Leading Without the Mask: The Real Work of Authentic Leadership w/ Jim Fielding
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In this week’s episodes of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with author and executive coach Jim Fielding on the importance of living our authentic leadership.
A few reasons why he is awesome — he is an executive coach, professional speaker and author. He brings 30 years of experience in leadership roles at globally renowned companies such as 20th Century Fox, DreamWorks Animation, and Disney Store Worldwide. And he has a national bestseller with his book All Pride, No Ego, A Queer Executive’s Journey on Living and Leading Authentically.
Connect with Jim and learn more about his work…
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“The leader sets the mission, the vision, the tone of the culture… and by them seeing that I was emotional, that I was a human being… you instantly through almost osmosis are setting a tone.”
Jim Fielding
Russel Lolacher: And on the show we have Jim Fielding and here is why he is awesome. He’s an executive coach, professional speaker and author. He’s bringing 30 years of experience in leadership roles at globally renowned companies such as 20th Century Fox, Dreamworks Animation and Disney Store Worldwide.
He has a national bestseller with his book, All Pride, No Ego- A Queer -Executive’s Journey on Living and Leading Authentically, and it’s that last word that we’re gonna be digging in today, and he’s here with us as well. Hello, Jim.
Jim Fielding: Hello. Such a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
Russel Lolacher: We’re gonna get authentic. We’re gonna dig deep into it. Before we do any of that, Jim, I have to ask you the one question I ask all of my guests to kick this off, which is, what is your sir, best or worst employee experience?
Jim Fielding: My best employee experience was being president of Disney Store for sure from 2008 to 2012, and it was I was managed correctly. The person I was working for led me correctly. He was a great boss. His name’s Andy Mooney. And the team that I was able to put together and the mission and vision we were on, it was just, it was probably the best time in my career for feeling like everybody was kind of rowing in the same direction and we knew what we were trying to accomplish.
In fact, I posted a video about it this week that I found on YouTube from 14 years ago, and it was just nice to reconnect with a lot of those cast members from them.
Russel Lolacher: So I’m gonna get you to drill down just a little bit more because I mean, those are great. They are very rare actually, for a lot of people when they’re.
Jim Fielding: So rare. So rare.
Russel Lolacher: When they’re trying to find direction, when they’re trying to find a team that speaks their language. So what do you feel like leadership did for you there that provided that experience?
Jim Fielding: Hmm. Well, I mean, it’s interesting because I was, I was in that position for four years. I had Andy Mooney for three years and another leader for one year, which is part of the worst story, which we can get into if you want to. But what Andy was really good. He was the kind of leader who set very clear goals, very clear expectations, and got out of your way.
Like he was not a micromanager, right? He knew I was, he had hired me to be a President of Disney store, gave me that job, and so he gave me qualitative and quantitative goals. And then basically was like, if you need me, you know where I am. But I think the other thing he was, and when you work at a company the size of Disney and, and any of your listeners that have worked there or known someone that’s worked there, you need a boss who has your back, frankly. Right? Because it is a, it’s a political, and most big corporations have politics, but Disney definitely is a political organization. And, so I was doing a lot with Disney Store. I was reinventing Disney Store. You know, Disney had bought the Disney store back from an outside licensee and I was put into this job with a very large budget, but also very high expectations. Basically, between you and me, don’t f it up, right? Make money, but make it a good experience. Make it a brand experience. The whole bit. And I felt that pressure. And the only way I got through it is that Andy had my back the entire time. Because let’s face it, we made mistakes. There was things we didn’t do. And for your listeners, and you know, Russel, I took over in May of 2008. The global mortgage crisis.
You know, the financial impact was August, September, 2008. So here I am, the new president of Disney Store, three or four months in building a team, and the business dropped out, like 50% drops. And luckily Bob Iger, who was the CEO of Disney, Andy Mooney, who was my boss, the board stuck with it, right? Because they could have easily pulled the plug and said, we’re not gonna spend this money. It’s a horrible time to be in retail. And they kept us going. And so what that did for me was give you that adrenaline boost to be like, I’m gonna figure this out. I felt supported, I felt enabled. And I say when you talk about authenticity, they got the best of Jim Fielding, like they got me 24/7 and I was pushing myself and pushing the team, and I think we did things with Disney Store that had never been done before.
Russel Lolacher: It really hammers home the importance that leaders need great leaders too.
Jim Fielding: Of course.
Russel Lolacher: But it’s, and sadly it’s not as, of course. Like we treat, we treat leaders like go out and figure it out. We’ll, we’ll help you with your management, we’ll help you with delivery. But it’s that motivation, inspiration, direction, all the shuns, like all, all the things that really a leader needs so they know which way to point the, point the boat.
And that’s a great example of that.
Jim Fielding: Yeah. And, and he was really good. I mean, it’s interesting you bring that up Russel. ’cause he was really good at course corrections. That’s another shun, right? If he thought I was veering the wrong way, or we weren’t going in the right direction, he was good at giving me feedback. And I have always said my entire life, and it’s interesting that I’m a coach now, I’m coachable.
I’ve always been coachable. I’ve always accepted feedback. It doesn’t mean it was easy, it doesn’t mean, there weren’t times that I was like, that was horrible feedback. I don’t agree, but, but I am coachable. And he understood that and he knew, he understood that it took small course corrections. It wasn’t sweeping call me into the office and you know, you’ve completely messed this up and you need to change everything and fire 50 people.
