Lynn Walder on Detaching Your Worth from Your Work

Lynn Walder · 0:00

My name is Lynn Walder, and I'm the founder and owner of executive management partners. Today's leadership quote comes from Lao Tzu. To know others is knowledge. To know oneself is wisdom.

Podcast Intro · 0:16

The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistants to become confident game changing leader assistants.

Jeremy Burrows · 0:23

Hello friends welcome to The Leader Assistant Podcast. It's episode 178 And this is your host Jeremy Burrows. I'm excited to be speaking with Lynn Walder today, Lynn. How's it going?

Lynn Walder · 1:45

It's going amazing. I'm super excited to be here and quite humbled that I'm on your show. I didn't realize the lengthy line of amazing leaders that have spoken prior to this incredible 178 episodes. Again, I don't know where you find the time.

Jeremy Burrows · 2:04

I don't either. What part of the world are you in?

Lynn Walder · 2:09

I am currently residing in the however you want to look at it, whether it's a small city or a big town, Boston, Massachusetts. I'm a little bit on the outside of that. So I like to say I'm a lifer here, because I've been here since college and just never left. So yeah. Love it very much.

Jeremy Burrows · 2:28

Nice. And tell us a little bit about your family.

Lynn Walder · 2:32

Yes, I have a little interesting makeup of a family. So currently I live with my husband who is working at timberland actually, and is enjoying every moment of it. This is after he actually had run his own business for about 20 years. And I have lots of amazing and funny and honestly some tragic stories as well from his days as a founder. And I also live with my two young boys. effing an Andrew. They are like the 13 and 11 right now and they definitely keep me on my toes. And then of course, I have the competition in the household, which is our english bulldog, Ellie. So she, she definitely put me a second rung in the house. My husband is definitely a little bit, you know, nurturing have her in much more of a directive way than he is of me these days. So if anybody's interested in seeing this shenanigans of Ellie, the Boston Bulldog, you can go to her Instagram handle it Ellie, the Boston Bulldog. So it'll, it'll make your day if you're having a tough one, I can assure you that.

Jeremy Burrows · 3:33

That's awesome. So okay, so you were going to talk a little bit more about your husband and the founder experience. And then, you know, you are very passionate about helping founder CEOs. You're in you, your set yourself, our founder and owner of executive management partners, which is a consulting firm. Tell me a little bit about what you do with executive management partners. And then we'll kind of reverse engineer and go back to your career that led up to this.

Lynn Walder · 4:07

Sure. Yeah. So yeah, I find that my niche specialty is working with first time founders, and usually visionary, first time founders that are looking to break convention or break the mold. And I attribute my deep care and deep reverence of working with founders to being married to a founder who ran a company for 20 years. And funny enough, his company was called the underground hip hop.com. And he started it out of the dorms of our college called northeast University, same place where Napster was started. So we were, you know, both in college at that point in time, and he turned his hobby into a business and there's lots of excitement and lots of energy and lots of amazing how eyes with one of them actually being his business almost being purchased by the Beastie Boys and their label, right when we were graduating college, which would would have been his dream. But also then that was quickly tempered when that deal fell apart right in front of him. And I remember looking at him and his, almost him throwing up in the middle of his dorm room because his dreams just shattered right in front of them. But if there's one message I can hope that people take away from this podcast today from a philosophical wisdom standpoint is I truly believe everything happens for a reason. And I told my husband that at that moment in time, and what he didn't know is that the label went bankrupt six months later, through those ups and downs of his business, I was able to witness not only I partnered with him, I wrote his business plan, I helped set up all the operations and administration I helped guide him on on HR and communications. This is way back when I had a lot more time on my hands, obviously, I saw how founders believed themselves to be the actual business, they their entire work identity becomes them. And this seems like it's a very positive thing in the beginning. But what ends up happening when things get into crisis mode, is you start falling apart very quickly. And so after about 15 years of running a fairly successful business, I saw my husband start spiraling when things started getting really tough. And this is another I want to say funny story, because I'm looking back on it now. But when I was in it, this was not funny at all. He since he ran an underground hip hop focused community website, he would go into the city for hip hop trivia nights in Boston. And he went in for one evening, it was a Wednesday, I'll never forget the date, it was July 17. And he calls me and tells me that he is in tufts hospital with two broken arms. And at first I laughed think that he was joking. And I said, the senior you're pranking me on the phone, right, and he goes, No, you need to come here and move my car and and check check in with the hospital because I can't move either of my arms. He had tried to break dance at age 35 for a trivia challenge with his teammates, broke both of his arms at the same time. And this is when he's running a full time business. And so I had to step in as temporary CEO. And that's when I realized just how difficult of a situation his business had gotten into. And it was eye opening one from how I saw the devastating effects of his emotional and psychological attachment to that business. But also, I realized how my expectations were rolled up in to that business as well. And I didn't realize how much they were, I was able to assure him through the next couple of years with winding down the business and in in full transparency. And I got permission to share this part, he went into a deep depression because of it. And I had to, I really had to nurture him through that to get to the other side. And luckily, I had already been through a clinical depression in my late 20s. So I saw all the signs way ahead of time, I was able to be a good support system, I was able to help usher some of his business issues through and get him to that other end. Like I said, that was a pivotable pivotal experience for me in understanding the the unique needs of founder CEOs, and the difficulties that they take on. And I vowed at that moment in time that one of my purposes would be to hopefully get in and be a partner to these founder CEOs. And help them never get to the position that my husband was in both from a business scaling and success standpoint, but also from the psychological and emotional standpoint. So I have a deep deep care and deep deep reverence for founder CEOs. And that's when I realized this was what I was really meant to do. I had I had history doing stuff prior to that. But this is when I was I knew what my purpose in my path was within the executive administrative career. pathing so

