Leadership today isn’t just about managing people—it’s also about managing yourself. With so much change happening around us, how can leaders stay grounded and show up for their teams in the best way possible?
In this episode, I talk with Chris Thyberg, a leadership coach and founder of The Serving Way. We chat about what it really takes to lead people in today’s world—whether it’s dealing with AI, figuring out remote vs. office work, or building trust in your team. Chris shares helpful advice on how to lead yourself first, and how being honest, curious, and human can make you a better leader.
This is a down-to-earth, thoughtful conversation for anyone trying to grow as a leader in 2025 and beyond. Tune in and learn more.
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Being a Good Leader—Inside and Out with Chris Thyberg
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Last fall, I had Chris Thyberg on the program and we talked about leadership from both the perspective of an inner game and an outer game, how you need to take care of yourself in order to take care of the people that you’re a leader for. Since that episode, a lot has changed in the world, because the year 2025 has been marked by just a really rapid kind of pace of change on many different fronts, and that has caused a lot of people who have, say, different reactions. The range of reactions to these changes have been quite variant, as would be expected, and that has caused some additional challenges with regards to group cohesion as well as being able to delegate and trust the people who you’re working with. So, once again, I would like to bring back to the program Chris Thyberg to talk to us a little bit about what we need to do to be good leaders from both internally and externally now where we sit well into the year 2025.
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Chris, welcome back.
Thank you, Steve. It’s a pleasure to be back with you after an excellent conversation last time.
Well, thank you for coming back. This podcast has had maybe, I’m going to say three or four repeat guests, not that often, but it is something that’s changed quite a bit since we talked in September of 2024. I think we’re all familiar with what types of changes and, as you know, this is not a political show in the sense that I’m not here to tell anyone how they should or shouldn’t be responding to that aspect, nor is it telling anyone how they should or shouldn’t be responding to things such as AI, the number of layoffs, and the additional challenges and anxiety in the workforce today. All we can really do is kind of respond to it. Chris, what are you observing as far as the people that you work with and how they’re responding to all the different forms in which this change is taking place?
Yeah, thank you. The last time we talked together, I described the conditions that leaders are under as white water conditions, as paddling down the river in the rapids and they’re starting to get class 4, class 5, maybe there’s even a waterfall that you can see coming up. All right. So, here are a few things that have been contributing to now what feels like windsurfing in a hurricane. If we thought the river trip was a little hard, sometimes, yeah, let’s try windsurfing when the swells are 20 feet high and we’re in driving down rain.
Right, so you got a whole new situation here. Yep, let’s go.
So, one aspect is the place of AI, how disruptive it is, the anxieties it’s creating for everyone, from longstanding employees to folks coming out of college, those entry-level positions that now people are arguing can be done just as well by a well-trained bot as that expensive college grad. So, what I like to remember in this space is that, right now, generative AI is like a very eager, tireless, relentless, driven intern that absolutely knows nothing at all about you, your business, your people, your leadership. All of it, right? So they need a lot of training and to invite people to see that, now, if these could be kind of really enthusiastic helpers on the side, then maybe now we can see that we can contribute the unique brain power and even more the emotional, cultural, social, human-to-human intelligence that is the bottom line. And so that’s how I’m thinking in terms of AI and starting to use AI in interesting ways in my practice to help support the coaching process. All right. So, now, that sort of flows down, I’d say, into coming back from working at home, the struggles over how much in-the-office time, how much freedom. Are we building a culture? Do we have cohesion if we’re kind of spread out and everyone’s sitting with their own little chats and playing around? Yeah, that’s gotten a lot harder, and so I want to explore that a bit more with you in the conversation. And then the last thing I’m noticing, again, without political comment, but I work a lot with nonprofit and social sector entities, and the flow downstream of impact on budgets and grants and getting great work done in their neighborhoods and the context that they’re in, it’s harder, and so I’m sitting with leaders in a great deal more pain often than when I started this in 2018.
So, would you say that these are the three primary forms in which the anxiety is taking place right now, in general, in the workforce, of like how is AI going to force me to transition, force me to adapt? What does it really mean? Are we abandoning remote work? Are we all coming back to the office? What’s the right amount of flexibility as well as, in many sectors, where is the funding coming from? Where is some of these budget cuts and some of these transformations in what gets funded going to impact certain organizations?
