Leadership should be driven with purpose and meaning. It is not just about leading for the sake of it. It should be the foundation that puts the business and the people within it to success. In this episode, Jayson Krause, the founder of Level 52, shares with us how he is working to help organizations disrupt and accelerate a new breed of meaningful leadership. He shares the unique points of the company and how they are experimenting with work these days. Jayson then lets us in on his upcoming book, The Science Behind Success: What Every Leader Needs to Know About Mindset, Influence, Culture, & Performance, where he dives into the four elements of science to create actionable tools for leaders to make a bigger difference and deliver better value.

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Accelerating A New Breed Of Meaningful Leadership With Jayson Krause

In this episode, I’m here with Jayson Krause. He’s a leadership strategist, author and speaker who specializes in helping organizations disrupt and accelerate a new breed of meaningful leadership. He’s the Founder of Level 52, a boutique leadership and executive coaching firm with global reach. Jayson has led the Level 52 team as it has expanded to work with leaders and organizations from Singapore to Silicon Valley through an innovative approach to leader development.

In 2019, Level 52 was awarded the Best Learning & Development Initiative at The Workies Awards in New York, New York. In 2010, he co-created The Science Behind Success, a disruptive approach to leadership based on the physiology of high performance, which was piloted at the Warrington School of Business at the University of Florida. His book The Science Behind Success: What Every Leader Needs to Know About Mindset, Influence, Culture & Performance is scheduled to be released in December of 2020. I’m excited to have Jayson on my show.

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Jayson, I’m super excited to have you on the show.

Thank you. I’m thrilled to be here.

Let’s dive in. Tell us a little bit about what you’re up to in your work right now.

At Level 52, we are constantly seeking to push the boundaries on how we can accelerate the development of strong, meaningful leaders. We do that through leader development programs, as well as leadership and executive coaching.

What makes you special? Lots of people are doing leadership development. What’s your stake in the ground around that?

It’s a couple of things. One, I obsessed with leadership. I spent eight years as a national team bobsled pilot. Being immersed in high-performance, there are little things that help teams be successful. Throughout my athletic career and then after I retired, I stayed obsessed, fascinated with this. Through collaboration with another athlete, Steve Mesler, who went on to win a gold medal in the 2010 Olympics, we were both up to speed on the latest emerging science. Years ago neuroscience was still fresh and new, but we started speaking about the elements of high-performance, neuroscience, behavioral and viral contagion and why it matters, epigenetics and all of the scientific backgrounds that make leadership makes sense. What makes us different is a blend of high performance and cutting edge science that demystifies leadership.

How do you choose your coaches?

We’ve got a variety of coaches. A lot of the individuals we work with are classic linear thinking industries, whether it’s software engineering, petroleum or structural engineering. There seems to be a lot but it’s not always the case. A lot of that linear thinking mindset and how we choose our coaches, the coaches that work with us, is do they have the mindset? Do they embody some of the qualities, the things that are important to us as a team, our organizational values? Do they know how to connect with our primary audience, the linear thinkers, which is why the scientific background creates the entry points so that people go, “I get it?” When you see your world differently, as you know, Melanie, then you can do things differently in your world.

I’ve been a coach for many years and for the first several years of them, every time I got a client in tech, I would have fear in my heart about linear thinkers. For the next several years, I ended up specializing in tech and it’s an interesting come from to present information differently and to think differently about the way I communicate with my clients now. How are you experimenting with your work these days?

It is a constant experiment. If we look at the products and services that we delivered at Level 52 compared to now, it’s significantly different. I landed from a program in Chicago at the beginning of March 2020. When the plane engine shut down two days after with COVID, we had significant business across North America and Asia that shut down. We were forced. Once we got over the pity party of the few days of seeing revenue evaporate, we quickly pivoted our programs. Instead of full-day leader development programs, we turn these into twelve-week, two hours a week where groups come together. It was fast-paced and highly experiential. That was a big experiment in March 2020. We’ve made tweaks every time we’ve delivered that program. It is without a doubt, 100% a better product than we ever had before.

I love that you have a vested client that you’re interacting with. The feedback loop is good. I love that you tweak it over and over again.

