Sara Sheehan’s guest in this episode is Dr. Rob Lion, professor of Human Resource Development at Idaho State University and a speaker and consultant. Dr. Lion has over 20 years of experience with leadership development and improving performance. Sara and Dr. Lion talk about what his method of professional development looks like and how he works with clients in actionable ways. Rob also explains his work with athletic identities and research into transitioning athletes into workplaces with greater ease.
Dr. Lion talks about his newfound drive to embrace more peace in his everyday life through researching Daoism. He strives for greater balance in life. One of the things he discusses with Sara is how achieving more peace and self-awareness in his personal life flows into his professional work and influences it for the positive. Much of his work is in motivating people and Rob dives into how motivation works and what he needs of himself to impart it to others.
Sara and Dr. Lion’s conversation reveals how Rob got involved in his athletic research, what the impetus behind it was, and how he identified and studied the variables that could contribute to athletes struggling when transferred to workplaces. Rob details how the skills athletes possess can work for or against them if not developed correctly for the new environment. Sara explores self-awareness, leadership development, who Rob’s ideal client is, and why he convinces organizations that without doing the necessary work they’re one bad hire away from a problem. The episode is a fascinating and enlightening deep dive into Dr. Lion’s personal and professional life and drive.
About Dr. Rob Lion:
Dr. Rob Lion (pronounced “Lee-own”) is a professor of human resource development at Idaho State University and a dynamic speaker, consultant, and business owner with over 20 years of experience in workplace culture, leadership development, and performance improvement. He specializes in helping clients build human-centric, sustainable systems and initiatives that align organizational needs with employee well-being, driven by the belief that “work should fuel the human spirit, not drain it.”
As the co-founder of Black River Performance Management, Rob draws on his extensive background in human behavior, the psychology of work, opportunity recognition, and relationship development to advise business owners and executives. He has a wealth of ownership experience across industries including food and beverage, personal fitness, and business development, and has dedicated over a decade to economic growth through a community-focused lens.
Rob is recognized for crafting people-first solutions that enhance workplace culture. His approach integrates sustainable and strategic performance improvement practices, empowering individuals and organizations to build effective teams and networks. His students and clients appreciate his innovative methods and creative approaches to enhancing workplace practices.
In addition to his teaching and research, Rob collaborates with leaders to develop clarity in their planning and leading processes. He emphasizes the importance of a people strategy, recognizing that even the most robust strategic plans are merely ambitions without an adequate understanding of staff talents and organizational attributes. His evidence-based frameworks provide rigor to decision-making, addressing challenges related to data utilization, staffing, succession planning, and employee engagement.
Rob’s expertise also includes helping organizations prepare for the future, ensuring that their plans are actionable and informed by the latest research in psychological and behavioral sciences. He is committed to building robust systems that support organizational goals by leveraging existing assets and fostering open communication at all levels.
Outside of his professional pursuits, Rob enjoys travel, fly fishing, and mountain biking. His passion for empowering individuals and transforming organizations makes him a highly sought-after thought leader in his field.
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Contact Sara Sheehan | Sara Sheehan Consulting:
Dr. Rob Lion
- Website: BlackRiverPM.com
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Transcript
Sara Sheehan: [00:00:02] Hi there, I’m Sara Sheehan and welcome to my podcast Transformational Thinkers with Sara Sheehan. Today I’m joined by Dr. Rob Lion. He is a professor of Human Resource Development at Idaho State University and a dynamic speaker, consultant and business owner with over 20 years of experience in workplace culture, leadership development, and performance improvement. He specializes in helping clients build human centric sustainable systems and initiatives that align organizational needs with employee wellbeing, driven by the belief that work should fuel the human spirit, not drain it. I absolutely love that quote, Rob. Welcome.
Rob Lion: [00:00:53] Thank you. Thanks for having me, Sara.
Sara Sheehan: [00:00:55] Absolutely, it is my pleasure. As I started to dive into you and your background, I’d love to hear from you about your dual focus in teaching and consulting, and how that may be fueling you.
Rob Lion: [00:01:20] It’s absolutely fueling me. What a special place to exist. I consider myself very fortunate that I’m in this line of work teaching, which so many people want to do. As we see people go on in their careers, they want to give back and teach and I’m fortunate to be existing in this space. It just so happens that my students at the graduate and undergraduate level are industry professionals and I get to work in organizations and consult in the same space I’m teaching. Of course, it looks different, the time frame is different, but right now we’re working on psychological safety in one of my classes. I work with that daily with clients. The fun thing is that I get to lean into both venues, both domains, the research to inform the practice in my classes. Then in the organization, drawing from that research very carefully to create systems, products, models, things that are actually going to almost shortcut, or hack, a process so people can be more effective quicker than a long drawn out development session. It’s a lot of fun, my students definitely benefit from it.