Yeah, that’s what I see with my thinking partners, aka clients, because I don’t fix people, I don’t fix –– well,
I don’t fix problems, I really help people grow up into their greatness. Share on XAnd so, from my point of view, those kind of leaders, that’s what I’m seeing. I’m sure other people see other things as well but that’s what I’ve got a line of sight on particularly.
Now, so let’s go through those in order, since those are the ones brought up. So we start with AI and, with AI, is there a certain type of role, you talked about the new college graduates and whether or not people think that the AI tools can do it just as well for a lot less money. Are there other types of roles that people are really getting anxious on? Because I’ve read some materials and seen some videos that have mentioned specific roles, I’m not going to specifically say, not to scare specifically, but there’s types of people that are feeling a higher level of anxiety versus others that are feeling maybe a little bit calmer about it.
From the kind of leaders I’m seeing who are sort of senior, middle entering the exec ranks and C-suite, some of the things they are bringing into the room with me is how do we keep intact teams that trust one another? And how do I delegate to people really effectively? And how do the teams beneath me delegate really effectively? When we say AI first, I’m in a number of companies like Duolingo in my backyard here in Pittsburgh are saying, AI first, don’t do your work until you’ve started with AI. Well, that can make people anxious if they don’t feel very skillful. But I think if I were a senior leader, I’d really be wanting to know how much hallucination am I getting back?
Yeah.
I asked my people to go first to AI. And are they exercising their human judgment, their own brilliance with this really eager intern who doesn’t really know anything? So I’m seeing that it’s less the people that I’m with are worried about job displacement for them but they are taking a bigger, systemic, strategic point of view at it. And I’m finding with some leaders, curiously, they’re actually using AI with me between sessions to kind of sort out insights that they’ve gotten, books or articles I’ve recommended that they can’t read the whole things but they could ask ChatGPT to summarize what’s the essential stuff from these free resources that I talked about with Chris and they seem really relevant to what I want to do. It’s like the good old Executive Book Summaries on steroids.
Yeah, exactly.
So that’s what I’m seeing there and helping them use the tool for themselves to support their own leadership growth as well as getting a sense for the real human-to-human cultural stuff that they really have to be responsible for as sort of the primary culture officers of their organizations, the chief value officers. That’s all going to be human, human, human.
Now, this reminds me of another conversation that I’ve had a few times recently around the phenomenon of people using AI tools, specifically ChatGPT but sometimes others, quote, unquote, as their “therapist,” and I’ve actually talked with a couple of people last week who both do that as well as having a therapist of their own, which reminds me of the situation with you and your clients. And in both conversations I had last week, they told me that they actually let their therapist know that they had done this AI therapy and it is to be expected. Do you have any feelings about when your clients also use AI in conjunction with your coaching, how that could be done right or how it could potentially be done wrong?
That is exactly the right question. Because coaches, like therapists, we sit around and say, “Are we gonna be out of a job in two years? No one needs us.” They’ll just, quote, “self-medicate” by playing with somebody’s hot off the press coaching bot. Right, so here’s what I’m experiencing. First, it’s always working with each leader on what they most want to get done, what’s most important, and so coaching is all about where are you now, Steve? How did you get here? So you can start noticing the worn in habits, the grooves in your brain that keep taking you back to stuff that doesn’t work anymore in these conditions. So, taking a look at that, how can you start to lead yourself well?
Yeah, that makes sense.
–– because you’re very apt to cause more harm than good. You’re not attending to that inner dimension, that inner game of leadership. Okay, so I’m working with clients on a very bespoke “Where are you now? How did you get here? Where would you like to be?” because it’s always a forward motion toward a desired future. It is not locked in problems and pain. It’s about possibilities and potential. All right, so that really changes entirely what they would do with me as I’m using these tools to support them and they start using these tools on their own to kind of give a check-in based on, “What did I do with Chris?” Good, I now have told my assistant this is what I’m trying to do with Chris. And now, can I get a little check-in? This is what I’m experiencing. What do you make of the fact that I’m still kind of spinning with this thing? Can you remind me of some of the stuff that Chris and I worked on or the stuff I said I would commit to doing last session or the things that I was going to read. That’s a great check-in. And I’m going to say it, I think one of the things in working with me that stands out is that I’m not afraid to actually pull back the curtain and show you what’s going on with the coaching, because we’re co-creating it. Now you get a sense of why were those questions the ones that I asked. And now, if you can use the supporting mechanisms that AI can really generate fast and with enough training pretty good, we can begin to self-coach between the session. It’s actually not delegating to the AI, “Be my coach,” even, “Be my Chris on the side,” it’s all about, “Be my Steve to me as I learn how to apply what I do with Chris for myself, and, now, if I apply it with my team, I can be less of a bossy pants boss and more like a coach and I can have the difficult conversations that we need to have because I’m coming from a much different place.”
