Are you aware of how your attitude impacts the room you walk into? Positively or negatively? Our guest today is Lisa Even, who talks about how your attitudes and behaviors as the leader of your company create a ripple effect throughout your team.
TODAY’S WIN-WIN:
What does joy look like?
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ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Lisa Even (ee-ven) is a keynote speaker, bestselling author, and leadership coach who helps teams create what she calls a ‘Good Ripple Effect. With a background in healthcare operations and team leadership, she now works with companies like ESPN, SHRM, and Disney to teach leaders how to show up with presence, build trust fast, and shape stronger cultures. She’s also the host of the Have Good Ripple Effect podcast.
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TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] Dr. Tom DuFore: Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. As we open today, I’m wondering if you are aware of how your attitude and behaviors impact the rooms that you walk into as the leader, and that’s impacting it positively or negatively. Our guest today is Lisa Even, who shares with us and talks about how your attitudes and behaviors as the leader of your company create a ripple effect throughout your team.
Now, Lisa is a keynote speaker, best-selling author, and leadership coach who helps teens create what she calls a good ripple effect. With a background in healthcare operations and team leadership, she now has worked with companies like ESPN, SHRM, and Disney to teach leaders how to show up with presence, build trust fast, and shape stronger cultures. She’s also the host of the Have Good Ripple Effect podcast. You’re going to love this interview, so let’s go ahead and jump right into it.
[00:01:10] Lisa Even: Thanks for having me. I’m Lisa Even, like the opposite of odd, and I am the founder of Lisa Even. I’m a keynote speaker. I talk to teams about leadership and a little bit of life. My tagline is “Have Good Ripple Effect.”
[00:01:26] Dr. Tom DuFore: Fantastic. I love it. That’s part of the reason I wanted to have you on the show is to talk about the entrepreneur’s ripple effect. A lot of the folks that tune into this are founders, they’re leaders of organizations that are small businesses or franchise companies. I’d love for you just to talk about what is the entrepreneur’s ripple effect. Give us an overview. What do you mean by that?
[00:01:51] Lisa Even: Yes. I go back to the what is the description of a ripple effect. It really is a disturbance, and so this idea that your ideas and what you say and what you do is
creating a disturbance out in the world, and hopefully in a good way, which I’m guessing, as an entrepreneur, we don’t go into this business for anything other than that. The
idea is is that how are you thinking about the space that you’re in and what you’re doing, and how can you really create something that touches the people around you? That’s really how I’d say it.
[00:02:24] Dr. Tom DuFore: What led you to start going down this pathway to start thinking about this and talking about it and investigating it and learning more about it? What prompted that?
[00:02:32] Lisa Even: I would say it started before I was an entrepreneur, but it certainly is something that I use every day. I was an operational leader in the healthcare space. I worked in some teams and became the leader of some teams, where it was really hard. We were the neurosciences and behavioral health teams. When you think about giving people bad news or just having to save lives, literally, I’m not clinical, but our team was. It became our mantra of everything we say and do is a ripple, happy or crappy, our choice. There was a lot of this choosing that even though we’re operating in a really hard, busy, fast, regulated space, we needed to make sure that that was a priority.
You, I bet, as an entrepreneur, you can say, “Well, that sounds just about like what I do every day.” It’s like, yes, we live in this busy, wild, fast-paced environment where we
can’t control a lot of things, but we can certainly control our reaction to it. We can create a really impactful disturbance in a good way. That’s how it got started. It became
our tagline for our team.
Then my husband and I moved states, and my husband was like, “You should start your own business. Get out there and teach people how to lead people.” I thought, “Well, what in the heck would be my tagline?” He’s like, “I know your tagline.” I was like, “Oh, right.” Have good ripple effect really became the flagship for how I think about the world, how we approach it, and what I do.
[00:04:05] Dr. Tom DuFore: I love how you ended up kind of the why, a little bit of the origin story there on this. Let’s talk a little practical. One of the things I like about our show is we try to make sure we leave some practical things here. How do you help people have good ripple effect and help leaders of organizations do that?