Rob Lion: [00:02:46] I get to bring a lot of examples back. I get to bring job postings back. I get to bring projects back from industry, even if I’m not even affiliated with the organization. I work with different groups for different things. They’re like, hey Rob, can we have someone help us with this? So it’s really great. One of the added benefits of this, I think, is that my students have a great sense of the gray nature of life and issues in organizations. I think in academics, we sometimes paint the picture black or white. This is the answer from the textbook or the theory, and this is how you approach it in the organization. Organizations are messy because people are messy. What we’ve taught our students, our program has students from all sorts of industries because we’re focusing on leadership change, the psychology of work, these different things that are going to help them be better humans and better leaders. We remove the context, they bring the context to the class, but we give them models. We give the framework, we give the research. It’s just a really great place to exist.
Sara Sheehan: [00:04:00] Excellent. What would you say are your differentiators as compared to others that may be bridging academia and consulting and in a similar field?
Rob Lion: [00:04:16] I track some of my success, my superpower, my differentiator, to my pre-academic work where I was managing and leading teams and earning my lumps that way and then got into academics to find solutions and answers and then back out of academics into industry. Where I add value to organizations, is that I can work with a group from pre-hire so that we determine what they’re looking for and make sure that we get the best candidate to fit what they’re looking for all the way through terminations or retirement, in terms of what’s going on in the organization and how do we build systems, whether it’s based off of my tools, some vendors tools, something they read in a book or a manual. I’ve been successful at taking such things because I understand the human behavior element to build systems so that we’re working with leaders to do leadership development. We’re working with the entire team to do organizational development. We’re working with individuals as appropriate to do self-development. That’s the space I exist in. I do keynotes, I do large format delivery, I am a facilitator for strategic planning, facilitator for retreats and high stakes meetings. They all come together into a toolkit that I can draw what I need, when I need it, to be able to better serve our, and we call them partners because it really is. It’s not so much a client that we’re working with them on getting the calls at odd hours of the day for advice, for coaching, for quick assistance and feedback to work through, to keep their train on the tracks.
Sara Sheehan: [00:06:14] I noticed that you have a lot of very practical models on your website, and I’m sure that is very helpful to you in working with clients in terms of making it very actionable and understandable.
Rob Lion: [00:06:31] There’s a number of them there, but three terms we hear frequently in organizations: motivation, performance and engagement. What does that mean and what do we do with that? That’s the big challenge. We could read about it in a book and oftentimes in a book they say, this is what I did and just do this. The reality is that you’re missing a lot of the context. That person had a particular team based on a particular set of expectations, beliefs and goals. You can’t just take something and drop it in somewhere else, so what I’ve done is created these tools based on these popular concepts, based on the science behind them, so that we’re actually talking about them correctly. We’re not going in and saying, this is how you motivate people. We change the language. You can’t motivate people, you can cultivate the conditions and you create that path for them to be motivated. Here’s a tool to help walk you through that so that you don’t necessarily have to be thinking about this in terms of, what did the science say or what did the presenters say? You turn to the tool, you lean on the tool, and you use the tool to help you walk through those situations to troubleshoot, to add value, to generate engagement.
Sara Sheehan: [00:07:47] It probably also helps long term, because they can look back at it and remind themselves of what they learned in the experience where you used it.
Rob Lion: [00:07:57] Yeah, for sure. If we sat together for four hours to go through any content, the fact that we have an easy to use tool is a great reference point, exactly to your point. They’re not going to pull out the workbook from the session that was 20 pages long and try to figure out, where did I write this down? We’re trying to shortcut that process with high quality. Ultimately, think of it this way, how do I take a first year employee, because we know what that learning curve looks like, and move them to the level of competence as a second year employee. We can do that, we can build systems to expedite that process with not a lot of wear and tear on people. In fact, what they find is it’s a part of their culture, people lean into it. It’s doing the right things.
Sara Sheehan: [00:08:51] It’s better when you have some structure in place, and when the employee can thrive it’s even better.
Rob Lion: [00:08:57] And it’s so fun to watch.
