Hi and welcome to the Make Work, Work Better podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Marc Reynolds, President of FYV Consulting. This is episode one of season one. We're excited to get this podcast launched. We've already done a bunch of interviews that I'm excited to share with you, and we've already made some of the mini workshop series that follow those interviews For the Make work or Better podcast, we operate under the assumption that things can always improve. We can always grow.
We can always be better. Through this podcast, we have two main goals. First we want to give executives and leaders in the business world a chance to share the lessons they've learned. We want to give them a platform to share their voice. We want to give them a chance to share those lessons in their own genuine, authentic voice.
The vibe we're going for, and that is communicated when we have these interviews is essentially let's have a conversation as if we come to the end of a business day and we're just having a personal one on one conversation about life and the lessons we've learned.
Second, it's to give other people the chance to explore and find their own voice In better words, to found it, meaning to build it from the ground up, to decide what they want to be, who they want to be, how they want to engage in business and their personal life and the world around them, and craft that so that their intentions match their behavior and their action and their communication. So that's essentially what's going to be happening in this podcast.
To reiterate two big elements of this podcast. So don't be confused when you see some really long podcasts and some really short ones, the interviews will be longer and you'll see them labeled there as interviews. The second type is right after those interviews, we'll do mini workshops. Where we will give you specific tips, tricks and practical applications that relate to the things in the interviews that precede them.
Those of you that are excited for these interviews and to learn from these micro workshops, go ahead. I give you permission to skip to the next interview or the next micro workshop. But for those that are interested or if you come back later wondering who we are and what we have to offer, I want to give you a little bit of context about my story, who I am, and how I found my voice in this sphere. I've been really fortunate.
Engaging in this particular sphere of executive coaching and corporate consulting has just kind of fallen in my lap. And consequently, I'm making a career pivot from my normal everyday activity and my training and expertise in opera stage directing over into executive coaching and corporate consulting full time. Now, you might think That's the strangest career pivot I've ever heard. And I've actually been told that. And I don't disagree with you.
in fact, it wasn't until an executive that I've been working with for a long time and that you'll see an interview coming up here, helped me understand the logic, helped me understand what my previous career path of being an opera stage director and professional educator at the collegiate level, has done to prepare me to really offer something new, exciting, effective and relevant to today's corporate world, both to executives and their employees. So let me explain.
As an opera stage director, I have three main jobs. One, it's to manage large groups of people so that we can all work towards one common vision and communicate one clear story, but also so that I can empower each individual to really run with their expertise, their area of interest and ability so that each person can really contribute to their fullest potential. My job for the past 20 years has been to help others communicate in a way that's genuine, authentic and believable.
You might think opera really? That is what you're trying to do. Well, you missed it. Opera, especially in the US, is like trying to sell a great product to an audience that doesn't know and doesn't care. It's doubly hard because we're working in a foreign language. And luckily, that's really helped me here in the corporate world because I'm super comfortable dealing with people in a variety of different languages and cultures and helping them to work efficiently together as well.
But opera and believability, really? Yes. The only way to get an audience to engage and believe in want to come back to this very unnatural art form is to make them believe that this very unnatural art form is natural, genuine and authentic. That it's believable, that it's clear and it's interesting.
Third, my job has been to work with small teams, design teams, executive business teams, investors, and a lot of different people from a lot of different backgrounds working together to help them work efficiently, and keep them in a creative mode. helping them learn how to channel all that energy, communicate and engage in a team in a way that's efficient, doesn't trip egos, doesn't trip defense mechanisms and gets people really excited to make a fantastic product.
The other key piece that I found to being an opera director that has been crucial has been Often we work under a very tight time frame. We have a lot of pressure to deliver quickly to large audiences. Consequently, all these different areas that I've been learning, training and gaining experience in have acted like a crucible where it is intense, is extreme in terms of the personalities and the situations that I'm put into.
So what I found is that jumping into the business arena is actually much easier to get really quick results that are dramatic and help people get to where they want to be. So though this might look like a strange career pivot, what I found in practical experience is really that it's a very simple transition from one to the other. And I've been really fortunate to have clients come to us and see that potential before I did.
and then get feedback that helps us both refine our product that we're offering you, but also shows us that what we're offering is something that is desperately needed in the business world. So what does FYV consulting do? First FYV stands for Found Your Voice. That might seem a little kitschy and cheesy. Let me explain. It's not just found your voice, as in oh, I found it, but it is found your voice as in, build it.
Create a foundation where you get to choose and develop how you interact and communicate with the world around you. You say, but I want it to be genuine. Authentic. Oh, it will have to be genuine and authentic for it to be your voice. But the challenges. There are many ways to be genuine, authentic in our own body. We want to find the way that is going to get you the results that meet your goals and objectives.
Our second overarching goal with Found Your Voice Consulting is to empower employees to have a voice, to develop their own voice in the business world, and to help executives hear their employees in a way that is as authentic, genuine and true to those employees experience as it can possibly be. How do we do this? We do this in two main ways. First, we do executive coaching. Executive coaching for us is not executive mentoring. Well, what's the difference?
Executive mentoring is about telling you what to do. Make this investment, make this choice strategy wise. Talk to this person. Make this move. Mentors are extremely valuable and we hope you have many of them. Coaches serve a very different function The function that we serve is first, to be a safe place for you to share your real experience. What's going on? Say it out loud.
