How Servant Leadership Can Transform Your Team and Unleash Genius

CheeTung Leong: [: 00:00:00

It's a great privilege to have him. Welcome to the show, Edwin. Maybe could you start by just sharing a little bit more about yourself and what PPC Partners does?

Edwin Garcia: Look, I been in HR for the majority of my career. I didn't start in HR. I started as a PhD chemist, scientist doing research and found my way into HR through recruiting and have had a career of HR and diversity and inclusion At a number of fortune 500 companies. And now I find myself at a smaller employee owned company.

We have about: 2300

We do mostly electrical work, either it be overhead lines or non residential work, commercial hospitals industrial, those kinds of things where we electrify what customers need us to do. So we do electrical, mechanical and automation are some of the areas we do most of the work.

CheeTung Leong: Very nice. And it's super interesting. How you transitioned from a chemist And having a PhD in that as well and moving into HR. What was that like? It sounds like quite a big change.

d more with the organization [: 00:02:00

So I started writing these things on the margin of the page. And when I came to see the margin had overtaken most of the page. So I did a transition while I was in a management development program, a two year rotation program and then ended up getting a chance to add a rotation to that program in HR and the rest is history.

CheeTung Leong: And did you find that, looking back do you find that your background in chemistry and research. Do you feel like it's colored your view of HR and how you run the people organization at all?

ngs to the table that others [: 00:03:00

And now we talk more and more about people analytics given that we do have Better tools now with human capital management tools. So I bring that. I also look at from a scientist perspective, I looked at how we might want to implement things from a business perspective as well.

So I'm more analytical. I tried to boil it down to what the business would be looking at and I am more of a business person doing HR. So it has colored dramatically. The way I think about HR and the way I work in it,

CheeTung Leong: Yeah, I can imagine. And I'm just thinking back to my own high school chemistry and the chemical equations never quite work in the lab as you would expect them to work. I think that's going to be quite similar to how people would respond to different policies and interventions.

t be different or, you don't [: 00:04:00

And even when we have people that, that share commonalities. Everyone's an individual, and that's key to how I view HR. HR shouldn't be about broad strokes or stereotypes, but really recognizing the person where they are and create and being able to bring out of them that genius that everybody has the potential of bringing to work.

CheeTung Leong: I love And, we were talking about the topic of genius as you just said, and one of big things to unleash this genius in our team is To be a servant leader, which is quite counterintuitive if you think about like this the old stereotypes of a know it all leader or like a Superman leader.

help unlock the genius that [: 00:05:00

Edwin Garcia: One of the biggest challenges that anybody has going from an individual contributor to become a servant leader. Or in general is letting go of what got you there that those things that made you successful as an individual contributor and adapting to your team.

So before you used to get evaluated and rewarded by things you achieve yourself and as a leader, you get rewarded and and recognize for things your team does, right? So that transition is very critical. And especially when you come from technology like science or high tech environments, the person that was best at doing that work gets promoted to be the leader of that team and then has to go through that transition.

It's very challenging for folks because they're thinking about. The skills that they had, and it's hard to shed those skills, that thing that you have done for so long to be recognized to then learn some new topics. And I find the concept of servant leadership to be very critical in this, that you're putting the emphasis on the employee.

looking to serve because in [: 00:06:00

CheeTung Leong: Let's expand on that a little bit more. So I think it's definitely the right direction to put the employee as the focus because they, at the end of the day, it's that experience that each employee has and contributes to how much discretionary effort, how much talent they're bringing to the game.

What does that mean from a leadership perspective? Because there's a difference between being employee focused and just giving in to everything that employees would want. So how do you strike this balance and walk this tightrope?

will encourage employees to [: 00:07:00

And then individually I modulate or conform my style to make sure that I'm extracting the most value out of you. So for example many leaders especially in the high tech environment or technology places, we're not good at giving feedback and in general we don't give people the feedback they need to improve.

If you don't tell me I'm doing something wrong or not as well as you expect, if you don't give me the feedback, I I won't know how to improve and we capture this in one of our trainings. We use the love curve and I know it's, it sounds something that you wouldn't work or you wouldn't be bringing up at work, but imagine for a second, a parabola where the open end of the parabola is on the top.

rom zero to one or zero to a [: 00:08:00

I give him feedback immediately, right? I honked my horn, did other things, waved at him in different ways. That feedback that I gave to a person I don't love right? Is similar to that of a child. My kid is getting close to the hot stove. I'll give them feedback. I'll pull them away so they don't get injured.

So with people that we love highly will give a lot of feedback. People that we don't love will give a lot of feedback, but those employees in the middle and other colleagues that you have on a daily day interaction. We tend not to give feedback. They're in the bottom end of the parabola.

ays future focused feedback, [: 00:09:00

Hey, next time you try that, why don't you think about this? Or are there other ways we can try that in the future instead of whenever you do feedback on the past, it tends to be perceived as negative and comes across as negative. So from a servant leader perspective, we want you to have affection for those that you're working with so that you give them the feedback they need to be successful and don't wait to give them the feedback, do it right there when they need.

