Today we're speaking with Kris Plachy. Kris has poured her life's work into learning about understanding, and then guiding leaders through the tricky path of learning how to lead a team in a space where there's a lot of noise and advice. Kris has designed the "How to have team leadership" through her lead your team roadmap, and we're super excited to have her. Before we dive in though, I want to ask you to please subscribe to our podcast. You can find us on iTunes, Google podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, any podcaster of your choice. You can also subscribe at peopleprocesses.com where you will get some exclusive subscriber-only content, like our current telework checklist for going home base for your employees. 

Kris, thank you so much for joining us today. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. It's my pleasure to be here. 

I'm super excited to talk with you because a lot of business owners right now are going through some difficult times. And I want to hear about how your leadership strategy works. But first, not many little girls and boys dress up as HR and leadership experts when they're going to Halloween, right. We're not exactly firefighters here. How on earth did you wind up after 25 years in this sort of profession in this space? 

Well, yeah, it's funny, you should say that. I think people who might have known me when I was eight might have said, "Oh, yeah, you're gonna be a leader. A bit of applause." Yeah, that's funny. Let's see. So it was a very natural process. I started my career right out of college with a recreation degree, so you might imagine that didn't lead me to a lot of.... 

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, what is a recreation degree? I don't want to take too long on your story. But you gotta tell me what that is.

Well it was, yes, there was one class where we learned how to do face painting. I'm not gonna lie. That actually did happen. But mostly it was quite interesting. We learned all about the importance of healthy leisure, and encouraging lifestyles of activity and recreation. So a lot of people who do study recreation go into the parks and recreation field, they become out as Park Rangers. You know, community park, district leaders, that kind of thing. I actually was interested in tourism, and travel and so I had every intention of staying in that space until I did about a year and a half stint and realized I hated it.

As we have with many colleagues.

Yeah, I needed to kind of stumble my way through that. So you know, but I did complete it. And I had this funny little minor in law because I wanted to be a lawyer first and then I decided I didn't love that either. So yeah, I think when you're sort of riffing there about, you know, little boys and girls don't act like whatever this is for Halloween. I never knew what I wanted to be. I never had a clear career path. And so I just got a job when I graduated as a recruiter for a private startup online school program.

Nice.

And I was good at it. I was good at sales. I was good at consulting, which I later realized was coaching and this one in the early 90's, when I discovered a side class. So I realized there were more classes on being a coach, being a professional coach. And this was honestly like 1994, Rhamy.

A long time ago.

So I went to this class and I was immediately like, "Oh, that's what I'm supposed to do." So what happened then, next many years, is I follow the trajectory of leadership. So I was a frontline recruiter for a couple years. Then I got promoted to manager for about four years. Then I got into training for several years. And then I got into senior leadership and I was leading upwards of 200-250 people. And all the while was continuing my learning and studies of coaching. And for those who have kind of followed the profession, that's sort of been the trajectory as well, we started seeing more and more interest and support and resources and learning for people who wanted to