Improvisational Leadership and the "Yes/And" Approach: an Interview w/Joe Boyd, CEO of Leadercast

So how does an improv class with the future Ted Lasso change the course of a depressed churchplanter in Las Vegas?—and how did he become a movie producer, entrepreneur a media company, turn into a world-class storyteller, and the CEO of the largest one-day leadership event in the world? In this fascinating episode, Dave Workman interviews Joe Boyd who describes how the principles of improvisational comedy affected his leadership and life…and get ready to learn the secret of “Yes/And”.

www.joeboyd.net

www.leadercast.com

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Transcript

All right, that's it Joe Boyd. I haven't talked that much in a long time, my throat hurts. You need to talk more, man. 

Welcome to the Elemental Leaders Podcast, designed to help you grow more effective in your leadership. Visit us at ElementalGroup.org for more resources and free downloads. 

Hey everyone, good to be with you on the Elemental Leaders Podcast. My name is Dave Workman. I'll be hosting this episode with a great interview today with Joe Boyd. Joe is a fascinating person with one of the widest varieties of leadership experiences of anyone I know. He's a storyteller, an author, an entrepreneur, a movie producer, actor, former church planter, university instructor, a consultant to several Fortune 500 companies. He's improvised with Second City and on and on and on he goes. He's currently serving as CEO and managing partner of Leadercast. Leadercast is the largest one-day leadership event in the world. He founded a media production company and creative agency here in Cincinnati, Ohio called Boon Rise. He's produced and starred in several award-winning movies just all around great guy. Father of two boys, married to the funny and super extroverted Debbie Boyd. 

Full disclosure here, I first met Joe in LA around 15 years or so ago. And we worked together for several years at a Vineyard church in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I would consider him a good friend. So, Joe Boyd, welcome to the Elemental Leaders Podcast.

Thanks, Dave.

That's a pretty impressive intro, I think. 

My thought after all that stuff is in, I'm still broke somehow. After all that experience. Oh, my goodness. It hasn't been boring. 

You certainly have taken some really interesting routes on your way to wherever you're going. And it'll be fun for me as a friend to see where that ends up being. Me too. 

Well, to start us off, give us a little background. How did you go from attending a small Bible college in the Midwest to church planting in Las Vegas to becoming a movie producer and entrepreneur to CEO of a leadership development company? It started in Atlanta and whatever your next season might be, how did you become the current Joe Boyd? 

So, Pokey Miller showed up at my house when I was eight years old. I liked the start of this already. I don't know if I've ever told you about Pokey. His real name was Omar, so he went by Pokey. I don't know which one's worse. I just remember this old guy came and sat down. I'm an only child, sat down with my parents and I. And now when I think back, he was probably 50, but he was so old. And at the softest hands of anyone I've ever met to this day. You can stop right there. And just like very gentle guy. But he was the preacher at First Christian Church in Russell, Kentucky. And he came to tell us that we were going to hell for not going to church. Wow. But he was very nice about it. So, I remember my mom and dad being like, well, we should probably go to church. And so that's how my, that's how that part of my story started. And I was baptized with my parents on Easter Sunday, 1980 at that church. 

The whole trajectory of my life really started that day because I entered into the world of church, which of course gave me a faith that definitely morphed through the years, but also gave me a place to belong. And I excelled for whatever reason at the things that they have kids do at church, which is mainly like listen to Bible stories, right? And try to remember them. I just remember being completely captivated by Sunday school and the Bible stories. And those stories served me for my whole life and still part of my life, obviously, and kind of shaped everything and made me for the beginning of me becoming a storyteller, I think. 

And then when I was 12, 13, my dad got a promotion. We moved to Columbus, Ohio, which was culture shock. I had a couple of significant culture shocks in my life, but the going from sort of smaller town, Appalachia to a Worthington, Ohio, which was a wealthier suburb of Columbus, pretty big transition and eighth grade was the worst year of my life to date, very much bullied and was like a hillbilly kid, chubby hillbilly kid, big glasses, bull haircut, didn't fit in. 

Middle school really isn't the big self-esteem builder for anyone, is it? 

