Positively Influencing the World with Glenn Parker

Stephen King once said, we never know which lives we influence, when, or why. At least not at the moment. Perhaps if we look back carefully, we can identify specific people who changed our trajectory for good. Glenn Parker , whom I had the honour of interviewing on my podcast, calls these people 'positive influence leaders'. He is an organizational consultant and has written several business books, including one called, you guessed it, Positive Influence!

Who has been a positive influence in your life that has helped hone your leadership?

Let me take you back to my first job out of graduate school, my first boss Larry, and my first performance evaluation with Larry. Larry thought I was doing a good job and told me throughout the conversation that he liked what I did.

I should say, parenthetically, that I was doing mainly research. I was looking things up and writing reports, and I was pretty good at that. Quite frankly, on reflection, it was reasonably tedious work, but I was happy to be working.

We got to the point where he asked what I would do going forward. I had thought about it because I knew what was coming from the forum, and I noticed that the people across the hall doing leadership training seemed to be having a lot of fun. They were jumping on planes and travelling all over the US and Canada, conducting leadership training, and coming back with great stories: travel stories, hotel stories, and class stories. And I thought, gee, that would be fun!

So I said to Larry, I think I'd like that, but I don't know. Can I observe a class? He said, well, next week, I'm going down south to conduct some leadership training, and you can come with me, but I can't justify your travel expenses unless you teach something. So my lips started to quiver.

But Larry, I don't know anything! It's OK, he said. Don't worry about it. We'll figure something out. So he did, and I taught two hours on the second day of a two-day workshop, and I thought, oh, I like this. It went well. And I said, well, I think I can do this.

And that completely changed the direction of my life. That's how I got started in leadership training and development; then I went to the organization and team development and all that sort of thing. But that little episode was significant in my life and went on from there, though I didn't realize it at the time. I just thought oh, this is nice.

The critical thing about Larry, which is interesting, is that he's just a guy, but nobody confused him with Tony Robbins. He was not the most charismatic person but what I've learned since is that it doesn't matter if people can be a positive influence. They can be a heart-centered leader without all the charisma, and those people often have good interpersonal skills. They see where you're coming from. The critical thing is that he saw something I didn't see in myself, which was a game-changer.

What about you,?Deb? Have you had anybody in your life that made that kind of an impact?

I have, actually! You've been the first guest to ask me a question. I've interviewed 214 leaders, so it's a story near and dear to my heart. My dad passed away when I was at university. I was 21 and had to withdraw. I was lost, and my foundation became learning and having emotional resilience.

I had to go to work, and I had a lot of technical skills. I knew DOS and Unix, the operating systems before Windows. I had a wonderful technical boss and was the concierge for this specialized group. I was the Girl Friday, I was the receptionist, I was the admin assistant, I was the executive assistant, and the president used to call me once a day from this company, and he said I just called because I love the way you answer the phone. Do you do that for every single phone call? And I said I do!

So long story short, the company was restructuring, and my position was being let go. And my boss, Steve McClure, was excellent. He told me we need to go for lunch today, and I have a couple of things to tell you. So he took me for lunch and said, I have to let you go, but there is an opening at the branch. He said I don't think you're going to fit in very well, but go and shine your light and be who you are. Let it play out, but I don't think you'll last, and that's precisely what happened!

So I got to my three-month mark, and my boss's name was Nancy, and I was the youngest in the branch. So the four women I was working with were all twice my age, and here I was, this 23-year-old, blonde hair, physically fit, gregarious, helpful; you're getting the picture here.

Nancy pulled me into her office, my three-month review, and she said, this is just not working. I could have fallen off my chair. I came in early. I stayed late. I was a team player. I was friendly. I was helpful. I kept my desk clean.

Steve took me out for lunch again. And he said you need to hear from me that you didn't lose the job because of who you were. You lost the job because your boss sees the leader in you and doesn't know how to foster it. He said, please go and start your own business. And at 24, I started my own business.

I just lost Steve three years ago to cancer. He was one of my mentors. He was the father figure. If he didn't dare to sit me down and say take that leap of faith, you're a leader; go and lead others, I might not have done it. Also, my dad instilled entrepreneurship qualities in me because I watched my dad become a successful entrepreneur. So that's my story.

What imperfections does Glenn bring to his heart-centered leadership?

I can be impatient. I like to get things done quickly. And sometimes, not everybody else is on the same page as I am. So I can be annoying.

Where did you get the grit and the heart, and how did you know it was time to write and release your book, Positive Influence?

I had another experience—a man who was another positive influence on me. I had left my job and became a consultant, and he was a client of mine for about 20 years, which in my field is unusual to have someone that long, and it morphed into a friendship.

We got to know each other's families and the like. I saw his organization go through many transitions, which I was part of, and converted to a team-based organization. He eventually retired, but we stayed in touch and would go to lunch and catch up on things.

I got an email from someone saying he had passed away, and I was invited to the memorial on Sunday. So I started thinking about his life and impact on me and how again, he was another brilliant, not charismatic person, just like Larry.

