In this episode of People Fundamentals, I’m joined by Larry Baider, vice president of talent management, leadership, and learning at AmeriHealth Caritas. Larry is an expert in performance and talent management, leadership development, and creating great employee experiences. He also co-leads Lean IN Leaders, a content-sharing platform focused on organizational psychology and peak performance.
Listen in as we explore how to adapt your leadership skills for remote and hybrid work environments.
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Transform your leadership with real human connections
One of the biggest shifts in leadership has been the increased importance of what Larry calls “human skills.” These skills, which he says are erroneously mislabeled as “soft skills,” are crucial for navigating today’s complex and fast-paced work environment.
“You need to have sharper and stronger acumen around what I and others call human skills,” Larry explains. “I do not like the term soft skills because at the end of the day, we all know that they are the hardest things for people to build acumen and muscle around.”
Building these skills involves developing empathy, communication, and the ability to connect with your team on a deeper level. These aren’t just nice-to-have attributes but essential components of effective leadership.
Focus on the three C’s of leadership: care, connect, create
Larry sums up his practical approach to leadership with “Three C’s”: Care, Connect, and Create. These principles are foundational for building a supportive and effective team.
By minding these three C’s, Larry says, leaders can foster an environment where employees feel valued and supported. Creating conditions for success involves providing the necessary resources, removing obstacles, and offering continuous encouragement. When leaders focus on these three principles, he says that they build trust and loyalty, leading to a more cohesive and productive team.
Engage in personal reflection
Effective leadership requires continuous reflection and growth. Larry highlights the need for leaders to regularly take time to reflect on their actions and the impact they have on their team.
“Something a leader needs to do very actively is to take time to reflect,” Larry advises. ”You need to check in with yourself and ask yourself, ‘Am I creating the time, creating the space to connect with people?’”
Personal reflection allows leaders to evaluate their interactions and decisions, providing an opportunity to learn and improve. This practice helps in identifying what is working well and what needs adjustment, ensuring that leaders can adapt and grow within their roles.
“You could just sit back and go through your calendar or in your mind’s eye and play back the week and say, ‘Who did I connect with this week that I don’t typically connect with or that is on my team but I know I haven’t spoken to in a couple of weeks?'” Larry suggests.
Regular reflection benefits the leader and enhances the overall team dynamic. By being mindful of their actions and decisions, leaders can create more supportive and effective work environments.
People in This Episode
Larry Baider: LinkedIn
Resources
Transcript.
Larry Baider:
Organizations should be focusing on long-term behavior changes, and that only happens when a couple of things happen. One is that you have the approach and the strategy to how you’re going to deliver that content. And it also comes back to modeling the way, and that the leaders of those individuals are demonstrating those behaviors, reinforcing them, and even pointing them out when someone’s demonstrating them effectively, and also pointing them out when they’re not, and then reminding them why they’re important.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Hello and welcome to the Betterworks People Fundamentals podcast. I’m your host, Ashley Litzenberger, Senior Director of Product Marketing. Betterworks’ core belief in people fundamentals revolves around helping HR lead through constant change by focusing on core values like fairness, support, balance and enabling growth opportunities for employees. These tenants empower everyone in the workforce to strive for excellence, to foster creativity, and to acknowledge each other’s contributions. Betterworks believes that strategic HR leaders can translate these principles into action, shaping their workforce for the better and helping drive meaningful business outcomes.
In this episode, we’re chatting with Larry Baider, the VP of Talent Management, Leadership and Learning at AmeriHealth Caritas. Larry’s an expert in performance and talent management, leadership development and creating great employee experiences. He also co-leads Lean IN Leaders, a content-sharing platform focused on organizational psychology and peak performance. His goal is to help leaders evolve from the inside out. Larry shares his insights on how leadership has changed, especially in our increasingly remote and hybrid work environments. He explores the VUCA management framework in the present context, as well as the three Cs for being an effective leader, care, connect and create conditions for success. He also gives us some practical tips on how leaders can better support their teams, stay adaptable and prioritize mental health in the workplace. So get ready to learn how you can enhance your leadership skills and foster a more connected, supportive and successful workplace.