No, it's awful. So I stayed in the same sort of denominational heritage, Church Christ Christian Church, and was at a church in Worthington. My youth pastor's a fellow named Kevin Oder. He really sort of saw how lonely I was and took me out for milkshakes, which is how you get a fat kid to fall in love with you. So he did that. He just really sort of cared for me. And I think he saw the thing about church being like where I would thrive. I lived like a dual life. I was nobody at school and then I was like the leader of the group at church. So I was a leader in one level and trying to be as invisible as possible at school, basically. Got a full ride to a college called Milligan in Tennessee, they do one preacher scholarship a year and I got that. And then right at the last minute, I just felt like I couldn't live in the hills of Tennessee. So the last second I switched to Cincinnati. It's called Cincinnati Bible College at the time because I wanted to live in a city. By my junior year, I realized I wanted to be a church planter because I felt like I wouldn't fit in at a regular church. And of course I was 20, so I knew what to do. I basically wanted to be in control. I wanted to be in charge. I wanted to start a church for people my age because I knew nobody my age would actually want to go to the church. I grew up in. Yeah. 

By the time I graduated, I had that rebellious streak on the methodology side. And then Kevin Oder, my youth pastor, took a job in Las Vegas. He did a brand new church plant that was like the fastest growing church plant in America that year and invited me to come out for a year long internship. So that's ultimately how I got to Vegas. 

It's in Las Vegas at this, I think, a defining moment happened in your life where you went to some improv classes or something. What happened there? 

We went to see the Second City Improv Theater that had a show in Vegas at the Flamingo Hilton where they did sketch comedy and improv. That cast was stacked. It was Jason Sudeikis was in it and Kay Cannon who wrote the Pitch Perfect movies, Joe Kelly who wrote How I Met Your Mother. It was like a stacked, stacked cast. It was in that cast. So I watched it and I was just blown away, especially the improv parts. I used to watch Who's Line is it Anyway, the British version when I was in middle school and high schools on PBS. And I was just always, I couldn't believe they were making that stuff up on the spot. So I was a little bit of an improv nerd already. But after the show, I was the most depressed I'd ever been. And Debbie was like, what's wrong? It was great. And she's like, it was great. I remember saying, I wish I wasn't too old to do that because I was 28, I think, at the time. And I actually have never felt older in my life than in my late 20s because I had all this responsibility and I felt like I was a grownup for the first time. Bought a house, had kids and I just felt trapped, I guess, in the life I'd created for myself. 

Either the best or worst thing she's ever done for me. She got me second city classes for Christmas that year. So that's awesome. The first day I walked into the studio in Vegas, it did change my life. The main thing I remember thinking is, oh, this is where people like me end up. We end up in improv class. And I learned sort of tenets to live by. And ironically, I think it gave me principles to live by. It ultimately gave me what, yes, and, and some other rules that I was able to kind of live my life by. And it also ended up giving me a new career quite accidentally. Within nine months, I was doing that for a job.

I've heard you talk about this before your experience with improv as being something that really changed the arc of your life. You've touched on that, but what did you learn in improv that transferred over to life even the way you lead or the way you think about leadership? Can you tease that out a little bit?

Yeah, I actually talk about it a lot these days. For those who don't understand, I guess the first kind of rule of improv is what we call yes, and or to agree and accept. So improv comedy is always a team sport. You're always up there with somebody else and you're making up a scene on the spot. And the best way to think about it is in kind of pure improv, you've been dropped into the middle of a movie and you're watching a scene that has never been written, unfold before you. Right? So to be able to story tell in that way, you have to trust each other and you have to have some basic guidelines because you never have a script ever. So the first guideline that you can only break once you're an expert is to say yes. What that means if I walk up to you, Dave, and say, doctor, there's a problem, you can't say, I'm not a doctor. I'm a mechanic. Because you might have walked up there thinking you're a mechanic, but you don't get to be anymore because I made you a doctor. So you have to say yes, I'm a doctor. And you also have to say yes, there's a problem. And then you add to it. So it's yes and ,so you say, yes, there's a problem. My car won't start or whatever. And then I have to agree to what the problem is. It's just a simple, it's simply agreeing back and forth, which is an amazingly hard skill to learn in a world where we tend to naturally think of our disagreements first, right? Yeah.

