Lorraine Ball’s leadership journey got off to a rocky start when she chose a “take me as I am” approach which ended up pushing people away. Over time, she realized she needed to meet team members where they are so they could connect.

Lorraine has learned that connection, building trust, and fostering loyalty are key to driving performance. In this episode, Lorraine shares her insights on leading with curiosity instead of judgment to understand what motivates people.

After You Listen:

Check out the works of Peter Drucker

Take a listen to Lorraine’s podcast: More Than a Few Words

Join the Digital Toolbox marketing community

Connect with Craig: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craigpanderson/

Learn more about ClearPath Consulting and Coaching: https://clearpathcoaches.com

Download Craig’s 10 Rule’s for Better Meetings

Key Takeaways:

• Create loyalty through an authentic personal connection to drive performance
• Leaders have to find a balance between being their authentic selves and adapting to their team members
• Take your work seriously, not yourself; it’s the key to long-term success

Things to listen for:

[01:22] Lightening round with Lorraine

[04:15] Finding a balance of authenticity in leadership

[08:58] Running defense so your team can execute

[13:02] Leading with curiosity over judgment

[14:09] Lessons learned in corporate America

[19:14] Building loyalty to drive performance

[23:16] Advice Lorraine would give to her younger self

[24:37] Craig’s takeaways

Transcript

Craig P. Anderson:

Welcome to the Accidental Leader Podcast, the only leadership podcast that shows how today’s successful leaders develop the competence, confidence and calm to lead their team and organization to success. I’m Craig Anderson and my career journey is a tale of accidental leadership. I started out with a degree in English and a growing comic book collection, and my plan was to be a high school teacher, but what we plan and what happens aren’t always the same thing. A college job turned into a career in education, finance, and entry level in my alma mater, became over time increasing leadership roles in Fortune 500 companies, including many national leadership roles.

As that chapter closed, I spun off a business from a large operating not-for-profit, and grew that into a successful business that was named a great place to work in Indianapolis. Over my career, I learned a lot of leadership lessons the hard way I created this podcast so you don’t have to. My guest today is Lorraine Ball. Lorraine is the host of the marketing podcast, More than a Few Words, and the founder of the Digital Toolbox. She is a great leader and well recognized here in my talent of Indianapolis, Indiana, and around a lot more places than that. And Lorraine, welcome to the podcast.

Lorraine Ball:

It is so nice to be here.

Craig P. Anderson:

Oh, thanks for joining us today. So we like to jump right in Lorraine and get things started on a high note with our lightning round. Quick three questions to get to know you a little better, and then we’ll talk about all your history as a leader and what lessons you have to provide to our listeners. So let’s jump right in. Question one, what is the best leadership book you have ever read?

Lorraine Ball:

So it’s an oldie, I love Peter Drucker. And the book that really was life changing for me was written in 1992. I get it. It’s really old. It’s Managing for the Future. And before you poo poo it, you really need to understand that Peter Drucker was way ahead of his time. And a lot of the things that other people are writing about now, he laid the groundwork for 30 years ago. So his ideas on why corporations need to hire crazy people and how they then in turn screw it up completely was probably my mantra. And if you look at me naming my agency round peg, that’s really where it came from.

Craig P. Anderson:

Question number two, who is your leadership crush?

Lorraine Ball:

So I don’t really have a crush because I’ve been around long enough that I’ve come to understand that there are traits that make people great leaders in moderation, but that take into extreme those same characteristics work against them. And so, what I really would want to do is pull things from different people. For example, and this is not a political thing, but I think Obama was a great leader because he surrounded himself with very smart people and he listened to them and he was able to then sell their ideas. The problem is I think sometimes he listened too long and wasn’t decisive enough. Conversely, Steve Jobs basically willed the iPhone into existence. Like Obama, he surrounded himself with great people and he listened to their ideas to a point, and then he just forced through his vision and he was a crazy person and he ran over everybody. And so the question comes, do you judge a leader by their acts or by their results? And that’s where I get hung up on having a leadership crash.

Craig P. Anderson:

I agree. So some of the times the things that make us a great leader also, are there Achilles heel on the backside? All right, in the last lightning round question, in 10 words or less, how would you define leadership?