[00:04:24] Lisa Even: I really focus on three things. The first being how are you showing up? I had a team member who pointed out that I was showing up busy. Actually, just to give you a quick story, so you can almost imagine being there. We were in the lobby of one of the clinics because I managed multiple locations, much like you all with franchises. You’re at a particular location, you’re standing in the lobby, and one of our doctors walked through, looking like the mad scientist and slightly disheveled, hair, papers everywhere. One of my team members said, they pointed at the doctor, and they’re like, “Doctor so-and-so is so cute. She’s always so disheveled, like brilliant mad scientist.”
Then they started to go around the circle of like, “Well, you show up like this and you show up like that.” They got around to me. My team member Haley turns to me and she goes, “Well, you kind of show up, I don’t know, kind of busy.” I remember being like, “I am fun. I am energetic. I am not busy.” In my mind, I’m like, “Oh my goodness, what?” I laughed it off. Got through the interaction. As I was walking back to my office, I was like, “I’m showing up busy.” I was thinking I was doing a ton of work on their behalf, getting a lot done, but that was how they were experiencing me.
It’s really around this idea of how are you showing up. Similar to the weather, what weather are you bringing into the room? If you were to describe your energy at the time, are you bringing stormy weather, cranky weather, good weather? It’s a lot around that. I think that’s one of the easiest, quickest, most practical ways that you can create good ripple effect is to prepare for the interactions that you’re going to have. Like, “How am I showing up? What will people remember or describe me as?” I certainly didn’t want to be described as
busy.
[00:06:15] Dr. Tom DuFore: Great. I like the thinking about it as the weather too. What are you bringing in here? Instead of being a weatherman prediction type thing out there, where who knows what it could bring, right? If you’re planning ahead. What would a process maybe look like that if you’re trying to say, “Okay, how am I showing up? What am I
showcasing and what I’m presenting them?”
[00:06:36] Lisa Even: Yes, absolutely. I think it’s twofold. Number one, it’s really around A, recognizing the energy that you have. We all know when we’re angry. “I’m so angry,” or like, “Eh, I’m feeling kind of blah today,” or just taking almost to your temperature of where are you at. Then the second thing is really thinking about when I enter that room, what’s
that energy going to look like, and what’s it going to feel like? The second part that I always talk about is how are you engaging with your team? I often will think, “Well, I want to be a little bit maybe calm, but I also want to be curious.” Then, after you’ve identified what you want to do, then I often say, “Well, what would that look like?”
I know that sounds so silly, but we wouldn’t go out onto the football field and be like, “Well, we’re going to run play four, five, six, but we don’t know what that is.” You’re almost like putting the playbook together prior to that. In my mind, curiosity looks like I’m going to ask a question of a team member. I have a great worksheet on my website, lisaeven.com, and it’s called a PB&J worksheet. It’s for one-on-ones. It’s got a great list of questions that you can start to ask people. The P really is perspective. I want to take some perspective. What are they thinking about? What’s their personal life? I just want to get a sense of like, “Hmm, what are you thinking about?”
Then the B is better ways. Oftentimes, even in our franchises, somebody’s got an idea. They just need to be asked, like, “Does anybody have any ideas on how we could make this better?” I’ve asked that question of like, “Is there something that we should have improved a long time ago that we haven’t?” Usually, if they feel safe enough, they’ll be like, “Yes, this has been a problem forever. If we just moved this piece of equipment over here, I think it’d save us a whole lot of time and money.” Then you sit there as a leader and think, “Huh, good thing I asked. Good thing I asked.”
Then the J is really around their joy, just identifying, are they having joy in their personal and professional lives? Because that’s an indicator of a lot of things in the world, is
like, “How are you doing?” That’s just one way.
[00:08:39] Dr. Tom DuFore: Oh, fantastic. I do want to go back to a couple of the other points I think you were going to get to, but one of the things that I was very intrigued about having you talk about on the show is this idea of joy. One of the things that stood out in some of the pre-show material was you had this phrase that stuck with me that said, “Joy is my job.” I’d love for you just to build on this idea of joy is your job, and what you mean by that, and especially with the PB&J formula you described.