So, see, the AI can help with a check-in, it can help with self-coaching, but it’s all got to be driven by the reality of how that client and I are working together. Share on XIf you just throw it at a generic thing, saying, “Coach me,” I’m not too sure the results are going to be great, especially this, what I’ve noticed just recently, and I won’t name names, but ChatGPT is the folks who did it, their version, one version has started to become so sycophantic, it’s such a suck up, it tells me everything I do and it says, “That was brilliant. Let me do more of that. That’s the best thing I’ve ever seen.” Bullshit. Bull. I want tough love. I don’t want you just coddling me and playing back my ideas as if they’re brilliant because you’re just going to confirm me and my biases. You’re going to just entrench my habits more deeply. Fact, this is why a human coach is so good because we can be a provocative support. We can get in there and say, “Hey, we’ve been around this mountain four times and you don’t seem to be going up in altitude. What’s actually going on with that?” That becomes the topic itself. And, again, I think that’s the things that humans are going to do so well because we’re reading the energy, we’re reading the vibe, we’re reading the emotional tones. And that’s why I love being a human, talking with real humans.
So, what’s interesting, so there’s a way, and I brought the therapy analogy in because it’s a pretty similar analogy in the sense that you have someone who you’re working with but you have those times in between, you have those moments where, like I’m just thinking in both business coaching and in therapy, you can have the situation where you wake up Thursday morning at 3 AM with a panic attack over, say, you’re giving an investor presentation the next day or even you’re sending out a sales pitch, blah, blah, blah. Well, at that point, you’re not going to have a therapist on speed dial or whatever token now where you’re going to, as the coach, wake up at three in the morning to be able to do that, then you’ll be wearing yourself out. So to have that weird support in the middle through some of those situations while also prompting it but it sounds like you still need to give it a little bit more direction than just –– and this is actually what I’ve noticed with anything I’ve done so far with any of the AI tools is, every time I work with AI, I do need to give it more direction because it’s a matter of like it’s still a computer program in the end, it’s way easier than learning how to code in a coding language and having it show up on a webpage, but it’s still a computer programming languages and computer programming languages, what they all have always done is they do what you want them to do literally. And if you make a typo, it literally says that typo differently, or it’ll –– because that’s literally what you said them to do and that’s exactly what a prompt into ChatGPT is going to do.
Yeah. To play with the model, I’m just starting to work with some of my sort of more tech savvy leaders to co-create with me. They’re always on assistant coach. I’m always going to be the head coach, but, together, we could create an assistant coach really customized to you, tracking with what you’re developing and learning each session, knowing what you’ve read, knowing kind of the typical stuck places because we are teaching it that, and now I can execute the training program on the practice field at three in the morning. Now, the knowledge is getting trained.
Well, yeah, no, I mean ––
–– 3 AM, yeah, so, yeah, the model of an assistant coach, very well trained to really meet the needs of my clients with my sort of master coach, head coach guidance on the side.
And then so you talked about AI, and then the second trend you talked about was kind of this remote work. Now, the thing that confuses me about where we are right now is that when the pandemic happened, I remember everyone switching to remote work and people being suddenly amazed, like, “Oh my gosh, productivity did not decline,” and, at that point, it felt like some form of remote or hybrid was here to stay and, now, it feels like everything’s moving somewhat back in the direction of people wanting back in office. What’s behind all of these thoughts right now?
Yeah, I’m pausing to take that in and do my quick mental check-in with actually the people who matter, the leaders I work with. All right. So, here’s my sentence. Leaders are recognizing that a cohesive culture, it is –– it’s gold. It is pure gold. In that place, individuals hold themselves mutually accountable. I’m not sitting at the boss trying to make Steve accountable. How do I hold Steve to be accountable? Everyone’s kind of, in a healthy culture, are looking at themselves and saying, “Am I being responsible to me for me so that I can be accountable to you, Steve, as my teammate,” and all the way up and down the chain. All right, so I just ask, hey, how healthy was the culture when everyone hung around the water cooler and did BMW constantly, Bitch, Moan, and Whine, BMW?