 You know, if you get way into it, maybe growing up sort of fundamentalist and not living in a world where you're allowed to disagree to anything, maybe I needed that sort of safe place or something. But what it forces you to do is to be present. And so what I was learning on the side through some therapy and also just some reading was that I would catastrophize and live in the future. That was the main cause of my depression and anxiety. In improv, you're not allowed to do that. You're never allowed to think about the future. So you have to be in the moment. And ironically, what all the great religions are supposed to teach you, which is to be present in the moment with God, to be just with him. That's probably what worship is supposed to be, right? I never learned it in religion, but I was able to start to learn it in improv and ultimately was able to apply it to my faith. 

The other thing I was learning at the time was because I was an improvisational style teacher, a lot of folks would give me a hard time in saying I just wing it all the time. And that was definitely true because I'm sometimes lazy, but I had begun to read about how teaching was more preparing the teacher than the teaching and how that Jesus might have modeled that sort of thing where maybe he didn't write down on note cards the sermon on the mount, but he was prepared to say all those things because he had learned them and improv felt more like that way. I'm preparing myself to be an improviser. I'm never preparing a scene and it helped me as a teacher, I think too. I'm never preparing a sermon. I'm preparing myself to be able to teach about anything. My job changed. I was still always sort of doing some church teaching stuff. So that began to evolve there as I began to take more leadership roles. It's just how I approached every day.

Talk about that a little bit more because I'm fascinated. How would the yes and approach to life, how would that be helpful as a leader? You've led several different companies. You've kind of always been in a leadership position. How did that help you in working with a team or working with a company that you're leading?

I have three answers at once. I hate when that happens. But the big picture, I've generally led in entrepreneurial situations. When I've been the primary leader, it's almost always been entrepreneurial. And so you are always supposed to have a plan, but it never works. I'm very comfortable knowing that. What I learned was I was so comfortable in that that I could sometimes blow up a plan that was working just because I would get uncomfortable. When there was a script, I would start to get uncomfortable. And I've learned that I was yes anding too much. I was like forcing us to be in an improvised place when it was time to develop a plan. Yes and in leadership, I think is most important at the beginning. At the beginning of a company or an initiative, at the beginning of a relationship, at the beginning of a meeting. I talk about having a 60 second yes at the beginning of every meeting. So we don't say no. We say yes and see where it goes. But over time, you have to say no, of course. That's how you can't always say yes. It's building that early momentum where we have to learn to say yes. And it might be a little bit why I start to get bored after a while when that season ends in an initiative. Kind of the bigger the initiative, the longer that yes season needs to be. So if we're building a huge thing, it might be five years of yes. Amazon still might be in yes. But the smaller the thing, if it's a meeting to figure out our next sermon series, then that's probably 15 minutes of yes and then 45 minutes of figuring it out. So I'm just no, I'm most wired to thrive in that yes part. I hope that makes some sense. 

The other part is just not being in denial. I think to me to say yes in real life is to accept what's going on and to walk into a room and not pretend like something else is happening. Like this is actually where we are. Kind of true telling the and becomes very important because you have to and so what are we going to do? Like, how are we going to address this?

Would you say that yes and approach is helpful in building trust in a team? In other words, you're not shooting down ideas or you're not shooting things down. You're creating an atmosphere where listening is a high component and bouncing and building off other people's ideas is critical for trust, right?

Yes, and the only caveats I would get to that, like if you'd asked me that 10 years ago, I think it was just like a flat yes. Next question, but I think yes, especially a culture of yes and builds trust because people aren't afraid generally to have an idea or to speak up. I've learned there are certain personality types that would much rather live in a no world though. They just feel safer. So sometimes I've learned that creating a full environment of say anything at any moment, anything can be a yes can drive some people absolutely insane. 

Because their creativity requires some sort of parameters?