The Science Behind Success: What Every Leader Needs to Know About Mindset, Influence, Culture, & Performance

When you talk about the feedback loop, after every two-hour bite-sized segment, we have feedback forms. It’s what we call learning repetition forms that include feedback like, “What didn’t you like? What do you wish happened that didn’t?” If you look at that alone, we get significantly more feedback and the innovation of our programs happen directly as a result of client feedback.

I have had some similar experiences during COVID and it’s interesting to have that fire. You’re putting something into the fire when you’re co-creating with a client. It’s exciting as a practitioner to do that.

Finding constant ways to deliver better value, that’s the performing mindset.

You have a book. Tell us about your book.

The book is, The Science Behind Success: What Every Leader Needs to Know About Mindset, Influence, Culture & Performance. This is a deep dive into the four elements of science, how we specifically use them and actionable tools. It’s the same tools we use with leaders to make a bigger difference to deliver better value. It’s all captured along with real stories that we’ve pulled from our engagements.

Is there a story that you can tell us about your book?

There are several. There’s one story that most people can relate to. That is a story of how often we speak in shorthand, nebulous expressions and expect other people to understand what we’re saying. For example, a senior leader inside a company brought me in and he was lamenting during the whole time together saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong. I’ve been here for six months and from day one, I’ve been telling my team, ‘You need to take more ownership.’ I feel like I’m banging my head against the wall because I keep telling them to take ownership and they’re not doing it.” I asked him a question. I said, “What is ownership to you?” He paused and he’s like, “Take ownership.”

I’m like, “I get the word but what does it mean to you? What would you see people doing that would tell you they were taking ownership? What would you see them engaging in? What would they be saying? All of these things to build out the body and the clarity of what ownership is.” He could fully see it for himself and then communicate to his team. As important as understanding the clear picture, it’s as important to get clear about what is ownership. Tell me if I worked on your team, what would you see me doing, saying, all of the activities that would clearly indicate I’m not taking ownership?

We have a tool that we call bookending. With any of our requests and objectives, we increase the likelihood of success when the likelihood of people delivering the desirable of what you’re wanting them to do. If we simply take the time to bookend, “Melanie, this is what would excite me, these things. Just so we’re clear, these are the things that would disappoint me.” Now, we can evaluate ourselves and hopefully increase the likelihood that the desirable expression happens.

If you’re making a business request of someone or delegating a task, is that when you would use it?

The participants in our program constantly say, “Bookending would have solved that.” When it comes to articulating expectations, making requests out of colleagues, peers or even upstream to your leader or when I’m onboarding, if I’m onboarding you onto my company, they say, “Melanie, we have a value of what we call meaningful masochism. This is what it means. This isn’t what it means.” To give the full picture, both sides of the coin, this is what it is. This is what it isn’t. The tool of bookending is one of the many tools that we use that leaders stick in their toolkit and pull out frequently.

I like that thought. I like the language and it’s practical. What are leaders thinking about these days? What’s current, relevant and scary for the leaders that you talk to in your world?

There’s a lot. If there’s some resemblance of normal, what will that look like? What impact is it going to have on the business? How is everything changing buying behaviors? What does the market need? What does the market want? What is this going to do with a distributed workforce office? There are many question marks that leaders are having, what they’re experiencing. In a time of uncertainty, the place that we keep pulling them back to is where can you create certainty? What is important? It’s truly an invitation to focus on the process and juggling possible destinations. When you look at creating your 2021 strategic plan, you create a plan and you have to now put a little more effort into identifying possible pivot points.

I have a nebulous question. It’s important to talk about privilege and marginalization when we talk about leadership and leadership development specifically about women and people of color. I’m wondering how you grapple with those things in your programs and your book. What do you offer to people who don’t walk through life, walking easily into their leadership positions with privilege?

I don’t directly address it in the book. In our programs, we have leaders from different industries, different backgrounds and this is the way that we present it. Number one, when we look at diversity from it, whether it be gender, background or whatever it is. There are many forms of diversity that great leaders understand that diversity impacts in a positive way the quality of the outcome. The leaders that step into our programs understand that. They embrace it and they seek to create it. When it comes to what stands out with what you said is like the challenge of getting into a leadership position. When we look at the challenges of leaders, getting into a leadership position or creating whatever it is that you want, we invite leaders to fully step into a place of examining and engaging with the challenges in their environment. We all have different challenges.