Sara Sheehan: [00:08:59] Yeah, it’s great. I noticed that you spent a fair amount of time in Marquette, and even went to school there, too. Then you taught there?
Rob Lion: [00:09:14] The school I did take there was just for added development. I already had my degrees, I had my master’s. I didn’t have my PhD yet, I actually did that remotely. I started taking some classes there, and once I had that experience, they started to invite me to teach in that graduate psychology program. That’s where I started to cut my teeth in teaching, start considering consulting, that’s where my boys were born, that’s where some of my closest friends live. It was, a little bit later in life, a really formative experience. It’s my US home base, as I think about it. That’s where my heart lies.
Sara Sheehan: [00:09:58] That’s fantastic. My husband’s family, his maternal grandfather built a cottage there in, I believe, 1959. It’s still there, and we have gone up there to see it and see the area a couple times. Always in the summer, not in a time when you would see snow. It is beautiful. The cottage is owned by one other family, so it’s been in two families’ hands the whole time. It’s on a small lake called Au Train.
Rob Lion: [00:10:47] I know exactly where you’re talking about. It’s a beautiful area, but bring bug spray.
Sara Sheehan: [00:10:53] In the summer, for sure bring some bug spray. The last time that we went, we stayed on Lake Superior. It was really nice.
Rob Lion: [00:11:03] The interesting thing is, from Marquette once you’re standing on Lake Superior, my hometown is just due northeast of there, across the lake. Big lake.
Sara Sheehan: [00:11:16] It’s beautiful though.
Rob Lion: [00:11:17] Yeah, it’s wonderful. We go back every once in a while to speak at events and things like that, and it’s my favorite place to go.
Sara Sheehan: [00:11:25] That’s great. There’s nothing like the U.P. for sure. In talking with you, you mentioned that you are focused on trying to be more purposeful about finding and enjoying peace in life. I’d love to hear a little bit about that.
Rob Lion: [00:11:47] I’m not quite sure what stimulated this. One of my big development experiences was when I was in college, I started to read and research Daoism, and that is what I truly identify with. It introduced me to a level of peace and balance that I was not familiar with. For many years I’ve hustled for performance. I actually really enjoy working hard. I enjoyed it as a high school student, I enjoyed it in college, I enjoy it now. I’m really fortunate that I get to choose who I work hard for now, and how I work hard. A little bit different.
Sara Sheehan: [00:12:28] Very different.
Rob Lion: [00:12:29] Because I’ve moved into this phase where I have that discretion now, I’ve slowed my life back down again so that I could embrace the peace aspect. I’m just playing with some words right now. What I’m thinking of is from performance to peace because I was super performance minded. I still am as it relates to my work and my organizations and the students and things like that. But what’s present in there is this peace slowing down, this appreciation of beauty, taking it in and not being in a hurry. What am I running away from? Or what am I trying to run to? I don’t know if I have tomorrow, I really don’t, and so my priority is to be the best person I can for the people I love and I’m connected with. That’s beyond my family, it includes my family of course, but also community and friends and things like that. Not to be a doer, but to go through and exist. Being purposeful with those reflections has been an important part of my process. I was just telling someone the other day, they were asking about some of my fitness routines. I shared it with them. I said, starting last summer, because my load both in teaching and consulting really diminishes in the summer, I was able to get up every morning, go sit on my deck, and we’re on the side of a mountain. Where we live, we get 300 days of sun a year. I put my pad out and my foam roller and roll out, stretch and get centered for 30 minutes before I started my day. I could never have done that ten years ago, or earlier, but where I am right now, that’s what I’m prioritizing based on where I am in life.
Sara Sheehan: [00:14:28] That’s pretty awesome. With all of that I would offer, in addition to what you’re talking about as the pivot between performance and piece, that for me it would probably be centered in mindfulness and getting more present in a situation so that I can show up more as my authentic self.
Rob Lion: [00:14:59] I agree with that 100%. Think about it. When I’m not present, and I’m assuming you’re probably not too different, we’re not our best. It’s hard to live that authentic self when we’re not present. You usually hear about it afterwards that the kids are pissed off now, or my cousin’s pissed off. You know what I mean? Then you’re like, oh. But learn from that, heed the feedback. I don’t use the term mindfulness as much, to me it’s just peace and calm.
Sara Sheehan: [00:15:33] The last part of that, for me, is putting myself out there with courage to constantly sharpen the saw.