Jeremy Burrows · 9:23

Wow. Well, thanks for sharing. I you know, I can relate somewhat, as my prior executive burned out and dealt with depression and, you know, end up getting fired. And that was when I decided to move on and start my career over.

Lynn Walder · 9:43

Devastating, absolutely devastating.

Jeremy Burrows · 9:45

Yeah. And I vowed the same thing. I was like, I want to help executives and assistants avoid making the same mistakes. And I've always been drawn to the founder CEO role as well. That's my currency It was also founder CEO, but, but my prior executive, unfortunately, took his own life during COVID. So yours Oh, that's sorry. And it's just it just kind of, I always think about, okay. You know, I don't blame myself by any means. But I do think about, okay, like, what if we would have had a healthier culture and environment and boundaries and been aware of, you know, the pace that we're running at so hard for so long? You know, yeah, I

Lynn Walder · 10:39

think that it's bigger than that. I think that we have an issue systemically with how we, one build businesses and to how we place founders at the forefront of meeting to give everything and all, especially if there's investment money involved. And this is where I'm a very deeply spiritual person to I love I call myself a syncretic, spiritualist, I love Buddhism and Taoism and I was raised Catholic, and I studied a whole bunch of different philosophies, and I take a little bit from each of them, and pull them together for all the love and the beautiful aspects of that. And one of the things that I really tried to integrate into my partnering with founder CEOs is to make them understand the idea of detachment, because this is what ends up happening, they attach their value their worth their entire identity, to the business. And we need to get in way early and try to temper that and say, this is like raising a child, you don't want to hold on to a child their entire for your entire life, your goal is to build this child so that they can be independent without you one day. And we need to have them think about what's on the other side of this, most founders start their business. And they live moment to moment in it. And they do not think about their own exit plan. And what's even worse is they don't understand their own value outside of that business at that moment in time has happened to my husband, he felt like he didn't have any skills to go anywhere else. And I said, you ran a business for 20 years, the entire thing, you have so many skills that can transfers, and he didn't have any confidence, he was terrified to go out and try to start over. There is life on the other side of, of when a business either gets sold fails, or you decide to shut it down. And we need to get better at starting from the beginning from that mindset and not trying to backtrack to it. So I think that there's other again, a tragic officer. And I think this happens more often than then many people want to talk about. But i That's why I want to try to bring it to the forefront. I think it's part of our roles to at least try to assist where we can we cannot be responsible for other people's actions, but we can try to support where we can.

Jeremy Burrows · 13:03

Yeah, I love what you said about detaching our value, because I talk about this all the time about this idea of of detaching our worth from our work. And that's one of the things that, you know, another story on a personal side for me, my dad had attached so much of his value as a person and his worth as a person to his job. And when he lost that job, he went into a multi year depression and suicidal and just it was just a similar situation. Thankfully, he's come out of it. And he's he's doing much better these days. But it's it the root of it. As you mentioned, the root of it was the attachment of his worth and his value to that job and to what that that is identity was in that job.