Lorraine Ball:

Cultivate talent, eliminate obstacles, set direction, get the hell out of the way.

Craig P. Anderson:

I love it. Very good. And I think you got that right in under the wire. All those are very true characteristics and just really letting people run when we give them the clear vision. I love it. Well, so Lorraine, I know you started out in leadership roles well before you founded your agency round peg, and you talk about that in your bio that you started out in corporate America like I did. So tell me about your first real leadership role.

Lorraine Ball:

So I was 21 and I was managing a department of women in a department store. A lot of young women from a small town in east Texas. And I’m from New York. I have a colorful vocabulary translation, I frequently sound like a sailor. These women from East Texas had really never been anywhere besides East Texas very sheltered, very religious. And my boss calls me into my office a couple weeks and he says, “So how’s it going?” “I think we’re doing well. My team seems to be coming together.” And he says, “Yeah, we have a complaint.” And I said, “What’s the complaint?” He said, “Well, it’s your language.” And I said, “What the F is wrong with my language?” To which he replied, “That’s it.”And it was this lesson very early on that you have to be able to communicate to people in a way that they’re going to be receptive. And I had to completely change my dialogue. And three years later I had a great career there and I had a lot of fun and we laughed about it, but in the early days it was very much, this is me, this is my style, take it or leave it and said, “No, we don’t.” You can’t do that if you want to be successful.

Craig P. Anderson:

That’s right. And it’s such an interesting juxtaposition to authenticity that we talk so much about in leadership today is how do you balance that authenticity without apparently F bombing your way into people ignoring you maybe?

Lorraine Ball:

I think you walk a line and as I progressed in my career, I got more comfortable. I also came into later leadership roles once I had my foundation where I came in and I said, “Look, this is who I am. This is what you’re getting. If this is not what you want, let’s stop now, let’s not do this.”

Craig P. Anderson:

How did you find the other people reacting to that kind of negotiation around authenticity? How did you elicit that and get everybody on board?

Lorraine Ball:

I showed up for an interview again, you have to think about the time. 1992, I showed up for an interview in a purple suit, orange blouse and four inch purple heels. And I walked into a manufacturing plant where mostly everybody was in polyester. Okay, so you think you want to hire me, let’s talk about it. And that was a very deliberate choice. And I was fortunate because that was a job that they said they were looking for someone like me. They had read all the books, I think they’d probably read Drucker’s book and I was their crazy person. The problem both they and I did not read the later chapters where he goes on to say that the problem is corporations hire crazy people and then they spend the next few years trying to cut their corners off and get them to fit into the holes, which is why round peg was called round peg.

Craig P. Anderson:

Someone said to me once, if you really want to understand a company’s culture, don’t look at who they say they want. Look at who they actually hire because that tells you so much. And it sounds like they said they wanted someone who was out there, the round peg in the square hole, but in reality they weren’t prepared for it there.

Lorraine Ball:

The guys that originally hired me were, but in a lot of corporations, and this is really a challenge if you’re going to be in a large organization, the management team that I signed up to work for got promoted, moved into different jobs and while I still had them in my sphere, the new people that came in were actually a lot more traditional. And it was harder because the people that had hired me and had said, “This is what we want.” Were somewhere else and the people that came in didn’t always understand that choice. So I mean I think if you are going to be a leader in an organization, one of the things you have to figure out is how big is that support network if that one critical person disappears unless you’re going to be CEO of the company.

Craig P. Anderson:

Which comes with its own challenges and responsibilities. But it is an interesting conversation in corporate America when you’re at that middle leadership level where you may have a way you want to do things, but are you the round peg in the square hole as that leader and then when someone transitions in, how much does that change? And that can be a very big change for people. And that sounds like what happened to you.

Lorraine Ball:

Yeah, very much so. I worked for the company for eight years and I loved seven and a half.

Craig P. Anderson:

So if you’re thinking back learning to those early leadership roles, what was the hardest leadership lesson you learned from those experiences?