They need structure. I don't think I honestly believed and this is awful to me that there really are people that wake up in the morning and just want to do the same task every day, exactly the same way. And they love that. If they love that, that's the role in the team and we need folks like that. I just always assumed everybody doing that hated it. So I would try to give them opportunities to be creative and do let's mix it up. But there are certain, I mean, I'm into the Enneagram, I think a lot of Enneagram five and one kind of folks and just really enjoy structure so much that they want some knows they want to know this is this is what I do. I'll come out of my box once in a while and have some vision meetings with you, but leave me alone. Let me do my job. So I do think there are folks where the yes and culture can add some anxiety to it. Not enough to not do it. I think just to be aware of that. You can also overdo it and if the leader never has a clear vision or communication. Yeah. And I definitely do struggle with that. I believe that vision is the key to everything. But because I'm so improvisational, I actually have a dozen visions for the next year I'd be fine with. I have to have some discipline to stick to one longer than I want because people get uncomfortable if there's not a clear communicated vision. And I'm more comfortable changing it up at any day. And I've learned that that's taking yes and to an extreme. That's not healthy. 

When you at some point lock into a particular vision and you say, OK, this is it. And this is what we're going to go after for the next X amount of years or whatever. Then with your kind of background, how would you say no to someone who wants to veer off that? Is that hard for you to do? Or do you somehow try to incorporate some of your improvisational learnings into saying no in a different way? 

It helps to think of our current situation. So we've dramatically changed our company from an event company to a subscription based company. It's almost like a tech company now. And so we have to say yes now within this reality that our new vision is becoming this kind of company. And I can get very excited about something that's not that. If someone pitches it, hey, what if that leader cast we do skydiving lessons to teach people leadership skills? I wouldn't want to do that. But I'm like, well, that sounds fun, exciting, but that's not actually going to help us where our goal is. Now, I also strongly believe if that's an internal person that I need to be everyone's career coach as much as I can. So sometimes saying yes might be helping folks realize and you seem really passionate about this. I think you should keep exploring it. I'll try to help you get there, but it's probably not going to be here. So I think sometimes it's helping people say yes to what's in their heart, the vision that they have. But realizing it's probably not going to happen here, but that's, you know, this company is just, it is what it is. It's just, you know, a company is just a collection of people that have agreed to do a thing for the time being. That's what it is. I might need to help you say yes to something that's going to lead you out of here, or it might be here, but not for years. So I don't like to tell people no to their personal kind of ambition, I would rather than push into that, even if it means it will be a no here. You can't be a fundamentalist, yes, and person either. So sometimes people just have bad ideas. You know, how I talk about it is like, you don't want to say no. It's a significant thing to say no. And so don't let it just like flow out of your natural conversation. You should weigh it. 

What's kind of your mode of operating when you're in a high pressure situation leading anything you find yourself in pressurized situations from time to time? What do you do when you're in the middle of that kind of thing?

I'm probably at my best. The highest the pressure is I tend to sort of weirdly calm down. I move to a more logical place. I tend to look for folks that might need to be more calm, kind of calm people down, have hard conversations if they need to happen. I'm pretty good in those situations. Ironically, I dread them. When I'm the worst is when those situations might be coming, but they're not here yet. And I live in all sorts of anxiety around it. My anxiety issues stem from being afraid that I'll be in those situations. But ironically, once they come, I am diagnosed. We joke about it, but I do have hypochondria diagnosis. So I worry about getting sick. But then when I'm sick, I worried like I thought I was going to dive COVID the whole time. As soon as I got it, I was fine for me, just the way I'm personally wired. And in the moment when the stakes are real, when there's no, there's no way out, I can't afford another day to worry about it. I just have to deal with it. Then I'm, I'm pretty great. But it's getting to that. That's hard. And I read an article about how I've been a procrastinator most of my life that they think now that's actually related to anxiety and depression. It's not necessarily a laziness thing. It's a fear of dealing with stuff, fear of doing it wrong or whatever. And generally once you do it, you think, well, why did I put this off? It wasn't that bad. And so I definitely, I have a little bat going on.

