two or three or four years on your own, if we can do that in six months, eight months a year, like great, a great win for all of us. - Mm-hmm, so I think one other thing about that is that there's that old saying about the, what is it? If you want to go, it's something like, if you wanna go fast, go alone, if you wanna go far, go in formation. And I think this is strangely a combination of those things because I do feel like flying in formation, so to speak, with the academy and with my fellow cohort members, not only allowed me to advance more, so go farther during the period I was in the academy, but it also made me go faster because having that regular accountability, essentially weekly accountability throughout the academy of the, hey, what have you done on that, really allowed me to push that farther? And so not only was I going faster, I think I was going farther too. - During your time in the academy, what did you change your mind on? - I changed my mind on several things, but I would say that one of the things that I changed my mind on that has persisted since then is that I'm a non-profit person and a non-profit leader because I've been in the non-profit sector my entire career. And so when you've been in an entire, in a specific sector for so long, there's this thought that your leadership skills don't translate. And what I realized as I was helping people in banking and people in engineering and people in manufacturing and people in all sorts of different areas with their challenges as members of my cohort, that things that I knew in the non-profit sector and in what I do as a consultant for fundraising totally applied to other people and their leadership and management challenges. And so I think that even though people had told me this for years, I finally embraced it that I'm not a non-profit leader, I'm a leader. And I really appreciate the academy allowing me to embrace that identity. - And I appreciate you for sharing your story with us. Thank you so much, Alice. - Thank you, Dave. - I'm thinking about what Alice shared and how it's often the case that we do exactly what she said, mostly talk to and learn from people in our own organizations, industries and associations. And we miss the perspective and creativity that a more objective perspective can bring. One of the things that I've noticed over the years is that whenever you get together with people who do the same kind of work you do, you tend to talk shop, whether it's who's in the new role or what trend is hot or who said what about this company or what the industry's doing or what the new cool software is, we all tend to do that when we get together with people who do similar work. And it's one of the reasons I bring together leaders in the academy from all different industries. We don't share the same technical expertise, so we can't talk shop. It means we spend our time helping each other move forward on the leadership skills that we're all working on getting better at. Maybe you're at a transition point right now with a new position or a new team. Or maybe you're like Alice and you've been leading a team for a while, but it's time to really move on the vision that you've got in your head. If that's you, I hope you'll consider applying for the academy before Friday, September 13th. By the way, we've made a few updates to academy qualifications since we last opened the academy. So if you've looked into it before but haven't checked out the details in a while, you might wanna have a new look. Just go over to coachingforleaders.com/academy for all the details and to apply. Thanks so much for listening and as always for the privilege to support you. [ Silence ]