He would never be like that, but it would be, he’d plant seeds. He understood planting seeds of, Hmm, maybe you should look at that differently. And our offices were about 20 minutes apart in two different Disney buildings. And that 20 minute drive back to my office, from his office, I’d always be ruminating the entire time of like, what did he mean by that? What did that really mean? And, and I would make a correction based and that was perfect. Because that was like slightly turning my head, you know what I mean? It wasn’t slapping me down and saying, you really screwed that up. It was like, how about you think of this differently, Jim? Think of it from a slightly different angle. And I, I appreciated that tremendously.
Russel Lolacher: Empowerment with direction. It’s, oh, that’s the, that’s the sweet sauce there, Jim.
Jim Fielding: Totally. And support. And support to make mistakes. I think that’s the other thing, Russel, like I, we made mistakes. He didn’t call me and be like, well, that was dumb. Because he knew that I was beating myself up first, anyway. I didn’t need him. But, but he also would call and say, that’s okay. You took a swing and it was a miss. Like you don’t, we used to, I mean, he. He, he had come from Nike, so he was a sports guy. Luckily, I love sports too. And he did. He’d do a lot of, well, you went for the home run and you should have gone for a single. There was a lot of those kind of conversations.
And I got it, right? Like you went for the three point shot, you should have gone for the layup. I like that made sense to me. I was like, okay, I got it.
Russel Lolacher: Well, Jim, for this episode, we like to set the table. We like to get a little clarity and with our topic today do being about authenticity, I think the most important thing we need to do to start off is defining what the hell we’re even talking about. Because what one person thinks is authentic could be very different from another.
So let’s make sure we’re singing from the same song sheet here. How do you define authenticity, especially in relation to leadership?
Jim Fielding: Yeah, I mean, I, I really give full credit to Brene Brown because I use a version of her definition. I think you know, I, her TEDTalk from like 2012, I think it is on authenticity, really struck with, stuck with me. And to me, my simple definition of authenticity is creating safe physically and psychologically safe spaces where people are allowed to bring them full selves to that environment, right?
Whether that be a community or a workspace or a family. And when I say they’re full selves. Their good, their bad, their ugly, their warts, their, their talents, their opportunities. You know, it’s, it’s really you accept the person unconditionally and I, it’s all rooted for me and we’ve talked before, Russel, it’s all rooted for me in storytelling in that everybody has a unique story, right?
Like even though we’re all human beings, we all have unique, we all have unique DNA, we all have a unique story. And to me, I always wanted as a leader to create that environment where they got to live their full story, because my theory was that that meant I got the best productivity outta them. If they weren’t worrying about playing a role or not being themselves, then that freed up their mind to be innovative and creative, and they actually enjoyed coming to work.
And I always thought, I think authentic leadership is very human centered leadership and I think it’s an offshoot of servant leadership actually, where I always felt it was the leader’s job to set that tone and to set that environment. In the olden days, I would, it would’ve been called situational leadership, meaning not everybody needed to be managed exactly the same way.
That you as a leader had to identify and modify yourself to bring the best out of a team. And I, and I think that works if your team is three people, you know 30 ,300 or, you know, I had teams up to 10,000. I mean, so. It. I, I really felt that, that it was my job and it was actually my executive team’s job to create that it’s culture to create that culture of authenticity.
Russel Lolacher: So what are we getting wrong? Because we throw authenticity around like it’s a keyword or an SEO exercise. So what are we getting wrong with this definition?
Jim Fielding: I mean, I think, I think some people, and I get asked this a lot, like on the tour and on my speaking gigs, by the way, there are degrees of authenticity, right? There are, you know, I always talk about like having a code switcher on my arm, right? Of that. I read a room and I read a situation deciding like how authentic I’m gonna go, and that doesn’t mean I’m being inauthentic.
It just means, again, sometimes you need to set boundaries about how much you’re gonna share. Sometimes it’s inappropriate for certain workspaces or certain cultures to share your full story. Some people are uncomfortable with the full story or the emotions. Again, I think you have to adapt, and I think, I think what we tend to get wrong in authentic leadership is it’s everybody treats it as very black or white, like on or off. And I actually think it’s gray. And I think all great leaders and managers know you are leading in the gray and that you have to adapt and, and change as circumstances change, as your team changes. And I think the culture, like the foundation of your culture can be there, but your culture changes every time you bring on a new hire, every time you, you know, change a department or an org structure. And I like it because to me, the culture is a living organism, right? Because it’s made up of human beings. Human beings have challenges. Human beings change. Human beings grow. Human, human beings have different needs.
Again, you need to adapt. And I think that’s the mistake that a lot of people make with authentic leadership is I’m gonna be authentic. You know, I’m gonna be on a hundred all day. And I’m like, no. That’s not the way it is. Like there’s shades, you know, there’s a lever. A lot of it gets wrapped up in, that I was, that I had a bias in hiring, right? Oh, I only wanted to hire I mean, I, I remember people saying, oh, Jim only wants to hire cheerleaders or extroverts. And I’m like, what? No way. Like I want the entire, I want everybody, and by the way, everybody thinks I’m an extrovert. I’m actually an ambivert.
I’m an extrovert and introvert. I need my introvert time as much as any, I’m not a full introvert. And I, I’m really proud when I look back at my teams, especially the last 10 or 15 years of my career, that you would look at my team and we looked unique, we looked different, we looked, and I loved that kind of stew of everybody having different points of view and different experiences and different backgrounds.
I love that, especially when you’re in a consumer face. I was always in consumer facing industries, so I, I felt it was important to be representative.