[00:09:09] Lisa Even: Yes, absolutely. When I first became a leader around that time, my husband and I both were climbing the corporate ladder, we have little kids, we were exhausted. I said to him one night, “I feel like life is happening to us instead of us happening to it. I feel like our schedule is way too full. When I look at the calendar, I don’t see a lot of joy.” I said, “I just have this sneaking suspicion that if we wait after this next project or after our kids sleep through the night, or after, after, after.” We keep pushing this idea off of like, “Well, when we get done with this, then we’re going to have a little fun.”
I said, “I just have this suspicion that we’ll get to the end of our lives and we’ll look back and be like, ‘Shoot, we were supposed to have joy back then.'” In healthcare, we measure
everything, right? We take your blood pressure, we check your pulse, we weigh you. I said, “I want to make– I don’t know, I just want to make joy our job, and I want to figure out a
way to measure it, to track it like a bank account or like a health outcome.” He looks at me, and he’s like, “Hmm.” He’s a really quiet guy. He’s like, “How do we do it?” I’m like, “I have no idea.” We ended up hanging a whiteboard in our bedroom, and that became literally our first joy list.
Now we track. We have a joy list. It moves over to the calendar. My husband and I have a meeting once a month where we literally sit down and look at our calendar, and we, almost in a British accent, say to ourselves, “Do we have enough joy? Do we need to add some?” If we don’t see enough joy on our calendar, we sneak some in. I do the same with my work teams. A lot of it, they’re in 15, 30-minute increments because it’s not a lot of time, but I want to see it, and I want to be able to track it.
[00:10:56] Dr. Tom DuFore: Again, getting back to that first point you were making, being more intentional, right? Some intentionality and some pre-thought into that. I have a sense of what joy is has maybe changed season to season, whether it’s professional or personal. Can you give us some examples of what that might look like?
[00:11:14] Lisa Even: Yes, absolutely. I do a lot of keynote speaking on team culture and being a good leader. Then I do a lot of speaking on joy. It was cute because one woman raised her hand during a session, and she, in a funny voice, was like, “I have enough joy. Thanks.” If you can see my face, like, I loved that. I was like, “Yes, that is exactly it.” If you
don’t want it, great. If you do, great. Your season of life is really going to dictate how that looks. For example, our kids are now in middle school, and so we don’t often have time to do a date night. Our dates are usually Wednesday afternoons, from 3:00 to 4:00.
Our kids get home from school, and we literally say, “Would you like technology and a snack?” They’re like, “Yes, we would.” Literally, we have a list of coffee shops printed on our refrigerator, and we pick one. Then we go have coffee. We literally drive there, order, drink it, drive home. That was date night. That’s kind of the season that we’re in. When our kids were littler, it looked different. My parents recently retired, and they have a joy list and a joy calendar. Some of their comments are like, “Well, what do you do when you have a lot of time on your hands?” I just laugh. I’m like, “I could never imagine.”
It really does take a little bit of forethought to think, “Okay, I have 20 minutes, I have 40 minutes,” or someday, when we’re rich and retired, we’re going to be thinking, “Oh, I have so much time.”
[00:12:45] Dr. Tom DuFore: My wife and I are in a very similar season as you. Our kids sound like they’re about the same age. It’s interesting. I find, as you described, your afternoon coffee for an hour, we have something similar that we try to get in. Midday, where we could have lunch, or just a moment while the kids are occupied, and you’re not running
them around to practice and schedules and time with friends or whatever else they’re into. I totally, totally agree. You had mentioned there were three things you could do, and I
think you shared with us the first one before I started interrupting you. I’d love for you to continue to finish that list there.
[00:13:26] Lisa Even: Yes, absolutely. The first one was show up. Just thinking about how you’re showing up in the room. The second one is really around engaging, and that’s kind of this idea that you want to be intentional about how you do it. I will often say, asking questions is a good one. Then the other piece to that is really thinking about what people care about, their values. We carry our values literally on our forehead. We talk about our kids, we talk about the things that we’re doing, and then we carry our values even when we’re upset, like, “They don’t trust me. I wish they would respect me. I’m so angry about X.” People literally, if you’re listening, they give you what they care about.