Lynn Walder · 13:56

Correct. And I feel that we as administrators also deal with this. And it's even harder for us sometimes, because we're the invisible workers. We're behind the scenes, nobody is like it, nobody nobody knows that we do anything until things really get messed up. And then it's a disaster. So I use this same advice when I'm speaking with other administrators. We need to find other other intern that's what I say to no others is knowledge but to know ourselves as wisdom, we need to discern our own value sets our own internal worth and, and do our best to not need to mirror it back from everything else that's around us. And American culture is very much about work identity culture. And this is why also many administrators burnout, which I know is a hot topic for you as well. We absolutely have to start separating ourselves and seeing the value of the work we do but the value of ourselves outside of that work. So I do hope that that we we are good Getting better with advocacy and understanding ourselves. And I'd love to give a little plug for a quick a quick survey if people wanted to take, it's free online, I use this in some of the work that I do. It's called the values and action survey. And you could just find it online and you just take it and it'll it'll, you know, spit out your top five or 10, I believe, driving values in your life. And it just gives you language and a better understanding of what's truly important to you and how you might want to build, whether it's within your work or outside of your work. Things that align with your true inner joy and your true inner worth. So,

Jeremy Burrows · 15:43

yeah, well, we'll put that in the show notes. If you can send that to me, we'll go ahead and make sure that's in the show notes at leader assistant.com/ 178. Leader assistant.com/ 178. And we'll make sure to put that in there. So y'all can check that out. So tell tell us a little bit about your assistant career. And, you know, you've you've talked about your passion in helping founders and and all that. So tell us a little bit about your assistant career. How do you get into it? How'd you get out of that? And all that fun stuff?

Lynn Walder · 16:15

Yes, yes, well, I find that when I talk to other administrators we all have, sometimes it's similar starting point of, I kind of fell into it. And it wasn't something that I was understanding that this is what I was seeking or doing or wanting to aspire to. And I actually did run my own business for a little while when I was right out of college. And I ended up realizing how much I hated it. And I realized after helping my husband with starting and growing his business that I was much better at being the support person. And again, being in the background, and on this side. So I was a career I'm not gonna lie was a lost career soul for many years. And I actually I mentioned before that I had gone into a clinical depression when I was in my late 20s. I call it the quarter life crisis. Most most individuals, they go through some type of turmoil around between ages 24 to 27, because you have to start adulting, as you call it. And some people it gets skewed a lot more difficult. And I remember my husband coming home, and he's he's building this thriving business. And he's knows exactly what His purpose is and what he's doing and what his joy Spark is. And I'm sitting here going, I have no idea who I am or what I want to do or what I'm even good at. I love volunteering, but you don't get paid for volunteering. I was a volunteer addict in my 20s asked my husband. And so my husband said to me goes, Why don't you try nonprofit? I was like, You know what? Why not? I didn't even think of that. So

Jeremy Burrows · 17:52

hey, nonprofit, but not that much. So no.