Yep.
Yeah, you probably had cultural issues before the pandemic spread us apart and now people got a sense of, “Oh, the integration between my life and my work is really different, not always better, but really different when I can work at home a lot of the time.” And so I want leaders to not get caught up in a knee jerk reaction, “Well, we all went away so we all got to come back,” because that won’t magically make it cohesive again. It’s not, so it becomes much more nuanced what actually makes for a really healthy, cohesive, collaborative culture. How much takes the real human in front of a human touch, and how much can we actually increase our cohesion, increase our connections to each other when we can hold the digital distance along with the hanging out in the lunchroom. So it’s not dodging the answer, it’s actually pointing to where the questions really are. Starbucks’ issue is not whether they all show up or not, Starbucks’ issue is do baristas feel like they truly belong in this corporation, that they matter and what they do matters?
Yeah, yeah 100 percent because people want to –– to me, the issue always was people want to feel like what they do matter that, they generally get along with and aren’t harassed or antagonized by the people around them, but with the remote work desire, people also want some level of flexibility and some level of understanding that we all have jobs but we have things going on with our lives and even the basic thing of saying, let’s say a standard nine to five work day, well, that eats up a lot of daylight hours that you’re expected to be inside at an office and I read somewhere that 70 percent of this country has some form of vitamin D deficiency, which we naturally get from the sunlight, so it always seemed to me like we’re trying to synthesize this idea for like life integration flexibility with still wanting to be a cohesive team and still wanting to feel like we can work well together and be accountable to each other in the environment.
Yes, and it is both that relational thing you just named, but it’s also the results, because either together or virtually, if it was all just relationship and we’re singing Kumbaya and we love each other but we’re actually not creating stuff of value that the market wants, the campfire is going to go out soon where we’re all warming our hands. There’s no more fuel. So results matter. And you go back to the team analogy, people want to love their teammates and trust their teammates, know that their teammates are really good in their positions on the field, but we actually want to notch some wins, so holding relationship and results and the executive needs to be very concerned in this whole distance or togetherness integration that, in fact, we are producing what matters to all our stakeholders as well as being in a place where I feel like I matter and my individual tasks matter.
And are the leaders that you’re working with getting a lot of input from their staff about the right balance in this hybrid remote in-person work type of stuff, because I’m sure they’re getting stuff and people are telling them their preferences.
Yeah. Well, I’d like to say the nature of my work is to help growing, evolving leaders create the conditions for flourishing at work. And those conditions might be at home, they might be hybrid, they might involve working with AI, they might still involve working with one’s hands. Totally cool. The rude way I say it is I try to help work suck less one evolving, conscious leader at a time. And the leaders who never really got their people’s view and buy-in, they’re going to continue to not get people’s views and buy-in, whether it’s this issue or the next issue or the last issue. So, again, it’s deeper. Leader, can you actually learn how to listen? To not need to always be right? To know how to have difficult conversations where there’s going to be emotion, there’s going to be tension in the room? Because that is really uncomfortable. It’s much easier to sit in the office, get all the reports and make a pronouncement from the mountaintop, thinking that we listen to anybody when all we’ve done is avoid the hard work of having the hard conversations. Now, I will say the great leaders were already leaning into doing it that way and coaching with me just helps them get really better at it, but the leaders who weren’t ever good at it, well, we’re sitting down in a different kind of conversation with a different kind of starting point but they get great at it too, just kind of one new move at a time.
Well, it’s wonderful that people are getting better at that because –– and you’re right, the remote versus in-person work is not going to be the only issue that has ever come up or will ever come up with respect to how your work setup is going to work and there’s always going to be people with opinions and there’s always going to be people who aren’t happy with the decision being made. That’s going to be a difficult decision when someone says, “I don’t like the way you restructure the teams. I don’t think three teams of four is better than two teams of eight,” or something like that.