You recognize storytelling as being a vital part of your life. It's kind of turned you into who you are. You are fascinated with Christianity because of the just the wide range of stories in the Bible. Do you find yourself incorporating storytelling in your leadership when you're leading a team?

It definitely comes into play all the time. I mean, I believe in my core, nobody changes their mind without a story. Facts don't change people's actions. It's probably the hardest to remember at times in very organic conversations. I will sometimes flash in my mind like, what story should I tell? Or probably more likely I'll ask someone else to tell a story. Like, I hear you're frustrated about this and you want this to happen. When was the time that you felt like it worked? Like, tried to get them to tell some sort of story because we need a metaphor. We're never going to solve the problem. And that's what story gives us. Anything I have to plan for even a little bit, I will very naturally thank story first. So even if it's a board meeting or if it's a big sales pitch or anything like that, I just know I have to tell a story. The more disciplined is like in the day to day conversations. I'm also an introvert too. So I don't like to take up too much air and space in a room. So sometimes I think I realize that I want to tell a story, but that was like three minutes long. Sometimes I get in my head a little bit about it. But I hadn't thought about it till you asked it this way. But I do think getting other people to tell stories is maybe even more important one-on-one than you trying to tell a story.

Then the leader trying to tell a story. 

Yeah. If it's a performance review or whatever's happening, tell me about a time when you really loved working here. Like, what's going on? Or, you know, obviously this has been a real struggle. Can you think of a time when you first realized this was a struggle? Nothing's ever going to get done if it's just spreadsheets and facts. And like it's just not. Story creates emotion, emotion creates change. You have to do that if part of your goals for people's behavior to change. 

Wait a minute. Say that again. That's worth capturing there, Joe. What was the corollary there? 

Stories create emotion, emotion creates action or change. You know what I use actually sometimes, even though I didn't go. When you did the water, clean water stuff in Africa, right? I use a fictionalized version of that sometimes when I tell people about this. Cause you did that trip without me, but I remember it. And I would say, you know, you can show all this data how not having clean water is actually killing people. And you can say in this village, it's killing 12 people a month. And most people actually don't have any emotion connected to that statement. But if you had a mother come up and talk about losing her child because of clean water and told that story, only narcissists and psychopaths don't have an emotional reaction to that. So that's how you fundraise to solve a problem. The reality is the story only told you about one child dying. It should have been more emotional to hear that 12 children died, but the facts don't create emotions unless you're super like empathic to a point where you can tell the story in your own mind quickly. So that's an extreme example, but I use that to kind of teach that it's story that engages the emotion. Emotion is what creates the action.

Wow, that's really good. Really logical people hate it when I say that. And then I talk about how emotionally attached they are to their logic. If you really believe I make all my decisions based on facts, just notice how emotionally charged you get when someone challenges that. You've built a lot of emotion into your logic.

Oh, that's interesting. So you've entrepreneur a number of things in your life. It's a pretty wide variety of things too. What is it about you or what are the particular skills you think an entrepreneur should have? And can those skills be developed? Is it just innate or can it be nurtured?

I want to say why would you want to develop them? It's like one of those things. Of course, anyone can learn to start something and do it well. That e-myth book that came out in the 80s, it's just so true. Like some people are just wired to start things. And I wonder if we're coming out of it now, but definitely through like the 90s. When I was younger, it was the cool thing to do. Most of us weren't growing up hoping to run a brand at P&G. We were like wanting to start our own thing. There's something very American and like whatever about that. But I do think some people are just kind of wired to do that. And for me, it's as much a blessing as a curse. Like it's sort of exhausting. I would love to stop actually. So, you know, I just turned 50. I'm getting a little tired. And I'm in a turnaround now, which I've never quite done. I'm taking someone that someone else started and totally restarting it. And that's a unique different thing that is rewarding, but exhausting in a different way because you also have 20 years of history to kind of unravel and undo where it's a little easier to start from nothing. I don't think I want to do this again. I think this is my opportunity to walk that out. 

My guess is it's a little more innate. The percentage is higher on it being sort of innate versus learned in terms of entrepreneurism, mainly just because it's so hard. Anything that's hard, most people give up on. Unless you just can't, you know, that's why most of us played little league baseball but didn't play in the major leagues. Some of us just like a skill set, but some of us we don't want it that bad at all.