Rob Lion: [00:15:44] I love that, interesting. You have to have a level of self-awareness to even do that. Once you have self-awareness, you could stack these things in the right order. I think about my younger self. It took a lot of work to build courage and to find the internal resources to sequence that, to do that. Now at this point of my life there’s things that are really tough that I try to do at times, but it’s a lot easier. It’s like skill development. The more we practice it, the easier it becomes. That’s what’s so cool about what we do as a profession. So little of this is talent based. What I mean by talent based, in terms of your pre-wiring. Are leaders born or are they created? So much of this is about the journey and the development over time. Everyone can build confrontation skills, communication skills, accountability skills, feedback skills. It’s just really neat. We’re all hardwired to pretty much do anything in life, we just need to line up those inputs to do it.
Sara Sheehan: [00:16:58] And practice so that we can get better. I noticed that you have some very fascinating research on athletic identities and workplace performance. What was the most surprising thing that you found in that research?
Rob Lion: [00:17:17] I’ll give a little bit of the backstory of how I got into this. I think this is probably the big ‘aha’ for me for the most part, is the backstory of how I’d work with people. They would say, I prioritize former athletes over non-athletes when I’m interviewing people. You could even go online, I don’t know if these companies still exist, but there’s a couple different things. They outwardly say, we’re only looking to hire athletes. Or there’s other companies that are like, you’re a former athlete, we’ll head hunt for you and get you a job. Those are two different things, but the preferential treatment is the one that I’m most concerned about. I was running into people saying, I believe athletes or former athletes have higher motivation, are more gritty or resilient, better at time management. I took that in for years and let it marinate in my mind because I didn’t know what to make out of that. As a college athlete, and athlete all my life, there were people on my team I’d never hire. People probably thought about me as that at times.
Rob Lion: [00:18:25] Some people weren’t hard workers, they didn’t have good time management, they weren’t kind. I was like, where are you getting this information from? Over time, we started to build out a framework to measure this. One of the things I like to do is, I like to do research that contributes directly to practice. My goal is to find these things that help solve some of our workplace problems. I’ve done this with a variety of different topics. We went to test it, we ran some rather robust testing models on it, and what we found is a couple of things. Number one, as we prepared for this and we did all of our literature review, no one was looking at the transfer of motivation or behavior from athletics or former athletics to the workplace. It was pretty much empty. You see it in terms of research, from student athletes to academics, you saw more of that. Or we saw athletes to character building. We went ahead and did this, we also found that the limited research on high performing athletes, was that they actually didn’t transition well to the workplace.
Rob Lion: [00:19:38] If you can imagine, because they’ve gone from being handheld in terms of training, diet, things like that, when they enter our workplace and our leaders are like, here’s your name tag, keys, here’s your autonomy and you got this. They struggle. What we found was that there was no conclusive evidence. There was no relationship between former athletic experiences. We sliced and diced this. High school, college, pro, semi-pro, niche sports, types of sports, types of activity. One of the neat things we did is we evaluated people’s training or activity level in terms of physical exertion volume over time as a variable, also. For example, if you were a road biker and you biked ten miles a week, this much amount of time on the bike, we had a metabolic output table that would give us factors. We would enter that in, and we used that as part of our variable sorting and our analysis. We really tried to slice and dice this in a number of different ways. What we did find is that there is some accuracy, there’s some truth to this concept of people that identify as athletes. It’s an identity factor that will demonstrate higher levels of discretionary effort in the workplace. However, there have to be other variables in between. The variable is self-control and locus of control. Which is, do I own my experiences or is my success and failures tied to something else?
Rob Lion: [00:21:26] What does this mean for an organization? It means it’s really hard to operationalize because you can’t just say, what’s your athletic identity? Or do you have athletic identity, and then you’re a good fit. That does not work at all. Instead, still true to a lot of screening processes, we need to look for people with higher levels of locus control because that does lead to discretionary effort as well as self-awareness and self-regulation are factors. The fact that this related to athletes, it was a novel group to look at, to respond to an industry issue that I was really concerned about. I also noticed the people that were talking about this were former athletes. I’ve never had a theater major say, I give preferential hiring to athletes. I believe, and that was part of the paper, one of the editions of the paper I try to share. People are learning skills in all sorts of environments. In band, in theater, in Lego Tech Club, all these different things. Those things are stacking and building towards character and workplace readiness. At the end of the day, nothing really special about athletes as it relates to organizational performance and success for the most part. Certainly not on the masses, maybe here and there in isolation but that’s not conclusive as a research identified path to follow. It’s neat to see because now when someone’s like, this is what I do. I can say, let’s have a conversation.