Talk through the good, the bad, the difficult without you having to be on, without it getting back to other employees and without you having to worry about that information leaking or affecting how people perceive you. Because of those conversations, we then are in a good position to help guide you, support you, and help you discover your own goals, your own voice, and how you're trying to communicate and engage with both business internally and with clients and investors externally.
Finally, our goals consultants are to help you think clearly, to externalize your thoughts, to be a sandbox for you, to be able to work through your thoughts and process them in a way that is safe, in a way that can be mirrored back to you. One of the things that being an opera stage director has taught me is how to be a really effective mirror. Now, if that sounds like a strange term, the reality is all humans have the same problem. We can't look at ourselves. We're in our body. We're doing it.
We cannot see how what we're doing is being communicated. We can video it. We can try to find other ways to monitor. And those are really helpful and we'll help you with that. But it's really helpful to have another human being who their job is to look at you and say, this is what I'm seeing, this is what I'm hearing. Here's what you're doing that is communicating this thing so that you can be like, yes, that matches what my intent is. Or No, that's not what I intended.
Then at that point, our goal is to help you achieve your goals in both communication and in the decisions that you have. Another service we offer for our executive coaching is external communication coaching. So that's whether you're preparing for an interview over video, a podcast, or you're just doing a presentation to the company and you need some feedback on how to make it come across as believable and engaging and authentic. We can help you with that.
The second service we offer is internal communication. Say you have a discussion or a meeting that makes you a little nervous, a little anxious, that has the potential to go sideways on you.
Our expertise is helping you learn how to communicate and advocate for yourself or others in a way that is not going to trip those defense mechanisms and those egos, but it's going to jump straight to the core of the issue and resolve the challenges that are in front of you, and to take advantage of the opportunities that are presented to you.
So in short, as an executive coach, our goal is to unlock your ideas, your goals, and your expertise so you can express yourself and achieve them to the fullest of your ability. The second main thing that FYV Consulting does is third-party skip-level interviews. Hopefully you understand the value of skip level interviews. That's pretty obvious in a regular practice in most organizations. You might be asking yourself though, well, why would I want a third-party to do that?
Isn't the whole point for me to go to employees throughout the company, get a clear vision and talk to them so they feel heard and valued, and the answer is yes. There's two challenges with that. Number one, you as the executive do not necessarily have the time to talk all those people regularly enough to gather the information in a timely manner. Second, and this is where the third-party part becomes really crucial, is if you're their boss or you're a member of the board or your H.R.
Or you have day to day interactions with this person, Most people are going to instinctively and subconsciously alter the information they share so that it's presented it to you in a way that is going to better their situation. In short, you're not going to get the most accurate information. Consequently, when you have these interviews, even if they're being honest, you won't be able to fully trust that the information you're getting is accurate.
If you have a third-party also doing skip level interviews and talking to your employees, then you can start seeing the trends. You can start identifying the common patterns, themes that are coming up over and over again. Well, how what we do really different from what you might do or HR or anyone else in your company when it comes to third-party interviews.
Well, we have a unique process where first we sign an NDA so that we can't share any of your company's secrets or the hard things that come out. Our lips are sealed when it comes to those things. Second in our contract, we have you sign that we will not disclose individuals information or information that can point to a specific individual without their specific permission. If you say, well, then it's worthless to me. No it's not.
That's a crucial step for those employees to feel safe to really divulge their true experience. Now, if you're thinking, well, this is just be a place for them to vent and complain.
It might be initially, but ultimately, our goal is to gather all the information, identify the trends, the things that many people are saying and communicating, or if there's just a person that sees a very targeted problem and it doesn't tie back to them, to share that information by sharing what are the types of comments being made.
And second, the recommendations that we would make based on those comments so that a if we're presenting you new information that you haven't heard before, you can move quickly and act on that information and confirm that it's really an issue yourself. Second, you can verify what you're hearing and how well your interviews are capturing your employees experience.
The final piece that makes our third party skip level interviews unique is that if you want to verify that, the comments that we're hearing actually indeed happened, that they came from your employees, we keep very detailed notes that are available to your attorneys or ours for verification.
Why that's important is attorneys can then use attorney client privilege to look over our notes, protect your employees, and still verify the truth of what we're shared with you, and that it indeed did come from one of your employees. After we do either executive coaching or skip level interviews or both, we’ll, then sit down and talk with the sponsoring executive and offer recommendations. Some of those are services that we offer beyond executive coaching and skip level interviews.
It might be that we come in and do a 1, 2 day, or week long workshop over conflict resolution, communication internally, externally, management training, change leadership or team efficiencies. Or it might be that we work with individual teams online, or we do some kind of mix of online or in-person with teams or your entire company. We hope that you'll check out our website and contact us. You can find our contact information on the website fyvconsulting.com.
You can also see information down below or if you go to the website you'll see a Book Now button. Go ahead and book a time. It's a free consultation where we can talk through what your needs are and see if we're the best match. If we're not, we also have other partners that we'd be happy to recommend you look into.
Now that I've shared with you who I am and I've shared with you what FYV consulting does, we hope that you join us for the other episodes where we get to learn from these other amazing leaders and have micro workshops where we give you practical tips and ways to apply the things that you'll learn from the interviews. Thank you for listening. Don't forget to click like, subscribe or follow us so that when we put up new podcast episodes, you can follow along too.
We look forward to seeing you next time and helping you make work work better.