Lynn Walder · 17:56

Again, universe provides, the universe puts you where you belong on the path. And the path is not always linear. So I ended up working at a nonprofit. And it was their admin, their like Operations Manager, supporting the president and the teams that were going out and doing work in the city of Boston. And it was a small team of 12. And so of course, I was doing everything. And I was also forced into becoming their IT operations manager for two years because they didn't have enough money to hire somebody else. So I not only was doing the administration side of the business, I was doing the full on IT operations side of it, too. And I learned so much during that time, even though I was very frustrated during those two years, it did come to the point where I ended up getting pregnant, and they never had anybody pregnant at this place. And so they had no support mechanisms for for pregnancy leave, or any they didn't know what to do with me. And so while I didn't want to leave, I had to and that's where I ended up getting shuffled into the biotech industry. Because at that moment in time, life brings us what do they say, desperation is the mother of all invention. I knew I needed a longer term sustainable industry that was going to support a growing family. And so I looked at three different places, academia, VC, and biotech, because those are the big things that are here. And given my experience working with some smaller startups and fast paced environments, academia wasn't going to work. And also VC wasn't going to work either because VC firms in their own right, they actually don't grow, they grow the portfolio companies outside of themselves. So So I realized, Oh, I'm gonna go work at a biotech and I'm not gonna lie coming from nonprofit going to private industry. You say, I'm selling my soul. That's how you feel when you're leaving a nonprofit. What I discovered was that you can find in private industry mission driven and purpose driven companies. And I found that at the place I went to go work, which was vertex, vertex pharmaceuticals. And I feel like I was there during the golden years, it was intense. It was amazing. They were doing incredible science, they found a cure for cystic fibrosis. It was amazing, amazing time there. And so that's where I fell in love. I became I started as a administrative assistant in the HR department, worked my way up into like, senior administrative roles in that, that department. And then I stepped into the interim CEO, assistant to the CEO for a little while. They wanted to keep me but they were moving to a huge building down in the seaport of Boston, and the commute was going to kill me. And so I said, I can't go with you. And they're like, No, you're coming with us. I'm like, No, I'm not going with you. And so I ended up after four years departing from there, but I stayed in biotech, and I just came closer to home. And then I worked in a smaller startup for about six years, and took on a hybrid role there, I was supporting the CEO. But I was also running the internal communications and employee engagement efforts. And so I worked very closely with HR in building the culture there. And that's where I fell in love with how important purpose meaning and the discernment of core values when you're building a business in order to drive behavioral alignment, and vision expectations. And so I was there for six years, again, worked with a very visionary founder, who was so supportive of me, I worked with the most supportive team who really believed in administration. And this is where I came up with two of my models that we'll talk about, I think in a few minutes, they were just they were really about innovation and braking convention with how you share resources and redefine process models in order to drive, more efficiency, more value and more impact on broader scale. So that was wonderful. That was a place that worked called form of therapeutics. And then, after that, I, I burned out, I had a burnout moment. And I had to take a hiatus and you'll see that on my LinkedIn profile, I say, personal and professional hiatus where I had to do some thinking about what was the next evolution of my career. And, and that's when I said, I think I want to aspire to venture a little bit more out on my own and take these ideas of things that I consider to see as patterns of issue, one with founders and two with when you're building companies, and they're scaling very fast, and try to hone in on those items, to change the way we build businesses to make it better. And as Another side note, I ended up getting sucked back into biotech for a period of time, because I wasn't ready to venture out on my own yet. And we're started working in a place called lab Central, I was recruited there to support a CEO who has a very crazy life running multi businesses and traveling internationally, and it was all over the place. So I came in help wrangled him. And after about six to eight months, I said it's time for me to move on. And this is where life has other plans for you. Because I literally had set up my consulting business was ready to depart on November 19, of 2019. And sorry, 2020. And literally the week before I my son gets diagnosed with type one diabetes. And so I started having an existential crisis of Oh, my goodness, stability matters now. And I cannot take the risks that I was planning on taking with my consulting business that I was willing to take literally before that day. So this is where agility comes in. And I really had to sit with myself and say, wow, like this is two to three years worth of work that has just been stopped in its tracks. And I was devastated for my son first. But secondly, for myself, because this was a bifurcation of my original plans. Luckily, I was able to maintain my employment at my place of lab Center, which I'm so grateful I love working there and I shifted into another role. And I still get to do my consulting work on the side. So I'm doing I'm doing both in tandem, and it's a beautiful beautiful thing. I'm loving it and then COVID hit of course, so that just like put a whole other situation on thing but that's kind of my journey again, it's it's this weird one Finding all over the place, kind of I have to go with the flow because when life throws these things at you, you can try to plow through it. But I think we have to be a little bit more strategic than that, especially when it has to come to healthcare. So

Jeremy Burrows · 25:12

right, right. So your that's where you're currently at, then you're you've got the day job and the side gig.

Lynn Walder · 25:18

Yeah, yeah. And so I work, I work part time at labcentral. So it's not full time, day full time, I worked part time there. And then I work part time with my consulting company. And I do do a little bit of coaching on the side, that's like, I feel like the coaching is the side hustle. So I work with companies, I help them with their executive operational scaling, I call it bridge to scale fractional services, where, especially for the biotech scene, they don't, when they're prior to getting their first Series A, they're not ready to commit to full time GNA functions yet, and they need somebody to come in, and I call it be the manager of the miscellaneous. So I do that with some project management, infrastructure setup, wrangling, the leadership team to show them how to come together in a more streamlined way and drive communications and culture. And my favorite Joy Spark is helping them discern their company values when they're very young, because the earlier you get your company values in place, the more successful your company can be because Your vibe attracts your tribe, as I like to say,

Jeremy Burrows · 26:29

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, tell us Okay, so that's a lot, a lot of great stuff to talk about. You know, I might have to do two or three conversations, because you have a lot of good stuff that I want to ask you about. But for this for this episode. Talk about Well, first, first, you did this paradigm shifting admin title recalibration initiative.