What are you grappling with within your own mind right now?

Because we’re all different, we have different backgrounds, experiences and industries, one of the first things early on in the program that leaders do is identify all of the metaphorical weights and obstacles in our environment. We break them down into three columns. One is complaints and irritations. What are the little things in your environment that irritate you and that you complain about? Everything from, “Jayson doesn’t clean up the dishwasher in the staff room.” The next column is the stressors. The big problems that keep you up at night. These are different. These are often unsolved questions.

The last column is the pains. What are the deep pains, the hurts maybe from the past? Looking at these through a lens of agency. There may be different things that we all face that are going to make these challenges difficult. Once we spell them out, part of the process is we plot them on a matrix. We plan, we collaborate on how we might exercise these and approach these to achieve our ultimate objective, whatever that is, individually.

I am becoming more and more aware of both of my own privileges as a white cisgendered woman, the things that keep people up at night. There are some women who stay up at night worrying about how to interact with the men around them in a way that men never worry about. I can only hypothesize that people of color, women of color are also having those thoughts as they stay up at night worrying. It’s an interesting construct and I’m starting to believe that in leadership we have to think about it. We have to figure out what we teach about it or what we dialogue. I’m always curious about what thought has gone into these things.

What you said, whether what males can ask or say to females, vice versa, different races, here’s the reality, which is why coaching is important. We are all unaware of what we’re unaware of. This is our job as coaches, whether it’s bringing to light responses that come from a place of privilege. Whether it’s bringing to light opportunities or ways of engaging with the world that one might not see. Our job is to give the different lenses and the multiple windows that people can choose to look through their world and engage with it differently.

What keeps you up at night, Jayson?

There are many things. Aside from my four kids, when my wife is working a night shift as a paramedic every night, hoping she comes back healthy. I love the work that we do. I constantly want to make sure that we help leaders deliver a stronger impact on their world. Sometimes my wife gives me a hard time to a fault that I do obsess over those little things that make a big difference, how we can make slight tweaks to inspire, engage and get people exercising the important skills, mindsets to address the workplace, which for most people is the place where their hearts hurt the most, and that’s a problem.

You’ve been in this field for a long time. I love to ask people about imposter syndrome, what they’ve noticed, how people get stuck in it and how people get out of it. Is there anything you want to offer? I’m not asking you to reveal your deepest and darkest secrets, but more just as a professional, is there any insight that you can give to this topic?

Here’s the stance that we take and it’s not the truth. It’s just a stance and opinion. If I frame it this way, when people come into our programs and activity early on, we ask them to define leadership. As you can expect, if we’ve got 30 people defining leadership, how many of those definitions are the same? Not many, if any. There may be some commonalities in the way they describe them, but there’s no definition of leadership. That’s very important because many people seek to find and fit themselves into the or a definition of leadership, which may not be theirs. That’s part of what meaningful leadership is. I don’t care what definitions of leadership are out there.

What’s most important when you’re working with us is by the end of the twelve-week program, you’ve got a clear definition of what leadership is to you and the way you express it. When I relate that to imposter syndrome, oftentimes, we get ourselves into a position that we’re pursuing a vision that’s not ours. It’s not authentically what we’re trying to chase. We overreach outside of something that’s not authentic. When you’re not pursuing something that’s real and true for you, my opinion, not the fact that’s when imposter syndrome comes in hard and strong.

It’s a lovely way of looking at that. I love the nuance of that and I think I concur. It’s an interesting idea that, “Who I should be as a leader,” as opposed to, “Who I am as a leader or who I want to be as a leader.” Where can people find you?

Meaningful Leadership: Our job as coaches is to give the different lenses and multiple windows that people can choose to look through their world and engage with it differently.

They can find me on our website Level52.ca or on LinkedIn, Jayson Krause.

It’s been a real pleasure chatting with you. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule and coming onto my show.

Thank you, Melanie. It was a pleasure to be here.

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I loved talking to Jayson Krause about how he’s been experimenting with turning his day-long workshop into a twelve-week series and getting regular feedback from his client so he can use feedback loops to deliver better and better value to hone his product and wildly improve over time. It’s been great having Jayson on the show. Go experiment.

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