Russel Lolacher: Is diversity a measuring stick? So I’m kind of curious that from a, from authenticity, even with shades, what is, what is your level of knowing that this organization’s authentic, or I know this team is being authentic. How do we know?
Jim Fielding: Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, I, I think part of what we’re going through right now in diversity or DEI is this performative of like counting and I never, I personally never liked that counting thing. I always tried to talk about representation and I basically wanted to look around a room, and in diversity there’s visible diversity and there’s invisible diversity, and I always wanted to look around a room of employees or a team and say, is there, is there a diversity of thought? Is there a diversity of experience? Is there a diversity of background? Because again, I thought that mixture brought the best results out, particularly again in creative consumer facing industries. I think if people thought diversity was counting like how many of a certain race you had or how many of a certain gender you had, or how many of a certain sexuality you had, that’s when it became very performative and very frankly, people got angry about that. I think, I think it’s more about, to me, I see diversity or belonging inclusion cultures as a competitive advantage because the, and a business imperative because the employee pool that you’re pulling from, particularly for me, I spent most of my career in California.
If I tried to hire a certain gender or race only. I wouldn’t have had a pool to pull from. I mean, I wouldn’t, and, and my thing, and I think any hiring manager says I wanted the best and the brightest. I wanted the most innovative, the, the, the most intelligent, the most experienced. And that was, I was colorblind. I was gender blind, I was gender identification blind because I was going for the best and the brightest. And to me, the, you know, and I’m working really hard right now, Russel, as you know, to try and get this story out of whatever DEI 2.0 is gonna be, because DEI, even though, you know, everybody says they’re rolling it back and people aren’t doing it.
You have no choice if you’re going to be a leader, particularly in the United States. We’re only getting more diverse. We’re not getting less diverse. We’re just not.
Russel Lolacher: Is, this is where I struggle a bit with authenticity and terms like bringing your full self to work. I agree with it in practice, but what if your full self is an asshole? Like authentically people are, can be horrible. They can be. I’m bringing my full self. I’m just saying it like it is, right.
Jim Fielding: Thousand percent. I love this question, Russel, and you’re not the first person to ask me this. I get asked this a lot on the road. By the way, being, being an asshole or doing something unethical or doing something illegal. And you can’t sit there and say, well, I’m, that’s authentic. I’m gonna cook the books.
That’s my authenticity. That’s not, no, I mean, that is a performance issue. That is a communication. And by the way, I addressed performance issues my entire career. I put people on performance improvement plans. I fired people for not performing their job correctly, and I laid people off. I mean, honestly, when you worked at Disney, we reorged every year, whether we were up 20% or down 20%. And so I learned how to manage reductions in force and I learned how to. But you do not accept… that’s not an acceptable answer for bad behavior. That’s just pure bad behavior. And it’s like, that’s fine if that’s your 100% identity. First off, you probably weren’t a right hire.
And I would say in that case, like I would’ve tried to pick that up in the recruiting and the interviewing. But, no, it, it does not give you, and it does not give you a right, even though I believe in freedom of speech and stuff, you can’t go around a building and be a bully and, and, you know, tell people they’re not worthy or they’re doing their job wrong.
That doesn’t work either. I mean, there are fundamental rules of working on a team and fundamental rules of working for companies that are foundational to team success, that have nothing to do with authenticity. And that might be your authenticity. Some people are meaner other people. But again, you, you better learn how to control it in a work environment or you won’t be part of the team.
Russel Lolacher: It also goes back to definitions. What’s mean to you might not be mean to somebody else. It might just be direct. Right. Might be, yeah.
Jim Fielding: Yeah, and I think as a leader, you know, this Russel, if I was having that issue with somebody, it’s not that I’m just walking in and firing them. I would be sitting down with them and saying, what is going on? Why are you like, why are you walking around the, the office being so difficult to work with?
Is there something fundamentally going on that we need to understand that we need to fix? There may be a systemic problem or maybe there’s something going on at home that I don’t know about, but you’re bringing it into the office and if you’re comfortable with sharing it, I wanna help you.
Particularly if it’s a behavior change, right? If you’ve had an employee for two years and all of a sudden their behavior changes, again, it’s your job to try and get into it without violating their confidentiality, without putting them in an awkward position. But to me, authenticity in the cultures I build, and I’m so glad you brought this up, it starts with the recruiting process and it starts in the interview process, right? It’s as you’re building the team, because if you hire someone who is an individual contributor and they’ve been an individual contributor their entire life, and then you put them in and say, I want you to work on a team of 10, that’s not being fair to them because that’s, again, their authenticity is they like to work in a cubicle and do their job and you know, they don’t really wanna work on a team. But if the job you’re hiring for requires team work and team building, then you probably didn’t hire correctly.
Russel Lolacher: I’m glad you brought up hiring. I’m gonna get back to that in a second.
Jim Fielding: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: I’m thrilled that we sort of set the table on what authenticity is and isn’t. Now I wanna move into understanding ourselves better. So one of the biggest pieces of relationships at work is our relationships with ourselves.
So…
Jim Fielding: Oh gosh, yes.
Russel Lolacher: What would you say are some of the internal barriers we put in front of ourselves to prevent us from being truly authentic?
Jim Fielding: Well, I mean, listen, we all have that inner voice or an inner saboteur, as I say. You know, I write in my book, mine’s named Jiminy Cricket and he can be good or he can be bad, right? Like he sits on one shoulder and reinforces my good behavior. But he also can give me lots of insecurities and self-doubt.