I was brought in as a team consultant, and at a certain point, he said, I want to do customer service training; almost everybody in my organization deals with some form of client, either on the phone directly or out in the field in person. I said, OK, I don't know much about customer service. I have a network of people, and I can bring someone in, and he said, I want you to do it.

So I did it. And it worked out well, and he was pleased with it. But what was going through his mind was not only did he want customer service, but he wanted customer service tailored to his organization. He didn't want something that was off the shelf, a standard customer service program. He wanted something tailored to his particular organization, their work, and their interactions. So I did it. He got me to do customer service. Suddenly I was a customer service expert.

Fast forward a few years, and he said, I just heard that corporate has a business ethics class; everybody in the organization has to go through it. He said, I know I'm not going to like it. I know it will not be specific to my organization and the ethical issues my people deal with. So he said, I want you to do it. I said, well, I don't know much about it.

He said you'd learn, so I learned a lot about it. I became such an expert that a bunch of other companies started calling me to do business ethics training because I did it in a way that hit home with people because of the scenarios I came up with.

What would you do if you were working in purchasing and someone said to you, I've got two tickets for the basketball game Friday night? You could have them if you like, with no strings attached. What would you do in that situation?

That was the kind of dilemma that we would teach. And then the last time, he said to me, Glenn, I know that the senior leadership wants to do team building, and they want to do it off-site. He said he was going to recommend me. This time, I said, OK, I think I can do this, but I've never worked at the top of the house before. He said, OK, I got an appointment. I'm going to meet with the leadership team, they're going to ask me questions, and I'm going to tell them what I would do.

I asked him, do you have any advice for me? He said, yeah, don't screw it up! So I did the off-site, which finished at seven on a Friday night. This was back in the days before cell phones, and I knew him well enough that I had his home phone. Fortunately, he answered the phone, and I told him I didn't screw it up.

He was such a positive influence on me. He got me to do things I had never even dreamed I could do. I came home and talked to my son Michael, who works in financial services, manages a large team, has read literature on leadership training and development, and has gone through much of it himself as well. I told him I was thinking about writing a book on leaders who were positive influences. He said he'd read that book!

And I asked, how would you like to write that book with me? He said, oh, I would love it. And that's how he came to do this book. Then we started interviewing people and asking them who positively influenced them. We were trying to create a profile on what it is about these people who profoundly affect other people.

Please share some insights on how leaders perform during these unprecedented times. What have you observed??

An old phrase initially attributed to Benjamin Franklin: out of adversity comes opportunity! We found that there's been a tremendous amount of innovation during this time because people have been forced to innovate to deal with the situation. It's not business as usual. We know the history of a lot of this. The flu epidemic of 1918 was devastating, and out of that came a full development of public health measures to deal with the flu and other public health concerns. Public health became a thing after that. Later, there was the development of measles and mumps and, eventually, polio vaccines that came out of it.

During this time, with all the rhetoric and misinformation, disinformation, and tribalism, we forget that we had a tremendous example of public-private innovation. We developed these highly efficacious vaccines in 10 months, two highly effective and one very highly effective. Ten months was unheard of. I have worked a lot of my life in the pharmaceutical industry, and drug development takes much longer than that. So it's been fantastic.

Even at specific business levels, we've had a lot of innovation. For example, a gentleman named Mike is the CEO of a company that owns 21 Red Robin restaurants. Restaurants were hit hard, and he said that before the pandemic, all of these restaurants competed with each other to be the best in the group. The leadership fostered some of that competition because they thought it was healthy.

During this time, that stopped, and they started sharing best practices. As a result, there was much more collaboration because somebody learned something that one of the restaurants did. In the future, they will be more collaborative and innovative because of this collaboration.

I interviewed the general manager of a Marriott Courtyard hotel, and he said because we're part of a national or international brand, we have to follow specific rules. During this time, he said, we started to question the rules. And we began to ask how does this help our employees be safe and healthy and how does it serve our guests better? One of the most famous ones was in New York City, where the hospital system was just overwhelmed at the beginning of the pandemic, and as a result, they needed hospital beds.

The Javits Center is a big convention center in New York City that houses trade shows and other major conventions. Nobody came into a trade show during the pandemic, and they were shut down. They got together and collaborated with the Army Corps of Engineers that had all kinds of experience building field hospitals. Within a week to 10 days, they built a 2500-bed hospital within the Javits Center.

It just set a remarkable example of public-private cooperation and innovation to get things done; much more communication is going on, and leaders are starting to communicate more with the employees and open the doors to communication from employees back to leaders. Leaders started doing this old, fashionable thing called 'management by walking around'. Do you remember that?

So now, managers started walking around the hospital floors and asking people, what do you need? How can I help? What's going on? How are you faring? Do you need help? We've got psychologists here, we've got ministers here that can help with counselling. I interviewed the CEO of Amtrak; he and the leadership team were walking the platforms, riding the train, and trying to find out what was going on and what people needed. They were pitching in for somebody who could not show up for work. They were helping passengers, those kinds of things.