Being a Good Leader—Inside and Out with Chris Thyberg

Leadership today isn’t just about managing people—it’s also about managing yourself. With so much change happening around us, how can leaders stay grounded and show up for their teams in the best way possible? In this episode, I talk with Chris Thyberg, a leadership coach and founder of The Serving Way. We chat about what it really takes to lead people in today’s world—whether it’s dealing with AI, figuring out remote vs. office work, or building trust in your team. Chris shares helpful advice on how to lead yourself first, and how being honest, curious, and human can make you a better leader. This is a down-to-earth, thoughtful conversation for anyone trying to grow as a leader in 2025 and beyond. Tune in and learn more. --- Listen to the podcast here: Being a Good Leader—Inside and Out with Chris Thyberg Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Last fall, I had Chris Thyberg on the program and we talked about leadership from both the perspective of an inner game and an outer game, how you need to take care of yourself in order to take care of the people that you’re a leader for. Since that episode, a lot has changed in the world, because the year 2025 has been marked by just a really rapid kind of pace of change on many different fronts, and that has caused a lot of people who have, say, different reactions. The range of reactions to these changes have been quite variant, as would be expected, and that has caused some additional challenges with regards to group cohesion as well as being able to delegate and trust the people who you’re working with. So, once again, I would like to bring back to the program Chris Thyberg to talk to us a little bit about what we need to do to be good leaders from both internally and externally now where we sit well into the year 2025. ---   Chris, welcome back.   Thank you, Steve. It’s a pleasure to be back with you after an excellent conversation last time.    Well, thank you for coming back. This podcast has had maybe, I’m going to say three or four repeat guests, not that often, but it is something that’s changed quite a bit since we talked in September of 2024. I think we’re all familiar with what types of changes and, as you know, this is not a political show in the sense that I’m not here to tell anyone how they should or shouldn’t be responding to that aspect, nor is it telling anyone how they should or shouldn’t be responding to things such as AI, the number of layoffs, and the additional challenges and anxiety in the workforce today. All we can really do is kind of respond to it. Chris, what are you observing as far as the people that you work with and how they’re responding to all the different forms in which this change is taking place?   Yeah, thank you. The last time we talked together, I described the conditions that leaders are under as white water conditions, as paddling down the river in the rapids and they’re starting to get class 4, class 5, maybe there’s even a waterfall that you can see coming up. All right. So, here are a few things that have been contributing to now what feels like windsurfing in a hurricane. If we thought the river trip was a little hard, sometimes, yeah, let’s try windsurfing when the swells are 20 feet high and we’re in driving down rain.    Right, so you got a whole new situation here. Yep, let’s go.   So, one aspect is the place of AI, how disruptive it is, the anxieties it’s creating for everyone, from longstanding employees to folks coming out of college, those entry-level positions that now people are arguing can be done just as well by a well-trained bot as that expensive college grad. So, what I like to remember in this space is that, right now, generative AI is like a very eager, tireless, relentless, driven intern that absolutely knows nothing at all about you, your business, your people, your leadership. All of it, right?