Rob Lion: [00:23:08] A lot of our work’s actually moved into this hiring phase. We’ve got brought in by clients to fix problems and address issues. Part of the evolution of that is to move backwards in the life cycle with the organization to start this before they’re even hired. We look at pre-hire screening, which relates to this athlete thing. People were bringing this up and I say, we got to talk about this. What is it that you’re looking for? You’re talking about, this athletic concept’s not a fit factor, these are your fit factors we need to look at instead. We get them hired, screened for fit, and then we integrate this into the onboarding. Then that’s what’s really strengthening that down river path from there. But like I said, most of the time we’re starting later with the organization, and then we’ve moved earlier to help improve the quality of their culture and processes.
Sara Sheehan: [00:24:03] That’s very interesting. One thing in listening to you talk about it, is that it sounds like discipline that an athlete might have, which might also be the same for a musician or a thespian, an actor. Those kinds of skills that you hone and practice, those would definitely parlay to the workforce.
Rob Lion: [00:24:34] It’s all these formative experiences. Making sure you’re getting your kids to have a variety of different experiences and hopefully long enough that they can start to develop some of these and hone some of these things, is a part of that. One of my philosophies is in order to be a leader, I need to be a student. If I want to be a better teacher, better trainer, better consultant, I need to make sure I’m spending enough time behind the desk learning from other people. This isn’t just about kids and their development, it’s about ours at whatever age we are today and moving forward. We might have a long path ahead of us, and now’s not too late to start.
Sara Sheehan: [00:25:26] Absolutely, it’s never too late if you really want to grow. When you think about other big research questions out there that are motivating to you, what areas of research do interest or intrigue you?
Rob Lion: [00:25:45] I’m working with a lot of these ‘fit’ concepts right now and trying to pull some things apart. I have a couple different concepts I’ve identified that could help bring greater clarity for what we’re trying to do in organizations. To me, that’s the target. What is it that I’m going to do that’s going to improve our organizational process quickly? Not something that’s going to be published and sit on a shelf for decades. I’m looking at fit as it relates to some of our cultural inputs. If you’re familiar with individualism versus collectivism, individualism is where we prioritize ourselves over our family or community. Whereas collectivism, and this is a really basic example, collectivism is where we prioritize the group before ourselves. As a Western nation, the west is predominantly individually built. That’s our history, you might have heard the term rugged individualism. I spent the last year working on these concepts. What these are, they’re considered syndromes, outcomes or results from the cultures they emerge from. Eastern cultures tend to be more collectivist, but the consequence to that is that they have a really high regard for power distance. The person that is in lead, oftentimes the consequence to that is that they defer to their expertise in making decisions. They’re not as self-motivated self-starters as their Western colleagues, who are much more eager to roll up their sleeves and dive into things.
Rob Lion: [00:27:28] All of these background pieces have influence over our formation and who we are. Now what I’m working on is a piece that relates to, how do we articulate those of us that feel like we’re a part of this Western collectivism, that I’m not prioritizing myself over others? I’m seeing myself as an equal, but I’m narrowing the power difference between myself and my team. I want them to be part of the solution. When recognition is up for grabs, who’s getting it? It doesn’t have to be me. There’s some more nuanced aspects that relate to organizational success and fit. For some organizations, we just want individualistic people that are driving, but I think part of our human condition is tied up with this collectivist piece in the sense of, we need other people. Our connection, our relatedness is a basic psychological need. We need community, and look at it right now, we need community now more than we’ve ever needed community in this country. It’s trying to take all these really big concepts and trying to bring them together to operationalize them so that they can improve how we think about fit in our organizations. We often talk about person to job fit, culture to person fit, or even that culture fit we’re not necessarily clear on, so how could we continue to refine that and do that better? Some groups are doing it great, they really are. But by far and large, we’re really wrestling with this concept. What we bring is a little structure to that, and direction, and hopefully they take off and they never need us again.
Sara Sheehan: [00:29:28] That’s fascinating, to think about how you might be able to operationalize your learnings there. To talk about how focusing on a broader collective is powerful and not focusing on one leader. I love the practical application of that, very interesting.