Larry, it is so good to have you on our podcast today. I know that leadership is really important and is something that you’ve really focused on both in your work as a coach, professionally and throughout your podcast content that you’re sharing. Leadership has changed a lot over the last 100 years, the last 50 years, even the last five years as we’ve shifted from predominantly in-person situations where a lot of folks get FaceTime with either office leaders, headquarter leaders, their managers or their team leaders, to a much hybrid or even fully remote work environment. So how do you think or do you think leadership is changing as we move into these different remote situations?
Larry Baider:
The answer is yes, it absolutely has changed, and a lot of it has to do with this world that we have collectively entered. It’s always been around, but it is like 5X right now. So we could talk about the pandemic and the sedimentation of the pandemic, but at the end of the day, you need to have sharper and stronger acumen around what I and others call human skills, humanistic skills, power skills. We used to call them interpersonal skills. I do not like the term soft skills because at the end of the day, we all know that they are the hardest things for people to build acumen and muscle around. So I never call them soft skills, and I’m bold enough in a very respectful way to help reframe that in conversation with people and say, “Hey, let’s maybe not call it soft skills because it’s usually where people really trip up,” right? And I think it undervalues the importance of the skills.
Now, the reason they’ve become more important in addition to the landscape of the workplace where people are maybe functioning more hybrid or completely remote has as much to do with the pace of change. So I talk a lot about in presentations I do in and outside of the company, about a very well-known management framework that emanated in the late 1980s called VUCA. VUCA stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. And it emanated from a couple of futurists back in the 1980s and it was absorbed into the military very quickly because it did a very good job explaining the environment of those types of conditions, the military experiences. And then it was moved into the financial spaces like a business lexicon in the late 2000s due to some financial situations that we experienced.
And then you heard about VUCA, but not as significantly until the pandemic. It really explained what probably we most universally experienced as a society at the same time, right? Universal, obviously, meaning that things are changing, things are volatile, it’s moving at a very fast pace. We don’t have the answers. There’s various things happening at the same time, and there’s a lot of confusion as a result. And I would say that there’s very few people that wouldn’t tell you that’s a very good definition of what it felt like from 2020, even until today.
So the reason that’s important, getting back to your question, is that the types of skills that you have to build as a leader are different than they were even five years ago. Skills around relating to people, the ability to have a vision, the ability to articulate that vision and all the other important attributes that we often talk about, whether it’s through formal training or whatever means to build those skills, they’ve become increasingly important, especially the idea of tuning into people and being clear about what you know and what you don’t know. And it’s more important today for leaders to be okay to say, “I don’t have all the answers, but together we need to figure it out. So tell me what you’re thinking.” That’s a very big part of some of the new skills. You have to expand your network. You can’t just rely on one or two people to give you information because no one has all the answers.
Ashley Litzenberger:
I would love it if you could share an example of how leadership is changing from what you would’ve given as an example of a strong or a critical skill in leadership pre-pandemic versus post-pandemic. So where are some of those skills shifting and what are some examples and what is an example you would’ve given before and what is the example today?
Larry Baider:
I’m just going to tell you what I usually talk about to people. If someone says to me, “How can I be a more effective leader today?” One of the first things I’m going to suggest to them is don’t force it. Don’t be performative. Focus on transformational kind of behavior. So I’ll say more transformative and less performative because performative comes off as fake, disingenuous. So I’ll tell people to focus on these three things. I actually call them the three Cs so people remember them. It’s a nice little hook type formula.
I say the first thing you have to do is care about people. If you don’t care about people, you need to get out of their leadership business. And what that means for me is when you care about others, you show some degree of interest, a reasonable degree of interest in other people and for their welfare that you’re interested in what they’re thinking about. And yes, I’m going to say what they’re feeling. There’s nothing wrong with that. We have to tune into the whole person. What are they thinking? What are they feeling? It means really just caring about people at a very human level.