I always say, engage with people’s values. If they want to be the funny guy in the room that’s driving you bonkers, well, engage with that. That’s a top value for them. If you can get really good at just starting to notice what people care about and what’s really important or even what makes them cranky, you’re like, “Oh, trust is a big deal for you.” Then, when you’re interacting with them, like, “I’m going to give you this task because I trust you.” All of a sudden, they’re like, boom, “Okay, I’m on deck for this.”
That third piece is really the idea of looking at how you’re collaborating as a team and what your culture looks like. What’s the attitude of the room? What are the behaviors? Are we complaining a lot? Are we walking out of meetings saying, “Well, that could’ve been an email.” What is going on? What are people behaving like? I start to take note of those behaviors. Are they cutting corners? Are they complaining? A new behavior will pop up, and I’m like, “Oh, that one’s interesting.” I start to take tabs on it. One of the behaviors that I had is in healthcare, sometimes we’re too busy to be friendly, like, “I am saving lives. I do not need to be nice to my coworkers.” I’m like, “Oh, really?”
Just starting to notice those things because ultimately your attitudes turn into your behaviors, which turn into your beliefs, like, “Nothing changes around here.” If
you can start to get a handle on zooming out and really starting to identify, like, “What does our team look like, and feel like, and act like?” Those are the three keys, I think, to
really having a powerful business or a powerful team, even if it’s a party of two.
[00:15:49] Dr. Tom DuFore: The third piece there, the third–
[00:15:52] Lisa Even: It’s really around your attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs. That’s really what your team culture is about. You can do the same thing with your family. It’s my favorite exercise in the world. It’s just zooming out and saying, “How are we feeling? What are the weird behaviors that we’re seeing, and then what do we believe?” Our belief in our family is joy is our job. You can start to see that sprinkled across. Those are the three.
[00:16:14] Dr. Tom DuFore: Really, really great. Very well said. Sorry if I missed the third one there-
[00:16:18] Lisa Even: No, you’re good.
[00:16:19] Dr. Tom DuFore: -and asked you to repeat it for me. Thank you very much. What’s the best way for someone to get in touch with you, learn more? You talked about that PB&J worksheet. How can people get in touch to learn more?
[00:16:31] Lisa Even: My website is lisaeven.com. Then I’m also on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and I’d love to hear from you. I do send out a weekly email that has a really practical leadership tip in it, something you can go and do. You can sign up for that on the website. I’ve got downloads and blogs and all the things.
[00:16:50] Dr. Tom DuFore: Lisa, this is a great time in the show, and we make a transition. We ask every guest the same four questions before they go. The first question we ask is have you had a miss or two on your journey, and something you learned from it?
[00:17:02] Lisa Even: We were talking a little bit before the show, and I think about the misses, and I’m like, “Gosh, there are so many.” There are so many, but I think the biggest miss is that I left my old job, and that was in corporate America. Then I moved into entrepreneurship, and I thought that doing all the same things there would work in your business. I think that part of being in corporate America, at least I found, is figuring out how to fit in and make sure you’re following all the rules, and then all of a sudden, you get out on your own and you’re like, “Wait, what are the rules?” My miss was a combination of not being creative enough and brave enough, really, to try new things.
I think that was the miss. I tried to replicate the things that I did in corporate, and I was like, “Oh, in corporate, you want to blend in. In entrepreneurship, you want to stand out.” For a good bit of time, I was like, “Why isn’t this working?” I don’t know if you can relate to that, but that would probably be one of the misses that I started with.
[00:18:05] Dr. Tom DuFore: Absolutely. It’s easy to try to say, “Well, if I’m going to start a business, I’ll just do what everyone else does.” Then it doesn’t always go that way.
[00:18:15] Lisa Even: Yes.
[00:18:16] Dr. Tom DuFore: Let’s talk about a make or two, a highlight you’d like to share.