Lorraine Ball:

There were several epiphany moments and I think one of the first lessons was that I was a leader because early in my career I was the wonder kit. You notice I said I was a department manager at 21. I graduated college early, I got my jobs early. And so the challenge was I was the youngest person in the room. And getting to that moment where I got to that place where I’m like, “It’s okay, I am the youngest person in the room, but I’m the person with the answer.” And that lesson of the first time I spoke up in a meeting and somebody else turned around and went, “Wow, that’s a really good idea.” And I looked at this guy and he was 60, he had been with that particular company for 30 years. And I thought to himself, “Wait a minute, is he talking about something? I said.

And I think that was a really powerful moment where I was like, “No, I really do know this and I’m right and this is the right direction.” Think one of the other, and it wasn’t as early on in my career, it was actually a little bit later, I was managing a pretty big department inside a very broken company. And I realized that we were surrounded by chaos and nobody could get anything done because they were always worried about their job or complaining about their job or there’s just that. There was this whole swirl of chaos. And what I learned I had to do in that instance was somehow I had to put a wall around my team and protect them and be that buffer made my life pretty crappy. But we got stuff done. And just learning that it’s easier to say, “Okay, you go talk to that person and you talk to that person and they’d come back all defeated and then they wouldn’t do anything for the rest of the day.” I was like, “No, this is not working. You work on this. Give me a sword, I’m going into battle.”

Craig P. Anderson:

And I find that interesting Lorraine, because if you think about how you defined leadership before was creating that environment for the team to succeed. And at that middle corporate layer of leadership, it’s where can I run defense for my team so they can execute. So that seems like a big lesson to pull from that is how to… I wonder what came first, the belief in that or the lesson learned?

Lorraine Ball:

Oh I think the lesson came first, the process of realizing that that’s what I needed to do in order to allow these people to do their best work. And they were just incredibly talented and creative and letting them get to where they could actually get work done. It changed, I think for the rest of my life how I approached my teams because that has always been my mantra since then.

Craig P. Anderson:

So that actually brings us forward then. So now in your most recent leadership roles, what are your leadership roles today? Talk to us about what’s going on there.

Lorraine Ball:

So in between I started ran my own business, cultivated a lot of talent, sold that. And so now I am doing some leadership on non-profit boards. And it’s an interesting and very different kind of leadership because when you are the manager or the boss or the owner, people do things because you tell them when you are managing a nonprofit board, people will act because they believe you. And you have to be really a better leader. You have to be a better storyteller, you have to be passionate about what you are doing to get people to give time and support your mission. And one of the boards I’m on, we have some really interesting challenges without going into detail, there are some factors that are outside of things that we can control but have direct impact on how people view us and making a decision as a board, how we are going to move forward. It’s really been an interesting process.

Craig P. Anderson:

That must be a very different kind of leadership challenge when you don’t have some title authority, but you really have not that much. How have you found yourself shifting in leadership style for that? Is it more vision casting and less directive leadership?

Lorraine Ball:

It’s definitely more vision. I lean more on my question skills, a little bit of the Socratic method, just leaning on… “Well, have we thought about this? What will happen if?” Never the, “Why do you want to do that?” Because that just puts up walls. If somebody on my team came to me and said, “Hey Lorraine, I want to do X.” And I’d be like in my head screaming, “Oh my God, no.” But if they were passionate about it’d be like, “Okay, well let’s talk about it.” And have you considered this and how do we do that? And if this is the alternative and really approaching it from that direction. And I find that’s very, very helpful.

Craig P. Anderson:

So when you think about all those early leadership roles you had and the lessons that you learned, how has that informed and impacted how you’re taking a hold of this today?

Lorraine Ball:

There were two things I learned in corporate that surprised me probably more than anything else. Once I understood it though, it became a very powerful tool. The first is that nothing gets done because you say, “Do it.” It gets done because of personal loyalty, I worked on a team that was one of the guys on the team. He had all a department, I had a department, we had a vice president we both reported to. And there was something he didn’t want to do and he didn’t do it. And I watched him for seven years through three different vice presidents, I’m going to get to that, but this is more important. Well, do you want me to work on that or how about the sales meeting we have coming up? And for seven years he did not do it. And it wasn’t that he didn’t work hard, it was that he thought it was stupid and he flat was not going to do it.