And so I think a lot of it is going through some of that work younger in your career to really understand there’s so many tools now that you can, I mean, you know, personality tests, you know, assessments where you can really dive in and look at yourself and say, what am I good at? And what am I not good at?
What do I like to do and what do I not like to do? And by the way, again, we all have that story. We’re all human beings. We all have strengths. We all have developmental opportunities, we all have outright weaknesses. And I think, you know, a lot of the tools that I’ve used, you know, DISC and Myers-Briggs and 16 Personalities.
Not only does it show your quote, normal personality or your normal traits, it shows how you react under stress. And I think that was really interesting for me because I changed a lot under stress and I tended to be not a very good manager under stress. And I wore my stress on my face, like I can never play poker.
And that was a huge insight for me earlier in my career is that by nature being in retail and media and entertainment, there’s stressful indu industries. You’re dealing with deadlines, you’re dealing with changes in the marketplace, and I had to learn how to kind of be a sponge on that stress and maintain calm and maintain professionalism because what I learned in my leadership style, I could swing an entire team’s mood just by my mood.
And I only learned that by going through some of this work and going and doing some of these assessments and getting the feedback. I also think one of the tools I use, and I know a lot of your listeners use it, I did a 360 review and more than once, and for those of you who don’t know, a 360 review means you asked people that work for you, people that you work for, peers, and even people in your family life to answer a survey about yourself.
It’s all anonymous. You can tell like what their relationship is. Well, peer, it depends on how many you ask, right? If you only ask one family member, you’re gonna know what family members say. But I always tried to ask a pretty big pool. That probably was the most illuminated. And again, that was at Disney. I did a couple 360 reviews and I definitely changed my style after that 360 review. So there are, especially these day and age with tech advancements, there’s plenty of tools, free tools you can take online to like even learn about yourself. But I felt like the 360 review was probably one of the biggest tools for me.
Russel Lolacher: So I’m hearing one of the biggest superpowers I talk about for leaders is their self-awareness. You have to start there. You have to start there. So. How is self-awareness key in that? Because I mean, we’re, knowing yourself is great. These tools are fantastic, but it’s also a matter of understanding like how you grew up, your socioeconomic situation.
And I, it, I, I like tools. I’ve taken quite a few myself.
Jim Fielding: Yeah, yeah,
But it doesn’t provide a lot of context. It provides a lot of, here’s a word, you’re courageous ’cause you fit within the 79 words that we’ve provided. Which is helpful and informative, but it’s not personalized as much as you think. And if we’re talking about authenticity, I feel like we need to get a little bit more personal.
Russel Lolacher: I guess where I wanted to sort of move that is you talked earlier about degrees of authenticity.
Jim Fielding: Mm-hmm.
Russel Lolacher: So if we better understand ourselves, which is great and really important to do, how do we know which degree we’re showing up going? You know what, I am too much in these certain situations. Wow. I fly off the handle real easily in these situations.
Jim Fielding: Mm-hmm.
Russel Lolacher: So…
Jim Fielding: I pop, right?
Russel Lolacher: How do we know where the flags are? The beige, the green, and the red ones so we can adjust in the workplace for ourselves. Mm-hmm.
Jim Fielding: No, no, I think, I think you’re, well you’re basically doing a commercial for executive coaching and in some cases therapy. But I think if people. Do not have the ability or the means to access, you know, personal like therapy, psychology or executive coaching, which are two very different things by the way.
I think part of it is then being able to make mistakes and try some things like test and roll and then own it enough to say that you’re testing rolling. So for me, for example. I grew up with childhood trauma. I mean, I am, I’m an adult child of an alcoholic. I grew up with an alcoholic home. My mom was, was an alcoholic. Functioning alcoholic, but alcoholic.
I suffered with, you know, my sexuality and accepting myself as as a gay man. So, I had to work through that trauma. To your point, that childhood trauma, because some of my reactions to your point of context was because I was the adult child of an alcoholic and I was used to being a control freak because I was in a situation where my sometimes my home life was not in control and I became hyper controlling because at a very young age, I was helping my mom a lot and trying to keep stuff together. And so I learned that through therapy and also frankly, going to Al-Anon, right? So I needed to go get some outside help to understand that because to your point, that was the context. Now, that’s one of the things that I was asked when I, when I was interviewing for a job. Or I tell people to ask, interviewing for a job.
Are mental health services included in your benefits? Many companies have where you get 10 sessions for $20 co-pay or something. That’s, I mean, I accessed that my entire career. Like I, I went to therapy for a long time. I had an executive coach at Disney. That was an incredible benefit for me. I think that’s why I went into executive coaching myself.
But I think what you’re talking about is very personal and is a journey to understanding yourself. I was a journaler. I went back and read journals from when I had kept my journals the whole time. I went back to understand myself better ’cause I had forgotten some of that stuff. And I also had, luckily I have an incredible sibling relationship.
I have one sister, a younger sister who is a truth teller. She’s probably the most direct person in my life who frankly calls me on my bs. And you know, like my favorite phrases where you wake up, Russel, is like when somebody in your personal life, like a spouse or a partner, or your sister says, I don’t work for you. Stop managing me. And you’re like, woo. That to me is hit me with a wet towel, right? I mean, slap me hard. And she would say to me, you’re not, you’re not being real right now. You’re not really, you know, you’re playing a role like I want. And she calls me, my dad’s name was Jim. So I, to her and my niece is, I’m Jimmy, right?
And she’s I want Jimmy right now. I don’t want Disney Jim, I don’t want Dreamworks Jim, I want Jimmy. So I, I say to people, and I know, you know this concept, I say, form your board of directors, your board of advisors early in your career, and have people who are gonna advise you, you know, beyond mentoring.