[00:18:20] Lisa Even: I would say the highlight, after my stressed-out time of realizing like, “I’m going to have to do this a little bit different,” I decided to take on the view that I needed to live in the lab like a scientist. I needed to put on the goggles, beaker in hand, and run some experiments. I think one of the experiments that I’m most probably
proud of and surprised by is the joy is my job, that I took an idea that we were just doing as a family and said, “Well, how can I, A, share this with the world? Because I want to have good ripple effect, and B, how can I make it into a thing or a product that people will purchase?”
I took that from the idea to then keynoting about it, then writing the book. There will be a workbook coming soon where families can actually fill that out. I’d say that’s probably the make that I was like, “Huh, you can take a really abstract idea and make something out of it that really does create good in the world, but also provide for your family.”
[00:19:23] Dr. Tom DuFore: Make sure I’m on your list for when that workbook comes out. That sounds like something fun to do with our family and to share with our listeners as well. The next question we ask is, have you used a multiplier to multiply yourself personally or professionally, or any of the organizations you’ve run?
[00:19:39] Lisa Even: I think the multiplier, and it’s like, [sad sound effect], but I do have a coach. I think that if you’re an entrepreneur and you don’t either have a mastermind or a coach or some group that you’re a part of, that for me has been amazing, not only to go and commiserate of like, “It’s not fair,” but also to say, “Hey, how do I get from here to there? Do you know anybody who knows how to do this?” Or, “I’m dealing with this particular situation.” Having a coach and a group of people I can go to has been an extreme multiplier for my business.
[00:20:13] Dr. Tom DuFore: The final question we ask every guest is, what does success mean to you?
[00:20:19] Lisa Even: This is the hardest one. I laugh because you ask it last for that reason, I’m sure. I think success for me looks like, if I go on the practical side of things, that things are paid for in our family, we’re on track for retirement. Then I think beyond that, there is this idea that I’m out in the world helping people, but also, I love music, food, and travel. If I can do that with a little bit of travel, a little bit of good music, and a little bit of good food, I think I would be set.
[00:20:53] Dr. Tom DuFore: Fantastic. Lisa, as we bring this to a close, is there anything you are hoping to share or get across that you haven’t had a chance to yet?
[00:21:00] Lisa Even: No, I don’t think so. Other than I just really hope that the folks that are listening get a little bit inspired to be like, “Yes, how am I showing up? How am I engaging? Am I thinking about my team?” That’s what I hope because you set the tone for that ripple effect.
[music]
[00:21:17] Dr. Tom DuFore: Lisa, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. Let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. Takeaway number one is when she talked about the entrepreneur’s ripple effect. I like how she defined this by saying, “What you do and say creates a disturbance in the world, and how does that ripple effect occur and impact others?” I thought that was great. Takeaway number two is when she talked about how you create that entrepreneur’s ripple effect. She said there are three ways to help engage with people. She asked the question, “How are you showing up?” She described this as what kind of weather are you bringing into the room?
Number two is when she talked about engaging, and it was to find out what do people care about, what are their values, and the different things we care around and express, and how do we express them. Number three is how you’re engaging as a team, and what’s that culture like? Are people cutting corners? Are they complaining? What are your attitudes? What are those behaviors? She said, “If you can zoom out and see what your team look like, feel like, and act like,” as a great way to look at that, and even described applying this to your family.
Takeaway number three is when she talked about the PB&J method. I thought this was great. She said P is for perspective, B is for better ways, and J is for joy. This is for a one-to-one or a team meeting with one of your team members, where you ask them, “What’s your perspective on this?” Number two is, “Are there any better ways? Do you have better ideas or thoughts?” J is for joy. “Are you having fun or finding joy in your personal and professional life?” Now it’s time for today’s win-win.
Today’s win-win to me is when she talked about what if joy was your job and finding joy for yourself personally and professionally, as well as helping your team members to find their joy. Now, we have to be realistic and understand that our job cannot just be all the fun things all the time. Certainly, we all have things that we have to do that we might rate a 5 out of 10 or a 3 out of 10 scale in terms of whether we enjoy it or not, or like it or not, but we can still find joy in that process. How can you help your team find that joy, as well as for yourself?
That’ll be a win for you and a win for them and a win for your customers, a win for your franchisees. That’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the
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