Lynn Walder · 26:58

And my passion, I could talk all day.

Jeremy Burrows · 27:03

Like I said, we might have to have a few different episodes. So you did this a few years ago, maybe. Yeah, and

Lynn Walder · 27:11

this was in 2018. I did the other model, we that's on the docket, back in 2016. So administrative title recalibration project was done in 2018. And it was kicked off because I was infuriated with all of the feedback I was getting from all industries of the lack of alignment around titling compensation, development. And honestly, just respect for the roll. And nothing gets stuff done faster than fury. I'll tell you that every weekend, I was in the library, just plowing through writing and researching and putting it all together. And I was so proud of that when I put it together because I feel it is an opportunity for a true evolution of our entire industry. And I one of the webinars I did a number of years ago, HR had gone through similar evolution as what we're going through right now, about 30 to 50 years ago, human resources was looked at as a tactical cost center in the company for many, many years. And it wasn't until they started advocating credentialing and also aligning their titling with the rest of the company. And looking at it as people strategy, not transactional, only HR. And so it was more aligned with the actual strategic deliverables of the business. And now you see, in many companies, HR is considered a strategic partner, and it's integrated and resourced and planned for appropriately every budget season. This is what has to happen for administrators, I believe that the function of administration has evolved to a place that it needs to be reintegrated into the business in a mindful and aligned manner, similar to how HR went through that evolution. We as an industry have to come together and use the appropriate language, do a lot of education, and do our best to deliver to show that the proof is in the pudding of that this function can deliver strategic value for the business. That is not just for the executives. It's not a one on one relationship, especially now that we've moved from being a specialist role in many instances, up to a generalist role where we are working on a lot more cross functional projects where we're culture curators. We are relationship builders. We are also the street tactical bridge between understanding what the strategy is and actually the Delivering on the tactical and the operational infrastructure. And while that might not necessarily always hold true for enterprise organizations, because the larger an organization gets, the narrower a role becomes, and that's the nature of needing to understand and getting things done in a large bureaucratic system. But when you're in the smaller to midsize stages, there's so much opportunity. And I believe that we need to retitle ourselves not only to align the true development, accountability and growth, respect, because people, there's a difference. When you call somebody, an executive assistant to a CEO, or a director or a Senior Director of Business Administration, there's a difference. People see that and they feel it differently. And also, the compensation would be different, too. And the development, if you stay as an EA to the CEO, you're tied title Clift, you can't go anywhere beyond that, they literally will say to you, we can't do anything for you, you have to either go into another department or a function, or you have to leave. And it shouldn't be like that. They don't do that to any other function in the company except us. And so I think that this new model that I had created, fixes that and it's flexible enough that you can use it in startups, all the way up to enterprise if you wanted to, because you can cherry pick different parts. And I wrote all of the job descriptions. So you see how what you need to be doing to get to the next level, everything is open source I did as a goodwill to the industry, because I just want to get it out there. And anybody can download it the links like right on my LinkedIn page on you know, the front, if you click on the what the highlighted stuff. And the time is now, the time is now it's such a beautiful, amazing time to be an administrator if you are willing to take the torch and really move forward with it. Right. So if that's one thing I want to say this is,

Jeremy Burrows · 31:57

yeah, that's the thing I love about your resource is, you know, we say, Okay, we've got a assistants have to own their own their career assistants have to self manage a lot, a lot of times we have to self manage, and not very many, if any other roles in our organization are self managed like we are. And but what you did with your resource, you didn't just say, oh, you know, own your career, you said, Here is the here the tools, the research, the templates, literally the job descriptions, the spreadsheet with the titles in the in the career ladder, you know, all that stuff, you know, not just own your career, but use this tool, this is the torch, if you're gonna hold