And nobody who was asking him to do it did he really care about, even though they were his direct supervisor. Contrast that at a sales meeting, this goes back to when we were using, before we were just starting to use PowerPoint, but we were still printing the slides on glass slides that were projected on the screens and somebody dropped a tray of glass slides the night before the presentation and there was no way to get those slides back. And so I stayed up all night with him because I had learned how to use PowerPoint, rebuilt them all and ran the program from the computer. For the next five years, if I needed something, I could walk into his office and say, “Hey, can you help me with this?” And he would drop what he was doing and he would do it personal loyalty. And when I switched companies and I didn’t have that network of people who I had done favors for and who I owed favors to, it was starting over again.

And so that first lesson, that idea that it is people operate out of loyalty and whether you are managing a department inside a large organization or you’re running your own company, people will do for you and do more based on how you treat them so that was one. And then the other one was setting targets and having a clear target. When I went to Conseco, which was an incredibly broken company, and my team was responsible for all of the literature, millions and millions of pieces because insurance, it’s not a product, it’s just paper. And we were in charge of the paper and on any given day we had 300 different brochures, flyers, things that we were out of stock. If you’re out of stock, you’re out of business. And so I challenged my team, I said, “Here’s the deal, we’re going to get to under a hundred.”

And I’m like, “How long will it take?” And they’re like, “Well, yeah.” I said, “Here’s the deal, September one, if we get there by September one, I will take you to any restaurant anywhere in the city. I don’t care how much it costs. October one, we’ll go to a nice place November one, we’ll go to McDonald’s, December one, I’ll pack your sandwich on your way to the unemployment line because we have to do this.” And every morning when people came in, they saw the number on the wall. I got a report every day. And so you could see the numbers going down and it changed the conversation. So we started talking about how can we make this piece of the process more efficient? And we red tagged things that were out of stock and we hand carried them between the 11 buildings on the campus to get them signed and bring them back.

And people, our printers knew that if something was red tagged, the marketing manager who needed something, if it was red tagged, everybody dropped, what they were doing to make the process move faster. My boss did not bat an eye when I sent her that lunch bill on September 2nd, she just said, “Nobody has ever done this we got to 99.” And six months later, we actually got to zero because once we’ve cleared out the chaos, then we could be proactive. But it was all about having really specific number and date and making sure everybody knew that was our priority. Everything else could get done second, but that was our priority.

Craig P. Anderson:

And if I tie those two lessons together, Lorraine, I think it’s so interesting that we start out with the relationship building and we start building those relationships with the team. So when it comes to the point where we’re pushing against a big goal and we’re asking them to step to a larger level, the relationship is the engine that drives that productivity and that willingness to stretch. As you think today, I always am hesitant to kind of broadly brush the younger employee base today, but the employee base that says, “Hey, my work life balance is my most important thing and I’m not going to push any harder than I need to. And once my work is done, I’m done for the day.” What’s different do you think today to try and engender that relationship and loyalty to get people to push to a higher level of production and effort?

Lorraine Ball:

I think some of it is listening to the people. And I’m going to give you another example. When I went to Conseco, we had to turnover rate of 120% a year in my department. I mean, literally every week somebody was quitting. And we did a lot of things to address it. But one of the things I did was everybody had to be at work from nine to five. And again, now you’re like, “Well.” But back then I said, “Okay, let’s take a look at this and when do you want to be at work?” And I had people that wanted to work from 7:00 to 3:00, and I had people, younger people who would go out partying at night and 8:30 was just too early. And so they worked 10:00 to 6:00 or 11:00 to 7:00 and I didn’t care. And at first the larger organization pushed back and then I said, “No, you don’t understand.”

I’m running a creative team. I’ve got 11 designers. If some of them are here at 7:00 and some of them work till 7:00, you’re paying the same amount of money as a corporation and you are getting 12 hour coverage instead of five. And so doing that, developing a system where people could work 10 hour days and then have a Friday every other week off, that was what was important to my team at the time. And so I think today as people push back and they’re like, “Don’t want to live my job.” Okay, you don’t have to live your job. Tell me what you want. So when you are here or when you are at your computer, if you’re working from home, what do I have to do to make sure that when you are working, you are working.