Like I think there’s roles on a board of advisors, just like when you build up corporate board of directors when you’re a CEO, right? And that truth teller is one of the roles on the board of advisors. And you know, for me it happened to be my sister and happens to be my sister. She still cries BS on me.
Russel Lolacher: It’s so important to have that circle of friends and a network, and I don’t think enough people do. Or they think it’s people at work that have to be that when it could be anybody and everybody. You just need to have a connection. It’s about relationships to…
Jim Fielding: It is
Russel Lolacher: Benefit yourself.
Jim Fielding: It, it is. And I think when people get too formal about it, Russel, and they say, oh, I need to get a mentor, or I need to build a network, and they make it again very performative and like a to-do list. It’s like it’s kind of gotta happen naturally, but, but my advice to your point is do it earlier in your career.
I probably did it a little bit later and you know, my… I had a great peer mentor who was somebody at my same level, and I still have a peer mentor who had, was outside my industry right? But did my same role, but outside of retail and media, right? And so. I think that’s really important too, because sometimes they have to be outside your company.
They have to be sometimes outside your industry because otherwise you kind of get into that echo chamber, right? And it’s basically like a feedback loop that’s not really as honest as it could be. But I, I had mentors my entire career, but I tell people this all the time, you know? It’s the mentee’s job to have a productive mentor relationship, and it’s not the mentor’s relationship to make it productive.
It is the mentee’s job to make it productive. So…
Russel Lolacher: Can authenticity change or definition of authenticity change throughout it? Because as you said, it started early, there’s a lot of challenges and trauma that you overcame. So what you thought was authentic before may have changed with that knowledge.
Jim Fielding: Hmm. For sure. I mean, I started. mean, not to get into the book, but I started my career in the closet. I, went to work in the eighties, like people were not out at work in the eighties for the young listeners to your podcast. I spent the first three, almost four years of my career in the closet living a double light.
I was not living authentic, but I was being safe. I brought up that word earlier because it was not an environment that I could live as an out gay man. And, I made the choice to leave that company and go to another company because I was ready to embrace my, my story more and to live as an out gay man.
So to your point, my authenticity changed. My story didn’t change. Like it was still the same story, but again, that degrees of authenticity, it changes. And I also think the old adage, as you get older, you get wiser is true, right? You learn new things. You learn new skills. You learn what you’re good at, what you’re not good at, what you like, what you don’t like.
There’s new tools. Before we started this, you and I were talking about AI and all these new things that are coming on, right? I, I think anybody listening to this never worked for me. If I, if they knew that I was spending 5, 6, 10 hours a week on graphic design, they’d laugh because I’m not a graphic designer.
But now I need to be. So I, I think it changes, your story, changes your authenticity. Changes. What doesn’t change in my mind is your commitment to authenticity.
Russel Lolacher: Love that. Love that. Look at that little, I almost had, I almost wanted to give you a space at the end of that. Just go period. Done. Like sir.
Jim Fielding: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: That I love that impact of that. So we’ve talked about us understanding authenticity for ourselves and really digging into it. Now we bring authenticity into the workplace.
Jim Fielding: Mm-hmm.
Russel Lolacher: Engaging, working with other people. How does a leader’s authenticity, good or bad impact workplace culture?
Jim Fielding: Well, I think the leader, and again, it doesn’t matter if you’re leading a team of two, 20, 2000, the leader sets the tone, right? And we’ve, we’ve said this for years, all the classic leadership books, management by walking around, walk the walk, talk the talk, right? The leader sets the mission, the vision, the tone of the culture for sure.
I also think the company sets the tone of culture, right? Because there’s a company culture that you’re leading within, especially for me, ’cause I always worked at big companies. So Disney had a culture, Dreamworks had a culture. I was just operating my own mini culture within the bigger culture. I think I set the tone again, back to the interview, back to the recruiting, back to the onboarding.
I set the tone by being like who they saw in the interviews, right? Being who they saw in meetings, large meeting, large group meetings, small group meetings, one-on-ones, and by them seeing that I was emotional, that I was a human being. I had good days, I had bad days, and I wasn’t hiding in my office on the bad days.
You, you instantly through almost osmosis are setting a tone that like, okay, he’s serious about what he said. And you know what, we talked about hiring earlier and people are so shocked by this, and it didn’t matter even when I was CEO of Claire’s, there was a certain level of hire and I had to change it based on what my title was and how many employees I had. But, so it Claire’s, director and above was the, the level I went to. I, there was not a director or above in the field or in home base that I was not part of the interview process on. Now I wanna be clear, it often meant they were down to two candidates and they’d give me the finalists, the two finalists, and I’d spend 15 minutes with each of them. And then I would make my opinion. But in many cases I was not the final opinion. The hiring manager was the final opinion. But what that 15 minutes did Russel meant that I had a personal connection to that employee from their interview, and my questions in the interview were not technical or could they do the job because I knew if they got to me that he already cleared all the hurdles about their ability to do the job.
My questions were, tell me about, tell me a story about yourself. Tell me something that would surprise me about you. Tell me what you, without violating finding out their age or their children’s status, or anything like that. Like tell me what, tell me what you do for fun on the weekends. Like I wanted to know something personal about them because if they got the job and they started, I was able to know their name and I had something in my memory bank to say, oh, he plays soccer on the weekends. He’s on an adult soccer team. To me, that was the culture. And I also like doing it because I’m a people person. In other companies, I would do manager level and above, depending on the size of the team.