Rob Lion: [00:29:52] Thank you, but it has to be the appetite of the leadership, so that’s part of the challenge. You got a collective oriented leader, it’s really nice. You go in, you make this work. If you have a real individualistic, oriented leader, it makes it really challenging. But that also helps us choose who we want to work for based on certain cues that we get presented in front of ourselves so we can find our better fit. One of the things we’re seeing right now, if I may, the return to work calls. The mandates, people are pushing back, and ‘we don’t want to do this’. What’s stopping you from going to another position, another organization that fits your needs there? Clearly that return to office is part of whatever the leadership has decided what they’re going to do. Just because we don’t like it doesn’t mean we get the grounds to fight it and refuse it. Just like, I don’t like how my supervisor is treating me. I’m not going to change them. Most of the time the organization’s not going to change them, even if they are toxic and a bad fit for the organization. Unfortunately, my agency is at the limits of, I’m going to have to choose to go find something that better fits and meets my interests.
Sara Sheehan: [00:31:10] I think there are a lot of people that aren’t ready to make that choice for themselves. They’re kind of like a cat that doesn’t want to be picked up.
Rob Lion: [00:31:21] It’s tough, it’s not easy to quit a job and relocate or find something else out there. But at the same time, it’s not everyone else’s job to fix to accommodate you when you’re in a system of 20 people to 80,000 people.
Sara Sheehan: [00:31:38] There are a lot of implications for businesses, I totally understand. When you’re thinking about office space that’s not utilized or just the business itself and being able to collaborate and interact in a positive way. I was just talking about this yesterday at lunch. I will advocate with clients to be able to say, if you want me to work remotely a majority of the time that’s fine, but I really want to be able to have milestone meetings and opportunities to be in person. Because you can never develop a relationship with the other person if you’re never there. You never get to go to dinner with them, you have to have that time to connect.
Rob Lion: [00:32:30] It’s so transactional when we’re doing it this way, unfortunately. But that’s what some people are looking for. Like you said, that’s what your preference is so you’re going to seek that out. Same thing with me in many instances. I didn’t want to do a whole lot of zoom webinars and things because it changes the dynamic. It’s like teaching online, it changes the dynamic. My program is entirely online. I love it for certain aspects, but I dislike it for other aspects.
Sara Sheehan: [00:33:01] I’m sure on the interaction and engagement side, it’s different online.
Rob Lion: [00:33:09] But at the same time, I sat in a lot of live classes that sucked, too.
Sara Sheehan: [00:33:15] We all have, absolutely without question. You essentially got us moving into the direction of talking about big issues with mentioning the return to work, the return to the office. I would love to hear what you’re thinking about a couple of other pressing issues, specifically social media and mental health and kids, teens, and honestly adults, because people have gotten so incredibly focused on it. You can tell that people are totally addicted to their smartphone.
Rob Lion: [00:33:57] Unintended consequences. Great concept, which is the same thing that we need to be concerned about, AI. That we have a great tool, lots of promise that has inadvertently been used to divide us. Both technologies have and will be. My big concern, more on a professional level that relates to this right now. I’ll give you that in one minute. I think about what social media has done to us, and technology and the rapid exchange of information. I think that’s part of the reason why we’re wrestling with this ‘return to office’ concept, where the people have so much of a voice that never individually have had a voice in the past. They can make a lot of noise together, collectively. My concern is, what’s happening outside of this, where we are right now? People listening to your show and listening to me are on the same page about several things. Self-development, leadership, compassion. These things that we are now a part of our DNA. We’ve read about them long enough that we live it now. There’s a lot of people not doing this work out there and that’s my concern. I don’t mean, everyone has to listen to Sara’s show. As much as that would be great if they all did, but there’s a lot of different shows out there, programs.
Sara Sheehan: [00:35:29] A lot of opportunities.
Rob Lion: [00:35:30] That we are all in the same line of thought. I said to my wife the other day, we’re all drinking the same Kool-Aid. Self-development, I’ll own my experiences, difficult conversations, emotional intelligence. My concern is that as we continue to grow at this level, at this pace, because we are making growth changes, we are changing. Our bodies are changing, our physiology is changing, our mind is changing. Because of this, what’s happening with those that aren’t changing in the same direction? You see this in organizations where some of the gaps between employees in the same employment line are broadening due to a variety of situations. Not just listening to podcasts or not, life things, all different things that occur in life. You definitely tackle the world differently when you have a greater level of self-awareness and self-regulation than someone else that is in reaction mode. You used the term ‘ruminate’ earlier. They’re not even aware that they’re ruminating. At least we know the term and we can spot it. When I think about rumination, I think about old wagon wheels, the tracks they lay on a trail, ruts. Our thoughts are falling into these ruts consistently, but at least we have the awareness to say, let’s stop giving that mind space, let’s stop giving that attention, and those ruts will heal and come back up. That’s by minimizing our rumination. Our colleagues in some instances, friends, community members don’t even know that exists. They don’t even understand how that happens, they don’t know where their mind space is. That’s my concern. My heart goes out to everyone for everything we all are challenged with and working through, but my concern is that there is an increasing gap between those that are doing the self-work and those that aren’t. That’s going to create a new complication of the workforce that we’re not even talking about yet. That’s going to be exacerbated by social media and AI.