Yeah. And here’s, again, we’re a leader, we must lead ourselves well, because I know earlier in my career, if I got kind of that pushback, I would go into a reactive space and either it’s like double down, “I’m the boss, I’m right,” because it doesn’t feel good to admit I might be wrong. Doesn’t that mean that I’m a bad leader if I don’t know all the answers? No, it doesn’t. You’re just human. If I put out something and you really don’t like it, I may react with, “Oh, Steve, you mean you don’t like me? I’m not well liked.” Doesn’t a great leader need to be loved by everybody? No. Can you get over the need to always be right and have all the answers? Can you get over the need to always be liked? Again, that’s inner work a leader has to do to lead themselves well, and if they can let go of a little of that stuff, the freedom that they now have for the wisdom of the room to enter if they don’t always have to be right, for the caring and camaraderie of the team to come together if I, as the leader, don’t have to always be the most loved person in the room. All that stuff I just named is ego, ego, ego, and that’s what great leaders learn to let go of so that they can serve other people to grow up into their own greatness.
And that’s really important and seems like really important even more so today because I know we don’t really want to talk about anything specific political but there are political divisions that can actually impact how teammates work with one another. One of the saddest things I encounter is people who have literally decided that they cannot ever trust someone who feels differently about specific political issues or politicians one way or another. “Everyone that voted that way is an evil person.” How many of your clients, how many of the leaders you work with, are encountering that and having to navigate that as well?
Let’s knock on wood. In my good fortune, I am not hearing these big splits over our different political or social views. It’s not that they’re not there or cause tension, I’m just not hearing yet, “Oh, I’ve got two VPs and they no longer talk to each other because they’re on different sides of whatever issue.” Knock on wood, great. But the same dynamics are there about trust, and this all comes down to trust. So I’m finding, and it’s classic in the literature that trust has three big components. They all start with the letter C so they’ll be easy to remember and take home and try out. The first, Steve, if I’m working with you, especially if I’m delegating work to you, then I’m entrusting you to actually do that work really well, and, hopefully, I’ve made a really clean, clear request to you, “Steve, I need this done by Tuesday. It can only cost this much money. It needs to be this good.” Actually, you now know what are the conditions of satisfying a good piece of work. In fact, if I don’t give you that, our delegation is not even going to get off the ground.
Because you’re going to get something and you’ll be like, “What is this?”
Yeah, and then when I do that with you, you can’t trust me as the delegator and I can’t trust you as the delegatee, and it all started because I didn’t set it up right, so let’s hold that just for a moment, that one about setting it up right. Here are the 3 C’s. First, when I trust you, I trust that you are competent to do the work. If you actually don’t have the skills, the capabilities to do the work, then I can’t trust you, and it’s not because you’re a bad person, you just aren’t ready yet, you don’t have the skill set yet to really pull it off. So, do I trust your competence? The next one, and here’s where we really build it out. Do I trust your communication? Are you clear? Are you straightforward? Can we hash things out? And when I trust something to you and it goes sideways, are you going to come back and tell me, “Hey, Chris, I couldn’t get it done by Tuesday. Is Thursday okay?” But to not communicate and to surprise me on Thursday with what I thought was going to be on Tuesday is for me to not trust our communications bond. So I have to trust your competency, and now I have to trust communications. The third one is we need to trust each other’s character.
Yeah.
Do we have integrity? Are we authentic? Do we do what we say we’re going to do? Do we not do what we say we will not do? Do we hold the values that are the commitments, the glue of this enterprise? Now, you see people jump down to, “I don’t trust your character because you voted for so and so.” Time out. You’ve just missed the two other C’s. Do I still trust you to be really good at the job? Then let me connect to you there. Do I really trust that, around the work, we’re going to communicate well? Then let me lean into trusting you there. Do I trust your character here in the work that we share? Good, I will double down on your character here. And let’s put aside the ways I might not totally trust your competency, communications, or character, because you believe X about Y and I believe Z about V. So, see, it comes back to a fundamental human dynamic. These times exacerbate the stress and the division? Absolutely, but the fundamentals of cohesion are basic human dynamics. And, again, we’re coming back with leaders to what’s at the core? What are the essentials that will always be as long as humans are humans, and can you lead yourself first? In fact, can you trust yourself to be a good leader and to be trying and to be doing your best and under the days you’re not at your best, well, you look back and you figure out what it was and you come back tomorrow trying to add 2 percent. If you’re doing that, you’re doing the hard work of leading, starting from the inside out.