The second C for me is to connect, and you have to care first to connect. Right? But what I mean connecting is you’re pretty much taking the caring to this actionable level, and I will say this often, your primary job as a leader is to create the conditions for others’ success, right? So that’s the third C. But a little more about the connection that I just referenced, and that is you got to take the time to, again, figure out what they’re thinking, find out what their interests are. It doesn’t mean that you have to go 10 feet into their personal life, but you do have to realize today, and this is where those lines blur again, even more so post-pandemic, where people do literally bring their whole selves to work. We can’t chop it up and say, “Don’t bring your life experiences into work,” because whether we want it or not, it’s what they bring into through the door or through the screen.
And the quicker we realize that’s just a reality, the less we fight this old school thought of, “Just do the job and collect the paycheck, and I’m not really worried or care about you.” That just doesn’t work anymore. And it’s such an erosive terrible message. And when leaders do demonstrate this interest and by caring about people, and then taking it to this next level of connecting with people, they start to relate. And if you don’t relate to people, how are they going to follow you? Are people going to care about your vision if they think you don’t even care about them? And how are you going to figure out how to tap into people’s skills and their abilities and their interest if you don’t take the time to connect with them?
So it’s almost like this self-limiting way of operating as a leader if you don’t care about people and connect with them. And then again, that third C, I think is pretty much a drop-the-mic attribute. And if you as a leader do not take the time to literally create the condition so that other people could be successful, you will be leading yourself, and only yourself.
Ashley Litzenberger:
I am curious, with your background in coaching, I’m sure that you’ve worked with clients and with friends and with colleagues around these three Cs. Do you have any tips for someone who’s listening and working on their own leadership journey around reflection questions or things that they can ask themselves at the beginning or the end of their work week to check in on, “Have I been pracicing these three Cs, or have I been practicing some part of these three Cs?”
Larry Baider:
Yeah, I think it’s in the quasi formula I was just talking about. I think something a leader needs to do very actively is to take time to reflect. If you don’t take time to reflect, you’re not going to ask yourself about any of these things or any other important questions. So when you take the time to reflect, you need to check in with yourself and ask yourself, “Am I creating the time, creating the space to connect with people?” And you could just sit back and go through your calendar or in your mind’s eye and play back the week and say, “Who did I connect with this week that I don’t typically connect with, or that is on my team, but I know I haven’t spoken to in a couple of weeks?” You know what usually happens? And I’ve had this experience in my past where I felt like maybe a relationship with an individual is getting away from me.
Now, we all have these things. It’s that internal track in our head that’s reminding us of something. But I think, and I think it’s fair to say, and I place a bet on this one, that many people, leaders at all levels, don’t pay attention to those indicators. So think about it as a dashboard. When that lights up and it says, “Oh, I haven’t spoken to Bob in a couple of weeks, and I feel like I’m missing connection with them,” do something about it and turn it into an action orientation. So I think that’s really important. So am I taking the time? Who have I checked in with?
And then I think another simple one, but really important one is think about people who… Think about your team members and how they’re executing on work, and then check in with yourself and them and see, “Have I asked Steve if there’s any barriers I could remove to help him be more successful?” “How are you doing, Steve? Is there something I could do to help you? Is there something I could do to help you?” And then in addition to that, when people are struggling, don’t wait to check in and say, “Why? Why are you struggling? What do you think is getting in your way and how can I help you?” I think those are important things to consider.
Ashley Litzenberger:
I think those are great questions to reflect on, and a lot of that has to do with how you’re approaching it as a leader. Are you dropping work on someone’s plate and walking away and leaving them alone to navigate it? Or are you creating conditions for success? Are you cheering them on as they take on the new work? Even if they can take it on and they do have the skills, are you acknowledging that? And if they don’t have the skills, if it is a stretch assignment, are you checking in? Are you providing the support you need? Are you clearing the way, just like you said, creating those conditions for success?