Sara Sheehan: [00:37:53] The folks that might be less self-aware or not self-aware, are you seeing any correlation to age or generation, or are you seeing it all over the board?
Rob Lion: [00:38:13] It’s all over the board, it’s indiscriminate. Usually, it stems from needs and needs based fulfillment. It’s hard. Part of my work and research is in the motivation space, and it’s one of the things we bring into organizations to help people understand this. People that are struggling, are usually struggling due to a lack of certain needs being fulfilled. It’s difficult for a person to be present at the workplace, to be engaged, to hit their desired outcomes when their homes are being foreclosed. Think about what’s happening now with the rattling of the federal government, by the approach the administration’s taking with these cutbacks and cutouts and downsizing. I’m not saying right or wrong in terms of, we shouldn’t be doing some of the work we’re doing. We need to review our processes, our practices, our expenses, all that stuff regularly. But think about the physiological effects that’s having on people’s stress and cortisol levels and things like that. They would have been productive workers a month ago, and now this is looming over their head. You might see it, I’m seeing it, our clients are canceling. They’re not sure where their funding is coming from, they’re not sure what’s happening. When you’re really skinny on those resources, and maybe both of you work in government and you’re not sure. We’re doing such a number on people’s psychology right now, that is what really concerns me. How can they respond? These people that have been high performing, very successful people in our community are going to be at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs very quickly.
Sara Sheehan: [00:40:16] It’s a big change.
Rob Lion: [00:40:18] It’s going to be huge.
Sara Sheehan: [00:40:21] There’s no question about it. The marketplace definitely will reveal new practices, new problems. A lot of things will manifest, for sure. Fascinating.
Rob Lion: [00:40:37] We’re covering so much ground here, Sara. We’re all over the place.
Sara Sheehan: [00:40:39] That’s good! I would love to hear who your ideal client is.
Rob Lion: [00:40:47] I have two ideal clients. One is people that are really in trouble, they need to fix things quickly. We’ve had a number of organizations that were at the point of closure, and we’ve turned them around in less than three years. It’s tough to take toxic organizations to turn around in less than five years, based on some of the research. I like people that are really struggling. Not that I want them to struggle, but I want to help them because in many instances, they have some urgency, they’re eager and they want to be helped. That’s my other client preference, is a partner. Someone that says, I know my craft, I know my skill. I might be a widget builder, I might be an engineer, but I’m not a leader to the extent that I need to be. How can you help me build bridges, scaffold my talent with my team to move us in that right direction? That’s what I love. We can do that in both environments, both the people that are in trouble, we get them fixed and get them going. That’s been people that are going under, our accreditations have been working with schools and providing feedback on, how do we quickly change these things so that we can prepare you for accreditation? Or it’s just financial, that they’re running out of cash and we need to turn this around quickly. Or those that are like, things are going good. I’d like them to be better, and I’d like us to buy a little head space so that we’re not so concerned with inefficiencies.
Rob Lion: [00:42:29] What I mean by that is, when you start learning some of the science of leadership and the science of motivation and how people behave and perform, you’re taking the guesswork out. If you don’t have some education in human behavior, you’re just going off your gut, and your gut is based on a variety of different inputs. Some of them are really biased. You might be spinning your wheels when you could just slow it down and pick a different path based on better tools. I approach all groups, all organizations, that people are very loving and well intentioned. That’s what I believe is innate in humans and we work with that to leverage and grow that. But for some organizations they’re like, you talk about compassion, love, authenticity, that’s not us. We just roll up our sleeves and get it done. Sure, whatever. Clearly it’s not a match for us, but others want that. They want their people to go home at the end of the day with enough fuel in their tank to be present with their friends, their family, to volunteer. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter, but it’s important to you because you’re giving so much time to this other organization and their mission or profit motives.
Sara Sheehan: [00:43:50] The size of your ideal client varies, I take it? Small to large, enterprise.