It'd be interesting to tap into what you're learning on the turnaround side. For instance, in our world, we work with a lot of churches that some of these churches have been around for literally a couple of hundred years. So people are stepping into leading something that has this long history. It takes just a different set of skills to manage that. Can an entrepreneur step into a situation like that and have success?

Sure. I hope so. I just did it. 

I mean, what are your learnings as you're going through this turnaround thing? What do you wish someone would have told you that when you accepted the CEO role of a company that's been around for how many years? 20 years maybe? 21 or something. Yeah. What do you wish someone would have told you? 

That it'll take three times longer and cost three times as much as you think. That's what I wish I had been told. I wouldn't believe them. That's the problem. Although I can have a bit of pessimism in me, I'm tempted to be optimistic in terms of how much I can accomplish in a short time. And I knew that going in, so I thought I built in a buffer, but I didn't build in nearly enough. So what I thought would take a year is taken three. And I think that's the main thing. Probably you need to be thinking you're signing up for nine years, not three years, if you really want to turn it around. So I think that's what I wish I had been told. It just takes a long time to unravel stuff. The difference, of course, is like you're keeping the status quo going while you change it, unless you have some luxury of massive inflow of cash or something. So we have to keep paying these people who are doing the work. So we got to keep doing the old work to make the money to pay the people to do the new work. And so it's the both and of it. Ironically, I guess the yes and, but the doing both at once is not necessarily difficult, but it's confusing for people. And for me, confusing to cast a vision of this is where we're becoming. Get people excited about that and then say, but now go do everything we were doing because we've got to do this for six more months to get where we want to go. We're actually coming out of that in many ways right now, but the last 18 months have been a lot of that. People getting excited about we're going here, but to get there, we have to go backwards actually and do these things that we're not probably going to do in a couple years. So it's a weird intention. 

Are there places where your experience in pastoring affects how you lead a company? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I joke that I'm a recovering pastor, so I very much care about people more than most CEOs probably. I don't know. Like I've seen the positive stuff of it for sure. What you just had like you stumbled upon a very like double edged sword for me. So I am who I am. I'm wired the way I'm wired. It's probably held me back from some business success that I've been a little more people centered than others would be. I'm getting a little better at it, but it's kind of hard to think about just the company and the mission and the vision. And if it's a for profit, making a profit versus my role as developing people, helping them find what's best for them, building a team that cares for each other and has empathy and compassion. It's a nice little tension, Dave. 

Joe, I can't thank you enough for taking time. I know you're extremely busy guy. You got a lot going on. But your experience is so unique. And you've obviously tied some philosophical approaches to how you lead based on just the wide experience that you have. To me, that's the interesting thing to tap into and how you've leveraged that and use that to really do some really amazing things. So thank you. 

Well, thanks, man. One more thing to say. Yes, sir. And don't you dare cut this out. You skipped the part about why I got back into church work after my improv life and took the job at the Vineyard. I was not looking for it at all and I'll skip all the circumstances, but you're going to hate what I'm going to say. I trusted you and I met you and I still trust you today. And there's no way in the world I would have given church another try if I didn't trust the key leader. So I want to thank you for that and for being in my life. I love you, man.

I love you too, Joe. More than you can know. Thank you so much. You know, aside, I have some great Joe stories that are uniquely Joe Boyd on staff at a church. It's just the best. And I've probably told some of those stories maybe a hundred times. They're just really good. There's no one like you, Joe Boyd. Thank you so much. You're an amazing leader, a really unique personality, a fantastic entrepreneur. I don't know how you've done some of the things that you've done, but thanks for being in my life and thank you for taking part of this podcast. More success in the future for you, my friend. Thanks. 

And for all of you on the interwebs, glad you could join us. And just to remind you, at the Elemental Group, we work with churches and faith-based nonprofits just like yours to get a little healthier, a little more effective, and become everything that God has dreamed for you. So check out all the resources and our new menu of services at ElementalGroup.org. And we'll see you back here the next time. Take care. 

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