And this has been true for a long time, particularly in smaller businesses, people don’t really understand the finances. They look at, “Well, we just sold that project for $5,000. Why am I only making 500?” Well, there’s rent, there’s payroll tax, there’s all of these things. And too often I think leaders are afraid to share that information or for whatever reason. And that information is so powerful because when your team understands what’s really going on, they can support you better. And they’re more vested in the outcome because they understand what they do contributes

Craig P. Anderson:

And helping see how their job aligns with the larger mission. And yeah, what you’re talking about is that communication and that relationship, again in transparency and having that level of trust are just huge.

Lorraine Ball:

I’m also going to say something else, and this is cyclical and you’ve been through the cycles and there are periods where there are more jobs than people and there are periods where there are more people than jobs. And during a period where there are more people than jobs, it is easy for companies to become sloppy. And that was what was going on at Conseco when I first went there. They were like, “Yeah, well that person will quit. We can find somebody else.”

And then it flips and then you get into the situation where there are more jobs than people and companies are scrambling and employees have the upper hand. That’s where we are right now, but that may not be where we six months or a year from now. And so when the tables turn, I think employers need to continue with a lot of the things they’ve been doing to create positive work environments. And I think that employees need to really think about what is most important because they’re going to have fewer options than they do now.

Craig P. Anderson:

And watching people go through those cycles for the first time is always an interesting experience. So final question for you, Lorraine. I’m going to give you the power of time travel. You can take all your accumulated knowledge, everything you’ve learned about leadership and go back to Lorraine in 1992 in her first leadership role. What one piece of advice do you have for her?

Lorraine Ball:

Laugh more. I took myself very seriously as a new manager and as a new leader. And I think that you need to take what you do seriously, but you don’t need to take yourself seriously. So laugh a little bit more, have a little more fun. Don’t be afraid to let a little bit of that who you really are come through.

Craig P. Anderson:

I love it. That was the greatest compliment I ever received in leadership. As somebody said, you take the business very seriously, but you don’t take yourself seriously. Well, Lorraine, thank you for joining us today and for sharing all your insights on leadership. How can people find you if they want to hear more about some of your discussions around your podcast on marketing and some of the areas you’re expert in?

Lorraine Ball:

Morethanafewwords.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. And then the Digital Toolbox. If you are running a business specifically and you’re looking more focused out on the marketing side, digitaltoolbox.club and of course you can always find me on LinkedIn, Lorraine Ball.

Craig P. Anderson:

As always here on the Accidental Leader, I want to give you three takeaways for my interview with Lorraine Ball. And I want to frame them as you think about your leadership style and how you are going to bring your team forward into the future that you have cast for them. First lesson I took away today was one, that loyalty drives connection. And that connection as a leader with your team is what drives performance. Those relationship bonds are so important. And I even know for myself coming up in leadership, I thought distance was better from a leadership perspective, but really making that connection is what allows you to build the team successfully to really push that extra level to move forward.

Second takeaway from our interview today, authenticity in your leadership style to the importance of being authentic, but also balancing that with the culture that you’re in, not to the point where you’re not who you are, but realize that you also have to fit into the culture that surrounds you as a leader. And then finally, perhaps my favorite piece of advice so far on the Accidental Leader Podcast that’s someone wanted to share with their younger self is to laugh more. There is certainly a tendency early on in our leadership that we take ourselves very seriously and take that opportunity to do enjoy it. It’s a long ride where you can laugh more and not take yourself so seriously while taking the business very seriously is a key to long term success. So thanks again, Lorraine, for being part of the Accidental Leader Podcast today.

Are you an accidental leader looking to level up? A great place to start is by leading better team meetings. If you’d like help with that, go to clearpathcoaches.com/bettermeetings to download my 10 rules for better meetings. Your team will thank you and you will feel a lot more competence, confidence and calm in your next leadership team meeting. Thanks for listening today. And remember that leaders aren’t born, they’re made. You can go from accidental leader to the greatest of all time leader. It just takes competence, competence, and calm. We’ll see you next time.