In this episode, Sam Shriver, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at The Center for Leadership Studies, gets Jeff Chambers’ perspective on Personal Power and its importance in influencing others.
Episode Transcript
Introduction
Welcome to The Center for Leadership Studies podcast, an exploration of contemporary leadership issues with experts from a variety of fields and leadership backgrounds. In this episode, Sam Shriver, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at The Center for Leadership Studies, gets Jeff Chamber’s perspective on personal power and its importance in influencing others.
Sam Shriver
So getting people to give you all they’ve got and go all in, so to speak, on solving a difficult problem, that takes more than simply being in charge right?
Jeff Chambers
To do that with your direct reports, you have to have a relationship with them. So you have to have a certain level of personal power. How do you get that? What I always tell people is you hire the whole person. You have to manage the whole person. That means you have to get to know them on a personal level. You have to know what makes them tick. If they have a sick child at home, you’re probably not going to get their A game that day. How are you going to know that unless you know the person? I had a CEO tell me one time that he expected employees to check their personal issues at the door when they came in that day. I said, well, that just doesn’t happen. And really good leaders understand that.
I may not know what to do to help you with your sick child at home or your aging parent in failing health, but as a leader, I need to know that, okay, you’re dealing with this issue, and so that may affect your ultimate work product. So, I may have to push you a little more to think outside the edges of an issue rather than just take the most expedient route because your mind’s somewhere else.
Conclusion
Jeff Chambers is the Director of HR and legal at The Center for Leadership Studies. He is also a Vice President with Goodwin Executive Search, responsible for business development and search execution. He serves as the Secretary-Treasurer on the Board of Directors for World At Work and is also an advisory board member at Alpha Marketing. Jeff spent the majority of his career with SaaS Institute, a software company that consistently ranked high on Fortune Magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list during each of the eight years Jeff was Vice President of Human Resources.
For seven years prior to that, Jeff was SaaS’s Senior Corporate Counsel. After leaving SaaS, Jeff was appointed senior vice president of human resources and legal affairs for PRA International, a global clinical research organization. Most recently, he served as chief human resources officer at Vitent Health Systems. Jeff is a work-life-certified professional. He earned a BA in Political Science from Bucknell University and a JD from Villanova University of Law.
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