Larry Baider:
Yeah, great recap, Ashley. Nothing feels worse. So play that out one step further. You did a little more dumping than delegating and you’re not checking in. So imagine everything we just talked about that you should do and you don’t do, play that scenario out. And then an individual, maybe they’re struggling and this time has elapsed, and instead of meeting them in real time to talk about meaningful course correction, like in the flow of the experience, how much erosion has taken place? Right? And then what we forget is not only are they maybe not executing and succeeding in the work that we’ve given them, but the psychology of what happens to that person in terms of not feeling good about themselves, not feeling successful, not feeling like they’re achieving, you start to actually impact their confidence. And then instead of getting exponential return and production and stellar work, the person starts to question and doubt themselves.
Now, imagine that person’s in a leadership position. What effect then does that have on their team? Because if they’re struggling as a leader, they are not going to be as available or as helpful for the people they’re leading because they’re on their own heads and the space they’re renting is not good space. And that’s why this becomes really important. We have to keep reminding ourselves that when you are a leader, in addition to creating those conditions for success, leaders need to remember that they are always modeling for other people. The question leaders have to ask themselves is, “How am I showing up? Am I modeling in a productive, healthy way?”
Ashley Litzenberger:
I think that’s absolutely true, and your point that everybody is a leader. If you are a manager and you have a team, you are by nature in a leadership position. You might be running a company and really be the leader of that organization, but as an individual contributor, you also have the opportunity to lead by example and bring in leadership qualities and attributes into your work. And that is equally important, I think.
Larry Baider:
Yeah, just one clarification. The way I look at this, and most people do, is that regardless of the management position, and this is important because management and leadership are two different things, but we need both, in anyone who is leading people and is caring for people. So you might want to say that management… Sometimes I’ll say management is about position, leadership is about disposition. By textbook, management is about planning, organizing, task-related things, and leadership is about painting a picture of an optimistic or hopeful future. It’s rallying a team around important work. And then again, clearing that path that we were talking about a few minutes ago.
From an individual contributor level, sometimes like in the I/O psychology world, we’ll call them OCBs or organizational citizenship behaviors, and those are the behaviors that everyone should be demonstrating and building connective tissue around because it goes above and beyond just the job description, but it’s what leads to a better outcome and a stronger culture in the organization.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Since many of our listeners are organizational leaders or people leaders in people teams at big companies, what are some things that are important to keep in mind as you think about building a training program or a culture around leadership? What are the things that you can put into place to help build those leadership attributes at your organization?
Larry Baider:
Yeah, I think it’s very much in line with what we’ve been talking about. Within an organization, there’s usually some type of… Whether we call them this or not, some type of competency model that everyone has bought into, and everyone knows what we’re measuring people by in terms of behaviors. Sometimes we just call them behaviors. What’s important is that we’re clear on what they are and we’re clear on explaining why they’re important and how they tie the results. And then we’re also doing something organizationally to set the stage to help people learn how to build those skills, whether it’s formal, instructor-led training programs, micro videos where you’re talking about these human skills that we’re talking about, or experiential learning. Strong blended learning experience is really important to drive that type of sustainable development and growth within individuals, taking it to a place that is meaningful and not just checking lead indicator that we got a certain number of people in the room to consume this learning asset, but how do you change behavior?
And organizations should be focusing on long-term behavior changes, and that only happens when a couple of things happen. One is that you have the approach and the strategy to how you’re going to deliver that content. And it also comes back to modeling the way, and that the leaders of those individuals are demonstrating those behaviors, reinforcing them, and even pointing them out when someone’s demonstrating them effectively, and also pointing them out when they’re not, and then reminding them why they’re important. So it’s having the resources and the framework to build that acumen. It’s having leaders support it, reinforce it, and model it. At a minimum, those just are two very important… Consider it the head side of the coin and the tail side of the coin.
Ashley Litzenberger:
And how would you measure the success of those programs? My thought initially is would you send out pulse surveys to ask, “Do I feel like my manager or my leader is doing X, Y, Z or makes me feel X, Y, Z?” Or are there specific questions? Are there specific methodologies? Are there ways for people teams to start testing and tracking, “How are my leadership training programs impacting our overall culture and how can I track that progress over time?”