Well, and it sounds like on all three of those C’s, and this is regardless of whether we’re in a current world or any world in the past and the future, when it comes to those three C’s, there’s a potential for what people sometimes refer to as scope creep, outside of the scope. So, for example, competency is very much of a task specific thing, like you can have, say, the best auto mechanic and you would trust them with anything that happens with your car, but would you trust them to, like, say, operate on you surgically? Maybe not because that’s outside of their competency so it’s a matter of which competency is needed for the job. And the same thing with communication, like I need to communicate with you that, like, okay, I’m struggling with this task, communicate with you like I didn’t quite understand this ask and maybe it’d be a couple days late because of this, this technical glitch, that one, but maybe there’s some forms of communication, if you have an analyst at your job, maybe you don’t necessarily need them to be like a top notch public speaker or something like that, right? And then the character is also like you don’t want someone that’s going to, say, throw you under the bus, right? You don’t want someone that’s trying to undermine you. You don’t want someone that’s going to, I don’t know, do all sort of –– like, obviously, suddenly disclose secrets to a competitor or stuff like that. Does whether or not someone believes a certain thing about a certain issue become a character trait that’s really necessary for the job and that really just depends a lot on the organization and it could matter a lot in some of those nonprofits that are very mission driven, that they have to –– the characters, you have to believe in the mission, but just because you believe in the mission of an organization doesn’t necessarily mean you need to believe in everything that most people that believe in this mission also believe in.
Yeah. That’s some really good expansion of the topic. So, let’s pick that up.
Yes, great leadership, I just was ripping on leadership, but it also builds great followers, because when I’m a great follower and I can raise my hand and said, “Hey, we agreed on X, Y, Z, but you’ve just put in scope creep to do stuff that’s not yet my skill set. What do we want to do about this? Shall we renegotiate the agreement, the delegation? Or will you get me training?” All right? So raising my hand with courage as a follower, communicating with integrity and courage to push back, “Hey, leader, that actually violates our values. We don’t wanna cut that corner.” Man, does that take some internal strength to be a great follower who can respectfully tap the brakes or point in a different direction. Let’s not take the right hand turn, we need to take the left hand turn. All right. And then the third one is about character, just kind of builds on what we’ve just said, that me as a follower can also help co-create the conditions of a healthy culture in which we all flourish and we create the value that our stakeholders really want. So if at first, it was the leader who sat at the heart of that triangle, now it’s the followers who sit at that triangle, part of that triangle. And the leader is modeling and creating the conditions for great leadership and great followership, and that’s where a leader starts moving from being a bossy pants boss to more like a coach. And so, again, I love it when leaders say, “Hey, Chris, what we just did, I wanna do more of that back on the job.” I say, “Cool. Let me share with you how we did it so that you can go do it.”
Nice. And so it sounds like it’s a boomerang, in the sense that the leaders creating the conditions but then the follower also models the same behavior back and, on the follower side as well as the leader side, is it the same need to abandon the need to be right and to be liked all the time?
99.9 percent yes, because, especially in our culture, most of us were trained up that we have to be the smartest in the room, or at least we have to get A minuses. And when we brought home a C plus, no one looked at the A’s and A minuses, everyone pointed out the C plus, said, “That’s where you’re weak. That’s where you’re deficient. Go fix that.” I come at it, let’s find already your strengths and superpowers and leverage them. You will improve the softer parts of your game but if we go straight head on after where you don’t know, you just don’t know yet, where you don’t have the right answer, somebody else probably does so, see, that one gets built in for some of us, me, of I have I always have to be right. I have to be smartest. Why? Because it protects me. It keeps my ego secure. What about being pleasing? Some people were taught in our family of origins that we are the peacemakers, we are the ones who fix stuff, we are the ones who smooth the troubled waters, and if we don’t do that, we might get kicked out of the family system, because it’s a danger if we’re not the pleasing ones. To us, it’s dangerous, and to the family, it’s dangerous. Okay, I’m not a therapist so we don’t go back there or I don’t send you to a therapy bot, we sit with where you are, saying, “Did you see how all that wiring, all that old story, is still playing out now? If you can see it and pivot, what new story can you be writing for yourself?” So the long answer is I’m naming stuff that have been hard for humans ever since there have been humans, and the times may make it really harder when we’re on the class five rapids or windsurfing in the hurricane. Absolutely, that stress is going to bring out all those reactive unconscious flailing that used to work really well and don’t work anymore at the kind of leadership we’re being called to provide. So, deep stuff that then shows up in the current conditions in however your context, your industry, your company, your space, how it’s all playing out there.