And at Fox, you know, when I took the job as President of Consumer Products and Experience at Fox, I think we had 60 open positions, like the team was like, had been decimated. So that was a lot of meetings, but I really felt it eight, 12 months later because I, I had been so personally involved in the, the creating of that.
And I’m not saying it was like my way or the highway. It wasn’t like there, that’s what I’m saying. Oh, he’s a gym person. No, you weren’t about a gym person. It was, I wanted to know about what made you tick as a human being, not… again, if you got to that point, you could technically do the job. Like it wasn’t a question of could you do accounting?
Russel Lolacher: But not everybody can go, Hey Jim, the CEO, can you sit down on this hiring panel? So is there some way and, and not all, I’ll be blunt, a lot of CEOs are crap. They’re not good. They’re, when it comes to this people soft skill stuff.
Jim Fielding: I think, yeah, I would cha yeah, I would challenge, I would challenge the CEO. Like again, if you, if you don’t have the time, like figure out what level, maybe it’s senior vice president above that you wanna be involved in right at your company. But with technology now and Zoom and stuff, you can find 15 minutes in your day for key hires. I mean, you really can. I’m not saying you have to be in person, especially, I had global responsibility. I had direct reports in Japan and China and Europe. I didn’t sit down in person with every person, but I definitely did a Zoom or a teams meeting because then when I did go to their market. And meet ’em in person. There was that little glint of recognition and something would be in my memory. So I, I would say a, a leader, again, depending on their role, depending on the size of their organization, they have to decide at what level. But I think it should be farther than just your direct reports.
Obviously as a leader you hire your direct reports, but I even if you can only do your direct reports, direct reports, okay. You know, that is still setting the tone.
Russel Lolacher: How do you know your organization is broken in this way? How do you know it’s an inauthentic leadership organization? To, to be able to have to, you know, we should all be intentional. We should all sure it is. But we sometimes can’t see the train running at us down the tunnel, see? Ooh, pretty lights.
And we don’t really realize…
Jim Fielding: You, you know, Russel, I know your experience. You’ll know, I mean, you’ll start to see it in performance, like maybe numbers will start to suffer. You’ll start to see it in, you’ll feel it in meetings, virtual meetings or in person meetings like the, these undercurrents of something being off. You might even witness it if you’re in an office environment where you’re seeing little conflicts between different functions, right?
Creative arguing with finance or finance arguing with planning. You again, if you are worth the job that you’re in, which is a leader of people, right? If you’re, then you have to be doing active listening and you have to be doing active watching, and that’s where that whole management by walking around comes in.
If you come into your office every day, and I’m putting office in quotes, even if your office is at home and you don’t put on your active listening ears or your active watching ears, then again, I don’t think you’re doing your job as a leader because you have to be doing temperature checks. And is it more challenging in a remote work environment?
Yes. Is it more challenging in a hybrid work environment? Yes. Most of my career, my teams were, for the most part in an office that I was in. And if I needed to, I could say, Hey, everybody at 1:00 PM today, please meet in the conference room. We’re gonna have a conversation. You can still do that. It’s just, you know, virtual.
And then with these offices coming back, you know, two or three days a week, I keep saying to people even that I’m coaching, make sure when they do come back in the office that you’re giving them time to be together and be collaborative. Because if they come in and they’re just sitting on their headphones and Zoom calls all day, then they’re gonna want to do that from home. I think human beings, I have a fundamental belief, people can disagree, I think human beings by nature are communal animals. Some people aren’t. But I’d say for the most part, we actually like to be in community. And I always use, as an example, movie theaters. You know, Russel, I was in media for a long time.
They, we talked about the death of the movie theater, right? Streaming and Blu-ray DVDs and a hundred inch TVs and home theater systems. Were gonna kill movie theaters. Last time I looked, post pandemic, good movies that are made for movie theaters are packed. And it’s why, because we like that collective experience.
A horror film, a musical drama. You like that collective experience of being in community even with people you don’t know and you all gasp at the same time, or you all laugh at the same time. There’s something we really like about that. I think it’s why live theater is doing well in, you know, Broadway, West End. Especially post pandemic, I think human beings crave connection and I think we crave being in community. I’m saying the majority, I know there’s people who absolutely love isolation. Good for them. I’m saying the majority of human beings like to be in community.
Russel Lolacher: That’s fair. That’s fair. And I think to your point earlier, being a vulnerable leader, being an authentic leader also models behavior so other people feel safe psychologically to go, oh, that’s, that’s an okay to way to show up. Well, I, I can do that as well. I, I, I think that is beneficial at the team level.
I think it’s beneficial at the organizational level. Obviously at the team level you have a bit more connection because it’s direct. But as the organization you’re like, oh, okay. And I don’t mean executives, sometimes I think the ship has sailed on a lot of executives because they’ve been rewarded for not having to be humans just deliverable.
They, but I think at every level, if you can show up authentically, it sets the blueprint for others to feel safe to be so as well. So I love that.
Jim Fielding: Completely. And Russel, I have a quick authenticity story for your listeners that I think you’ll love because it’s from my time at Fox. I had a manager level to your point, but she had a team of four people, high performing manager, somebody we really, really believed in. She started to leave the office quote early, like around 3:30 or 4:00, and it, after a couple weeks, it became an issue with her team and I, she did not report directly to me.
She reported to one of my direct reports and I said to my direct report, let’s sit down with her because something’s going on. We pulled her in. She looked nervous like she was gonna get in trouble, and we said, I’m not gonna use her name, but we said, employee X. What’s going on? Like your team is noticing you’re leaving early, you’ve been kind of absent in the afternoons.