Lynn Walder · 32:44

the torch, I do want to put a caveat here, we have a huge uphill battle. And I'm still challenged by human resource functions and CEOs themselves, who I continue to educate. And I do it with compassion, I don't do it with with anger or frustration, because they just don't know what they don't know, they haven't seen the true ROI of when you have an incredible administrator by your side, that is integrating the function in a holistic manner, you need to recruit for that, you don't just bring it in and then think it's going to happen. And I'm seeing this and this is where the skills gap comes in. The job descriptions that are being recruited for for these roles are leaving a huge gap and a lot of disappointment with the CEOs and HR departments of what this role they they continue to hope it to be. But they actually aren't recruiting for the right competency skill sets in order. And they're not empowering the role in the right way when you come into the organization. And so this is why it's really important for us to advocate and also be very upfront with our languaging and our communications around the value that we bring to these roles, particularly on the executive operation side. And I when I'm speaking with other administrators, I give them language to use so that it translates differently. And I was I was speaking with an administrator a couple of weeks ago, which I was asking her about some work that she was really proud of that she had put together. And when I asked her I said well explain to me what you see the value in this work is and what it was doing for the business. And when she started describing to me the value of the work, she was actually focusing on the people that the work was for. And the mindset of what we have to shift to is we always have to use languaging that links everything we do back to the business, not to the people that we support. And this is what we've been stuck in for so long that we support executives and we help this executives and I'm helping streamline we executives. The reality is is yes we are doing that But the ultimate output of that is streamlining communications in order to speed up decision making, for for getting to our milestones and making our investors very happy. It's about the business. And so I want us to start looking at our role and our function within the company in that way, so that we can start getting the respect the empowerment, the titles, and the compensation that this function I truly believe deserves within the business landscape.

Jeremy Burrows · 35:32

Yeah, I mean, that is by actually just posted something the other day as their three areas of influence that we have as an assistance, your executive, your team in your company. And so, like you said, a lot of times we just focus on that first one. And it's all about, oh, yeah, I'm helping my executive save time, oh, I helped my executive do this. Well, if you don't broaden that, like you said to your team and your company, then it's not going to, it's not going to get you as far. And that's what Yeah,

Lynn Walder · 36:06

and like I said, I've been having conversations with CEOs where I start saying to them, Do you believe what do you think that this administrators should be doing? And of course, they took off the same stuff, right, you know, calendaring, office management, travel and expense, culture building, you know, those kinds of things. But then I start bringing in some other questions. I said, Well, are you going to be fundraising soon? And like, yeah, like, and who's going to be managing the actual, like tracking of all of this fundraising activity, because if that's going to be you, that's wasted time, not going out and actually getting money. And you need somebody who can understand the strategy and prioritization, build that for you and take care of that. So is that going to be in your job description, they go, oh, and so you have to open up the understanding of what the capabilities and broad skill set is for somebody who's going to come in and help in this role, at that higher level. And that's where I also believe that there is a need to fill some of these skills gaps, where the expectations have kept a lot of talents tempered, and you learn through doing and having the opportunity to do so. And so I am trying to educate CEOs before they even hire their first administrator. So this is one of my, one of my I like to get to the root cause of things, I don't like dealing with the symptoms. So I feel like a lot of our industry, we continue to say, we need to just advocate for ourselves, or we need to talk about our role. And what we do. The reality is, is we need to get to the decision maker before they actually hire that first person and educate them. So part of my consulting business is to try to partner with these companies before they ever even hire, and I show them what they what they should be expecting out of this level of a role. And to have the appropriate job description, to attract that specific administrator that is going to help build the business as a partner with the with either the founder or another CEO.

Jeremy Burrows · 38:11

So what could you share? Maybe one or two practical things that you would if you're if you're consulting with a CEO that's about to hire an assistant or needs to hire an assistant? Or if you're talking with an assistant who is interviewing and looking at these job descriptions? What's what's one or two practical things that needs to be on these job descriptions? You know, just practice with landscape practice?