Larry Baider:
Right. So you’re testing me on my memory of the Kirkpatrick model, which is a learning model, which is like a pyramid, and there’s I think five different levels. And one is, “Yeah, I enjoyed the program,” and then it goes all the way up to effectuating results. And to be honest, the days of lead indicators just don’t carry a lot of weight anymore. It’s really about looking at results and results through behavior changes. And if we’re developing acumen around human skills and we’ve got the right formula and the right ingredients in our recipe, over time, we should see demonstrative behavior of people becoming more successful in those behaviors. And if we’re tracking a trailing metric, I think it’s a fair hypothesis that there should be an impact on engagement. There should also be an impact on the type of measures or KPIs, whether we call them KPIs, OKRs, and there are slight differences between all those, or role-based expectations. We should be able to see some type of meaningful impact on those data points if in fact that’s what we’re addressing upfront in the delivery model around developing acumen and people in different dimensions.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Really powerful. And so I think one of the things that anyone who is an aspiring leader can take away is in my goals and my OKRs and my smart goals, whatever it is that you use as a framework, it’s not just about your role and your competencies. You should put in some role-based or some leadership-based KPIs. “Am I checking in with my team, each member of my team at least every two weeks just to connect with them?” Or something that will help you measure, “Am I actually putting these habits into practice? Am I taking action around these leadership qualities and attributes that I want to be cultivating?”
Larry Baider:
I think that’s a great way of going about it, and the reality is there are some people that it just comes more naturally to, right? And this gets back into are you born a leader or can you develop? And we all know the punchline is anyone, within reason, there are challenges, someone might have a challenge that gets in the way of that, but anyone can really become a better leader. It takes intentionality, it takes reflection, and it takes skill building.
However, there are people that do have a more natural propensity to leader-like behavior. It could be the way they were raised. It could be that they learn to be more empathetic or they were naturally more curious. So those people you might suggest look more like natural leaders, but they too need to keep sharpening that iron because you don’t just become a great leader and stay there.
I always tell people that it is not linear. It is not like climbing a mountain. It is a more like an undulating golf course, and by the time you get to the hole, there’s 1,000 more in your leadership journey. So it’s this ongoing thing and that the truth of it is too, you can consider yourself a very effective and proficient leader, and you can go through a really rough time that shakes your confidence, and you need to figure out how to get back on that horse. So the reality is a non-stop, never ending journey. We don’t just get there and we don’t stay there. We only ride that wave at a higher level or footage, like a bigger wave, when we keep filling our tank, and it’s all about intention.
And when leaders realize that, not only are they better for themselves. It gets back to what we’ve both said probably 20 times, you model that for other people. So you show people that you’re not perfect. You’re going to make mistakes. You don’t have all the answers, but your job as a leader is to help people realize that, but then to figure it out even in spite of those realities. Right? So very important concept to absorb. And again, that’s just another reality that when leaders realize that, it also takes the pressure off them because a lot of times, especially new leaders, they think when they get promoted into a new position, they got to be lights out. What they got to realize is that you just went back to the back of the, and you got to figure out how to build that skill to… And you only do that by getting reps and becoming more confident, and over time, you get better. You have some bad days, bad experiences, but you keep developing confidence and you know you could figure it out.
And it’s this continual process of learning, and I think we’ve said it in a few different ways here today, but that is one of the things that a leader at any level, or someone who thinks they want to become a leader, or I should say in a leadership position because we also said everyone is a leader, at least of themselves, and you’ve got to be a leader of you effectively before you’re a leader of others. But one of the things that we all need to do to keep growing, literally, is to be open to learning. When we stop learning, you stop growing. When you stop growing, it’s not sustainable because you’re going to have those bad days that rock you, those bad weeks, those bad months, and you have to realize that this growth thing isn’t just when you hit those ruts. It’s all the time, and it doesn’t have to be big things.