You’ve been missing four o’clock meetings, and she said, and again, this was her authenticity. I’m going through a divorce. I haven’t told you guys this yet. I’m a mother of four. I’m now a single mother of four, and I have to leave early to pick my kids up from school and daycare because of the commute in Los Angeles. Literally the mood in the room changed, so it was not a performance issue. And I said to her, and this goes back to being vulnerable, I said, did you tell your team that? Not the whole story, but did you just tell your team you have childcare issues? And she said, no, I didn’t think that was appropriate. I said, oh, I fundamentally disagree. I don’t think it’s about privacy. You need to pull your team together and say, Hey, there’s some changes going on in my life and I’m now in charge of pickup after school, and until I get my daycare situation worked out, I’m going to be come… because she was coming in earlier.
That was the thing. She was coming in at 7:00 AM but nobody was there. They didn’t see her. And she literally said to her team, for the next period, I’m gonna be working like 7:00 to 3:30 instead of our quote, normal nine to five. Instantly, the mood of that team changed. Instantly. Because she was honest and vulnerable and she had an issue going on in her life she had to take care of, and they didn’t pry, they didn’t get personal, but then they stopped the judging.
You know what I’m saying? Like I think that’s, and that was her authenticity for that period. She was going through a breakup. She was now a single mother. That’s her story.
Russel Lolacher: Relationships are so essential for figuring out authenticity for yourself and for your teams and the organization. So I wanna dig into some tangible things we can do to be on more authentic or maybe understand authenticity that’s around it. You’ve given great examples of therapies, a great one for ourselves.
Tools to learn each other. I’m now hearing if you wanna really understand authenticity in your organization, curiosity might be a really key way of figuring that out. How does, how can that show up? Perfect example in your story there is, can we sit down and talk about what you’re going through? But you have to lay the groundwork for that too.
Jim Fielding: You do. You do. I mean, one of the tools that I love, and it’s a super simple tool, and I think it’s actually a team building tool. And again, I mean anybody can Google this, it’s called a lifeline exercise, right? And or uh uh, and you, you literally say to people, come into this meeting. That doesn’t have to be pretty, but draw a timeline of your life and what the high points of your life were and the low points of your life and explain them to us. It’s like an icebreaker. It’s like a way of getting to know somebody. I think that’s a great tool of just, again, stoking curiosity because all of a sudden you find out that somebody was like a college division, one track and field champion. That you never knew. Or they’re one of 10 kids. Something about them, like you start to learn their uniqueness. I think another great one is, is to start meetings to take, like meeting management 101, when you pull a group of people together, have an agenda, have a set that’s published ahead of time, have a set of expectations so they know what meeting they’re coming to, and then literally put on the agenda warmup or icebreaker. And have, there’s so many different ones. You can Google, what are 10 great icebreakers, right? Tell me something, go around the room, tell me something about yourself that no one else knows. Or something that would really surprise you. And again, you know, someone says, you know, I’m one of 10 children.
Or you know, I was actually born in Japan. Like my dad was in the military. It doesn’t have to be soul wrenching, right? It can be my first job was in an auto mechanic shop, right? But it, it creates that humanism again, right where it, it makes them, it makes everybody in that room slightly more human and slightly more accessible to each other.
And they’re not just bluntly widgets performing a job in a company. They’re humans coming together to work. And particularly in creative organizations, which I was always running, I think it was really, really important to have those human connections.
Russel Lolacher: And I think it says the power of communication as well, because I’ve, I’ve been with teams and I, I’m like, I don’t really know your motivations. I don’t really know where you’re coming from. I don’t know what your values are. Do they align with the organizations? Should they? So people will take the information you’re describing and keep it to themselves.
And go, good. I know me better. Fantastic. But in exercises like that, it’s, yeah, but now everybody in the room knows you better.
Jim Fielding: Mm-hmm.
Russel Lolacher: You can be authentic because you’re communicating and we’re doing this vulnerably out loud.
Jim Fielding: You get it. Yeah. I love that you, you so understand this. Yeah. Like you and I would be great together working together ’cause you so get it. No, and the other there’s other, all these hints I give, and I do a lot of this in coaching too. I mean, I’m not consulting, but in coaching, go have different people run meetings, make them be in charge of the meeting.
Like you don’t always have to run the meeting. And, and by putting other people in charge of the meeting, the meetings are different because different managers communicate differently. But it’s a really good exercise for someone to plan a team meeting or plan a business update meeting.
You know, when I, when I was in an office environment with a team, we definitely had a meeting cadence. We definitely, you know, we had team meetings every week at the same time. And I would change who was in charge of it. And there’s all these other hints too, like we did meeting free Fridays. Fridays were not days where you did any scheduled meeting
Because Friday became a very good catchup day for you to work on your work. But also what you started to see happening is people kind of walking around the office and just doing those casual hallway conversations or meeting up at the coffee thing. I mean, one of the best investments I made at Fox, this gonna sound so stupid, I put in a a commercial grade espresso machine, right?
Like it was an expense, right? Because it was like those espresso pod things. Why did I do that? Okay, I’m a capitalist. Number one. My people were running out to Starbucks every two hours and be gone, right? By me providing them free and espresso. And I had to justify this to everybody. Finance and everybody else. It doesn’t mean they still went, didn’t go to Starbucks. Of course they did. ’cause it was Starbucks, but they, maybe one time a day they’d go into that espresso machine. Every time I walked into where that espresso machine was, I put one on one side of the building and one on the other. There was two or three people talking while they were making their nespressos, and they might have been, one was from graphic design, one was from finance, and one was from HR.