Lynn Walder · 38:38

Well, you'll see it actually, if you if you download some of my job descriptions through the calibration project. One of the things that really frustrates me with the current job descriptions out there, and this isn't just for the administration, job descriptions with every job description, they focus on the technical capability aspects. That's all they focus on the roles, that scope, you need to not only have those technical skills, you have to be able to do the behavioral skills, or intangibles or soft skills or whatever anybody you know, there's different terms for them. Because our jobs in particular are so about relationship building, and amazing communications, discretion, proactive infrastructure build, management of emotions for our actual CEO. That's actually what we do. And we're calendaring. This is like, again, looking at things in different ways. People say Oh, I do calendaring. If you say I do calendaring, CEOs go, oh, it takes five seconds for you to do because they think oh Calendly or if they don't realize the complexity that goes into it, and understanding the relationships and how you prioritize? No, we're actually managing the CEOs energy so that they can perform at their best in order to deliver on the highest value for their company and make it successful. You are managing their emotion, their emotions and their Nergi and not only that, you're doing that for the entire rest of the team as well. And this helps, this helps ease the tension. It's smooths out, we're like the conductors, right? So, so practical advice I would say is, if and when you're gonna go in for interviewing at a company, ask very specific questions around the expectations of actual behaviors and values and cultural alignment. And that'll give you some inkling of how they view this role and how they're going to integrate it. For example, I would probably asked the question of how do you view? Do you have a philosophy of executive administration and how you would actually utilize it within the ELT team? Do you believe this is actually a part of the ELT? Or is this a separate separate position? I believe that this position is an ELT position. And I make that very clear. When I'm interviewing, I go, this is an ELT position, because I am literally supporting all of the communication, all the strategy and all the facilitation between this team so they can function at their highest and their best to deliver on what they need to deliver on. And I can't do that if you're if you're keeping me as a as a side game. And so that's number one. The other thing I say which this can be kind of controversial, if you're, if you're not confident enough in the way that it's delivered, is I say, my job is actually not to be loyal to you, as a CEO, you will not be the first person I am loyal to the first thing I am loyal to is this business. But in reality, the business is technically you. So I will help protect you, and do everything I can. And I will challenge you if I think that you are doing something that is detrimental to your vision or this business. And so understanding that differentiation, again, separating that executive from the business and understanding that they are intertwined, but they actually are not one in the same. This is very important. When you start speaking in those strategic terms in a directive way, it shifts their mindset of the way that they look at how they integrate you into the business and into the role. And so these are the kinds of things there's there's definitely a mindset shift and a little bit more of a proactive directive approach with how you're confident in what you're going to bring in being the expert of scaling executive operations when you come into these roles. So there's so much to opportunity, I just feel it's being left on the table. And I have a lot of faith and a lot of hope that we're getting there. And I continue to talk with administrators who are up for the challenge to and podcasts like this that are getting the word out. Again, I'm super grateful and super appreciative for all the time and effort you put into this, this podcasts and your work and your posts and your book. And it's just amazing. And I just the community has gotten so strong, and it can be even stronger if we continue to move forward on this together.

Jeremy Burrows · 43:04

Yeah, Lynn, thank you so much for being on the show, and so many good resources. You know, I've been really encouraged, you know, every time I hear from an assistant that says, you know, what I was trying to fight for this, this re collaboration, I was trying to put the business case together, it didn't work. But you know, what, I found a company that values my role and values this process, and I left the other one. And I got I got a new job, and I'm getting paid more and I'm respected and and they see me as a partner. And you know, all that is because of the work that you're doing with this title recalibration, and the work that other assistants are doing to show that, hey, this actually works. This actually, that if you are in an environment that doesn't support this, and doesn't support you, like you should be supported. There are environments out there that do and it's getting

Lynn Walder · 44:05

better and better the opportunity, or they're getting exponentially better. So that's even more exciting, more exciting.

Jeremy Burrows · 44:13

Well, to wrap it up, where can people find you? How can they say hi, and find out more about executive management partners? And obviously, I'll share the links in the show notes. But where would you like people to go?

Lynn Walder · 44:26

Sure. I mean, I hang out mostly on LinkedIn, I just love engaging with people I put all my articles up there so you can go into the article section and see everything that I've written a couple of my other models work that I'm doing right now on values, values for systems second mindset or you can go to my website which is exec mpc.com. So it's you can type in executive management partners as well that'll come up to but really LinkedIn is probably the quickest and easiest way to come and find me so I love I love and reaching the kindred spirits, so definitely come find me.

Jeremy Burrows · 44:58

Yeah, great. Well Put, like I said in the show notes at leaderassistant.com/178. And I appreciate you again being on the show. We look forward to keeping in touch and thanks for all the work you do for this community.

Lynn Walder · 45:13

Thanks so much and full of gratitude for everybody who's decided to listen to this number 178 podcast. Thank you all