It could be a little thing, like taking time to reflect once a week. It could be taking time to… Like you said, I love what you said. If it doesn’t come to you, and this is how I went down this rabbit hole a little bit of if it doesn’t come natural to you, yeah, writing a goal for yourself about checking in with people is a really good idea. Over time, you keep developing that habit. Maybe it doesn’t need to be a goal, it just becomes part of your tapestry as a leader, but whatever you need to do to get there and connect with people more effectively and care about people and create those conditions, it all comes back, I think to those… For me, I just literally created that construct in talking to you today around these three Cs, but I think they’re that important. I talk about them all the time. I just never called them the three Cs until you and I started talking today, but to me, yeah, there’re three Cs, care, connect, create. It’s like I can remember that.
Now, there’s 50 other or 20 other or whatever your number is of whether the leadership attributes need to demonstrate. I would say whatever those others are, if you could do these three things effectively, you have an amazing foundation as a leader at any level or as an emerging leader on your journey to become a leader of others in an organization.
Ashley Litzenberger:
I love that. I’ve become a really big fan of the three Cs as we’ve been talking about them, care, connect, create conditions for success. They’re fantastic, and I love this vision you created, this reminder that being a leader or doing anything in your life, it is a learning journey. You have to be curious. You have to continue to be learning new things, and that you’re not going to just have that straight up a mountain success. It’s not going to be linear. It is going to have dips and valleys like a golf course. You’re going to have holes. Actually, I don’t play golf, so I can’t come up good analogy here.
Larry Baider:
Well, you got a bunker, right? You hit the sand trap and you got to try to get it out of it, right? It’s not easy.
Ashley Litzenberger:
Exactly. I am a mountain climber and I think about it more around, it’s not just going up to the top of the first peak. If you want to cross a mountain range or if you want to go on a cross-country road trip, it’s not going to be smooth sailing at every point. Some parts are going to be more tricky than other parts. And so learning how to lead through easier times when you are in the groove and you’re in flow and you can really quickly bring in new habits and level up is great. And then learning how to focus down on what’s really critical in other trickier places of your life or in leadership or in your professional organization, whatever’s happening becomes really important to learn how to lead in both of those cases.
Larry Baider:
That’s a great example and great summary, and Ashley, I just have to add this one more thing. I think it’s really important. Post-pandemic, mental health is incredibly important. It’s always been important, but it’s more important than ever. Now, there’s been a lot written about this in some very popular journals and articles over the past few years. As a leader of others, you do not have to be a psychologist, and you should not be practicing psychology, but you do need to tune in to people’s emotions and their feelings and know how to spot when someone’s struggling, because there’s probably more of it happening today maybe than ever before, and there’s been just so many reasons associated with that. I would argue that they’ve existed pre-pandemic. It’s just that the pandemic forced us to look at things differently.
But I do believe that when a leader takes the time to tune into other people, and I mean the whole person, and it goes back to those three Cs, in particular, the caring at that point and the connection, that you really are a non-performative and more transformative leader when you take the time in to tune into the whole person. I just think that’s really important.
Ashley Litzenberger:
I think that is the perfect place to end and think about how are we tuning into the whole person as an organization, as an individual in the work that we do? Thank you so much, Larry, for this conversation today.
Larry Baider:
Oh, it was my pleasure to be with you today and spend some time talking about a myriad of important tpics like this.
Ashley Litzenberger:
As we wrap up our chat on leadership in today’s changing workplace, let’s take a moment to think about how we can use these insights in our own organizations. First, focus on human skills. Larry talks about how important it is to build what he calls humanistic or power skills. In our fast-paced, remote and hybrid work environments, these skills are key. Make sure your leaders know how to connect and relate to their teams on a deeper level. Second, embrace the VUCA framework. That’s the model of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. By understanding and using VUCA in your leadership training, you can help your team thrive in unpredictable situations. Lastly, prioritize mental health. It’s more important than ever for leaders to be aware of their team’s emotional well-being. Larry highlighted the need for creating a supportive environment where employees feel cared for and connected.
Effective leadership isn’t just about managing tasks. It’s about caring for your people and setting them up for success. Larry’s three Cs, care, connect and create are all about building a healthy, productive workplace.
Be sure to stay tuned for our next episode of the People Fundamentals podcast. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube Music, and if you like what you hear, share us with your friends and colleagues. We’ll see you again soon.