It doesn’t mean one team got up and went and made coffees together. You know what I’m saying? And I think that those spontaneous, natural, again, human conversations were huge for building the culture. What are you doing this weekend? Oh, you’re going to the, you’re going to the Madonna concert?
Oh, you’re kid has a soccer tournament like. And sometimes I’d walk in to make my espresso or get a juice or whatever, and I would just join in. Just observe. Just listen. We’re humans. That’s again, the, the humanness of it. It was the best investment I ever made. And by the way, they bitched at me like, you know, oh my God, oh my God, the rent on the machine, blah, blah, blah.
I’m like, fine. Take it outta my travel budget. I don’t care. Like it’s, to me, that was an investment.
Russel Lolacher: I think it’s key to understand that the more comfortable people are, the more they understand each other as human beings and not a means to an end, or what you can and can’t do for me, the more comfortable they’ll feel to share that authentic information about themselves, their background, who they are.
Not a lot of people are comfortable with that. We’ve talked about diversity and there’s a lot of people going, I don’t care about you. I come to work.
Jim Fielding: Totally. Totally.
Russel Lolacher: I care about me. But to be a leader, I’m sorry, you’re gonna have to get out of that. Out of that. So going back to, you’ve mentioned coaching, how do you coach authenticity? How do you coach that in people?
Jim Fielding: Well, I mean, it’s funny, I mean, I feel, I feel like this podcast I’m gonna use is advertisement for coaching. ’cause all these questions you asked me, I mean, all of my coaching engagements. First off, before I start a coaching engagement with somebody, we have at least two quote free sessions where we get to know each other and make sure that the goals are very clear about why this person’s engaging a coach and that I’m the right kind of coach for them, because there’s many different kinds of coach coaches. I am a very EQ coach, right? And so if you’re not gonna be comfortable with doing a lifeline exercise or personality assessment, I can refer you to other kinds of coaches who are more IQ coaches but I’m, I’m more EQ. So, very similar to what we said, when, when I start with a new client, I have ’em do the lifeline exercise and I have ’em do a personality assessment. And, and if they’ve had one recently, I’ll say, well, just send me the one you had because I’m trying to understand again, the context. And in the first couple of sessions, it’s like getting to know you and I’m asking them questions that are bringing up things from their past. Not necessarily dredging up things from their past, but what’s the largest team you’ve ever managed? Tell me the time where you felt the most happy at work. Tell me the time you felt the most stressed at work. Those are the kind of questions a coach asks to get them talking so that you really understand what, what makes them motivated, and that’s where a, a good coaching relationship, I require a four month minimum because it’s not solved. Like you can’t have one coaching session and be like, okay, that’s it. It’s, to me, it’s weekly sessions for three, four, or five months where that relationship grows. And to be an effective coach, you have to be an incredible active listener, and you have to be an incredible question asker because the rule is, you know, the client should be talking 70 to 80% of the time. They should be talking ’cause then you’re hearing things and then you’re like, oh, I’m gonna ask a question about that, or I’m gonna note that. And I, for me personally, I, I like one-on-one coaching and I like group coaching, but I, I, I purposely don’t take on a huge coaching roster because I wanna have really quality relationships with my clients.
Russel Lolacher: If you had one action somebody could do tomorrow to be either a more authentic leader or, or to bring it to their team, where would you say they should start?
Jim Fielding: Well, I think you’ve hit on it so much. It’s spend some time looking in the mirror, figuratively or literally, and get in touch with yourself and your self-awareness. What makes you tick? What do you like? What do you not like? What do you wanna change about yourself? Because listen, there’s all things we wanna be better at.
Like none of us. I mean, we’re never perfect. I, I think it’s doing that self-awareness of and, and however you get there, right? For some people it might be by reading a book or some magazine articles or, you know, some online articles. Or it may be you know, it may be again seeing a therapist or whatever I think if you really wanna do it, like you have to be completely self-aware.
And self-aware means knowing what you’re good at, what you’re not good at, what you like and what you don’t like, and owning that and, and accepting yourself unconditionally. There are things that I’m not good at I’ll just use a great example. I’m good at interpreting numbers. I hate doing numbers.
For me to be an effective leader, I need a strong CFO. I need an incredible CFO that I can trust implicitly because I’m happy reading reports. But if you ask me to do a ledger or a P&I statement or a three year or five year plan, my head will pop off. That’s not, I can do it. I don’t like to do it.
I know I need a strong CFO or a strong head of finance on my team that I trust. That’s my self-awareness, you know? So.
Russel Lolacher: Thanks so much for being authentic with us.
Jim Fielding: Oh, I love it.
Russel Lolacher: I couldn’t believe I said That just so cheesy. It was just such an easy grab. It was.
Jim Fielding: It’s there. It’s, it’s, the word is tattooed on my forehead at this point, I think.
Russel Lolacher: Thanks for sharing your insights and experience with us, Jim today. Really appreciated the conversation.
Jim Fielding: Oh my gosh. I appreciate you so much. Thank you for giving me the opportunity.
Russel Lolacher: That’s Jim Fielding. He’s an executive coach, professional speaker and author. Please check out his book. It’s called All Pride, No Ego, A Queer Executive’s Journey on Living and Leading Authentically. Take care, Jim. Thank you so much.
Jim Fielding: Have a great day.
Russel Lolacher: That’s it.
Jim Fielding: Yay. That was awesome.