And, yeah, because everything’s playing out differently in all the places. You mentioned that in the nonprofit space, there’s a lot of people who are worried about where their funding is coming from based on a lot of changes. In some other industries, it’s a completely different worry, right? And you talked about these other two worries, the back and forth on the return to office mandate as well as people worry about how we’re implementing AI, but there’s also some roles, like, say, in-person retail stuff, where those things are not an issue but the issues could be something completely different, changing tastes, changing demographics, the neighborhood changed, like every industry, every organization is dealing with something, and so these tools seem pretty universal in how we deal with change right now and also just how we deal with each other because you never 100 percent get to pick every single person you work with. It’s not like your social circle, and you’re going to have that person in your office or on your Zoom calls, whatever, that doesn’t share your values and doesn’t want to work the same way as you and you’re going to have to find a way to work with them.
What you’re describing, many of my leaders are coming in, leaders that I work with, are coming in saying, “It feels like everything everywhere all at once,” and I say, yeah, probably does, but for the next hour, it’s what is the one thing with you that will give you the greatest leverage, traction, hope, growth? So let’s pick the main thing right now. It’s not everything everywhere all at once, at least for now, it’s you and me. And I’ll put it this way, I don’t create safe places, I create a safe place –– no, I’m going to change that. Rather, it’s we co-create safe places to be brave.
And that is what you help too with your clients. Where are you standing, just to wrap up, where are you standing with your current offerings? Do you have capacity to take on new clients? And if so, what will be the best way for someone to reach you?
Well, let’s start with that important part. First, check me out at LinkedIn, and I’m there by my name, Chris Thyberg, easy to find. Check out the website, theservingway.com, and what I hope is that you’ll see yourself first. You’ll have some sense of, “Wow, I’m not alone in this. Other people are at similar growing edges.” That’s most important, because coaching is all about readiness and relationship. So, please, take your time checking that out. And then we can schedule a free exploratory anti sales call. It’s not only not a sales call, it’s anti sales. All right, so the offering, still the same, and there is still capacity. There’s one-on-one coaching, and that’s with senior leaders in the C-suite, sort of that next tier of senior leaders and those moving up into those senior ranks, that’s both in nonprofit and for profit social sector spaces, yeah. So that’s the first bit. The second bit is that, in addition and compliment to the one on one, I do team coaching, which is more that tight little unit that really needs to be together or virtually together, right? Great. Then some of these things, like how to build teams that trust, how to delegate well, I offer those as two- to three-hour webinars, a half-day workshop, and that might be a lot more people up and down the stack of an enterprise, because a lot of people are responsible for building trust and doing good delegation at their level. Yeah. And the last thing I’m excited about is that I am starting to do mentor coaching with other coaches. So to be at the absolute leading edge of our profession, our calling, is so exciting and does shape then how things play out in those offerings, the one to one, the tight team, and the more group leadership, development work, those are the three main offerings still.
I’m going to check it out on LinkedIn. That’s Chris Thyberg, T, H, Y, B, E, R, G. That’s how it’s spelled. The Serving Way, theservingway.com. Chris, thank you so much for joining us today, going on Action’s Antidotes, helping guide us a little bit through the areas where leaders are experiencing a lot of anxiety around leading their teams, which are unique to what’s going on today in our period of transition, but the actual process, the letting go of being right and being liked, the kind of being first the coach of yourself, seems universal no matter what industry you’re in, no matter what set of changes are going on in your world, and no matter what is actually happening.
It’s a great pleasure. What a wonderful topic. Thanks for the conversation back and forth, nuancing and extracting new conversation and insights between us. I’ve gotten a lot of having this conversation, which I’m going to bring into the next coaching conversations I have. Thank you.
Well, that’s amazing. I love being able to contribute in any way, and, hopefully, I was able to contribute to those of you out there listening, I would like to thank you also for joining us again on Action’s Antidotes and reminding you to just keep tuning in to the show for more interesting conversations about topics and ideas that can really help you build the life that you really want to build.
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About Chris Thyberg
Chris Thyberg is the founder and leadership coach behind The Serving Way, a transformative approach to leadership development. With a mission to cultivate joy at work one growing leader at a time, Chris partners with emerging and experienced leaders across industries to help them navigate transitions, lead with purpose, and build resilient, empowered teams. Through personalized coaching, team engagements, and retreats, he equips leaders to thrive with inner agility, presence, and a coaching mindset that fosters sustainable growth and impact.