CheeTung Leong: I love how mathematical you, you got with the graph and the love curve. So essentially, it's a U shaped curve where the bottom of that U shaped curve, in terms of amount of feedback that we're giving occurs to people that we feel maybe some slight positive effect for, rather than like people love entirely or people we just don't care about. That's really interesting and I love that.

that to people that we work [: 00:10:00

CheeTung Leong: That makes a lot of sense and I love that idea of future focused feedback as well because it's not saying you screwed up in the past, you're bad, it's here's how you could do better in the future, and here's how you can grow and it reminds me of something that that I was told once where before giving any kind of constructive feedback to somebody, it's make sure that you anchor in your own heart that care for that make sure that you convince yourself that you genuinely care for this person, and then you enter that conversation, and it should flow naturally, . In your experience how do leaders and even individual contributors, how do they respond to this ? This isn't something that you can solve with a three day training workshop and then you're done. How do you keep that kind of mindset on a day to day basis?

eah, that's a great question [: 00:11:00

Principles of servant leadership and really wanting to know from our employees is the company treating you the way you want to be treated and are your fellow employees treating you the way you want to be treated that I really developed this concept or better understanding of servant leadership so I can really drive people to, to think about that.

So when I think about the manager's role, It's really difficult for some U. S. managers, U. S. based managers, because they have a concept of leadership that it's very different from, for example, Eastern cultures or Asian cultures in general, that the leader leads from behind.

er, the know it all, like we [: 00:12:00

If they committed to that employee first by actually wanting them to grow and develop and eventually become more autonomous and servants themselves. So if we deprogram some of that flying around, super human, leadership expectations and really understand. You get rewarded, you get recognized, your job is the team, you can take it to a sport analogy, right?

If you have one team member that's not working, you can kick him off from the team or you can invest with them in the off season or during in between games to really improve their skill. Because they've already made a commitment to your team and at the end of the day, the name that's important is the name that's in front of the jersey.

y, which is the individual's [: 00:13:00

CheeTung Leong: I Like that, the sports analogy, because you can imagine like the captain of a football team, they're not bossing people around. They're getting their teammates to work together as a team. And as a captain, your job is to first and foremost. Help your teammates to succeed rather than be that superhero captain And I want to pick up a little bit on what you mentioned earlier about configuring that the rewards and recognition and the incentives to support this deep programming How do you do that from a policy standpoint?

Is there something that you've done that you feel has? this deprogramming effort and that focus on helping leaders to be more aligned with a servant leadership model.

the employees to come along [: 00:14:00

So compensation is not the best tool. We do talk about the role of the leader itself and really not. Talking or emphasizing so much on the technology or the technical expert per version of the leader, but really how they enable others to act, how they encourage other to act, how they engage their employees.

So we follow engagement for sure. We also look at a group. Group goals. We also talk about collaboration between different business segments, business units operating companies, because that would also show a willingness to look at the whole being successful, not just the individual.

ist and everything else that [: 00:15:00

So as we think about the leader's role, it's really about recognizing that hard work is there and that the employees just need to be guided. Not so much exchanged or dismissed if things aren't working out because at the end of the day as a leader, I fail if my team doesn't succeed.

CheeTung Leong: It sounds like there are quite a few layers that need to be deprogrammed for the leader. It's no longer. It's not just how much I'm personally contributing, it's how much can I get the team to contribute.

And so that's one layer of the programming. And then the other layers, as a leader, I'm not the one that, that needs to be bossing people around and pushing people forward. I need to enable them to do their best work. How much is HR involved in that transition? Because it almost sounds like you need to coach leaders to be better coaches. Is that something that HR is heavily involved in?

potential programs that you [: 00:16:00

So it gives you a chance to look at that. The other one is really when we think about. Who has been their leader, right? Has that person been living the servant leadership values have they demonstrated that the interest of really having the employees best interest at heart. And we do through engagement surveys, try to identify at a individual operating unit. How well those leaders are doing with our seven servant leadership questions. And we look at those questions as a way to really highlight people that are doing it very well and then making them be the standard or sharing them as a potential example so that leaders can learn from other leaders.

on in order to become a more [: 00:17:00

CheeTung Leong: And I think what you said around like making sure that the leaders that you put in leadership positions have the right raw materials to begin with is so important because that, that is essentially if you start on the wrong footing, it's really hard to backpedal from that.

Have there been occasions where you've had really talented ICs? But they just didn't have that raw material and you therefore had to deny them that people leadership position, but somehow was able to find a way to keep them in the organization. Is that something that you've ever encountered?

hey were able to develop the [: 00:18:00

To help you get to the next step our message is not consistent with our behavior, and it gives us an opportunity to match those two up so that the person then becomes ready to take on the role. So we've had situations like that and then you do get some situations where under pressure people revert back to their normal behaviors and then you have to intercede again and try to get them to really think about, Hey, Is this the way you're going to succeed?

Or do we have to realign to our mission and values?

CheeTung Leong: if you're giving advice to another Chief People Officer to be able to build that culture of servant leadership in their organization, how would you break down everything you've said into some framework or a checklist that could help them?

Greenleaf Center for Servant [: 00:19:00

Start with that. Really thinking about those principles of servant leadership by underlining the fact that you're going to be committing to the success of the individual. Secondly, I would then look at establishing open and honest communication more in terms of a psychological safety perspective, and you can go to Harvard Business Review to find some articles on that.

nity to provide future focus [: 00:20:00

CheeTung Leong: That's great. Thank you so much for being with us today. If people want to find you, what's the best way for them to do?

Edwin Garcia: I think the best way would be through LinkedIn. There's a lot of Edwin Garcia's out there, but not any working with PPC Partners, Inc. I'm the only one. And then you'll see this face on, on my profile. That's probably the easiest way to get ahold of me. And I'd be happy to engage on folks learning more about servant leadership or what we've done here.

he HR impact show. I've been [: 00:21:00