Rob Lion: [00:43:58] I like small to medium sized enterprises. If we’re getting larger than work units, work teams, I like to work within those because those are just a replication of a medium enterprise or a small enterprise. Yeah, love it.
Sara Sheehan: [00:44:15] Is there a target revenue that you are looking for?
Rob Lion: [00:44:20] Where they’re at? No, there’s not. What’s more important to me is what they’re committed to. What are they curious about? What do they want to accomplish? We work with nonprofits that have very little, but we also have larger corporations and organizations that have a lot. In some instances, we have nonprofits that spend more than for profits because their mindset is, this is money well spent. Whereas other places they’re like, I don’t want to spend money on these things. Let’s just be clear. Many of these things that are budget lined items, it’s not your money to save. In fact, you should be expensing what this is to help and grow your team. Just don’t throw good money at bad solutions.
Sara Sheehan: [00:45:12] You work cross-industry?
Rob Lion: [00:45:16] What I talk about is, we’re industry agnostic context specific. Because at the end of the day, it’s behavior as it relates to the team I’m with. It’s not behavior that’s different in healthcare versus the food and drug industry. People are people are people. The industry has some nuances, has some policies, has some limitations on some of that. But at the end of the day, it’s the people. People are messy and it’s a beautiful messy. That’s what makes us so interesting. We’re the thing that compromises many of the processes. Processes are neutral, and they’re intended to do good work. Like Six Sigma, Lean, all these different things, they’re well intended, but it’s the people in the end that mess it up for good or bad. That’s the target, that’s what we want to help.
Sara Sheehan: [00:46:18] The behavior change that you have to influence there, and gain adoption on, is some of the hardest to do.
Rob Lion: [00:46:28] Exactly. Your term ‘gain adoption’ is exactly what this is all about. What we’re doing is we’re trying to have people adopt the open minded, curious, to a way of thinking, a way of practice, that they have never experienced. Like I said, we send people to engineering school, we send people to welding school, we send people to med school, but we continue to promote them without much of a framework in terms of leadership acumen.
Sara Sheehan: [00:46:58] It’s definitely an investment well spent when they invest in their people, without question.
Rob Lion: [00:47:07] I share that with people frequently, that you’re going to either pay now or you’re going to pay later. I run into a number of people that are like, we’re just fine. The reason why I’m having these conversations with them is because they’re not and people have reached out to us to bring us in, to try to get them on board with doing the work. I remind my clients of this too, when things are going well, think about it. This concept of, you go up the hill on the roller coaster, you know you’re going to go down at some point. Just when you think things are going great, just give it a moment and something will let you down or hurt you or upset you. That’s been 100% true all my life. What I try to convince my organizations of is, if we’re not doing this work, we’re potentially one bad hire away from a problem again.
Sara Sheehan: [00:48:02] Excellent point. Is there anything else on your mind that you want to share today that is a big concern or a big goal?
Rob Lion: [00:48:14] You know what? Not really. I just hope people are finding their own. My heart goes out to people always in general. But right now, with some of the stressors we’re experiencing in our economy, our leadership, I know people are hurting, I know people are sad, I know people are afraid. As I mentioned earlier, we need community. We need people of like minds. I don’t mean family. Family is good if you have it and if it works, but not all families are healthy and not all families work, so we need to find our people, find our tribe, and hold each other and support each other.
Sara Sheehan: [00:48:57] That’s a wonderful way to wrap up our conversation today. Thank you so much for your time.
Rob Lion: [00:49:06] Thanks, Sara. It’s been a pleasure.
Sara Sheehan: [00:49:07] Thank you.
Sara Sheehan: [00:49:09] Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode with the brilliant Dr. Rob Lion. As a professor and consultant, Dr. Lion provides invaluable perspectives on merging academia with practical consulting and what it means for transitioning athletes into the workforce. Here are three key takeaways from our discussion today. First, holistic development. Dr. Lion emphasized the significance of addressing both organizational systems and individual growth, noting how his work helps enhance leadership and culture based on scientific models. Second, athletic transferability myths. Contrary to popular belief, being a former athlete doesn’t necessarily translate to superior workplace performance. Dr. Lion’s research highlights the need for self-control and a personalized locus of control for true discretionary effort. Third, the importance of community. In times of uncertainty, he stresses the need to find and connect with supportive communities, asserting that collaboration and collective effort can vastly improve organizational and personal resilience. Thank you so much for listening today, and as always, subscribe and never miss an episode.
