I was honored to be invited for an interview on Close Up Radio as part of their “Leadership Coaching” series. I had the opportunity to sit down with Jim Masters for a live radio show to discuss the coaching profession, leadership development, and how I help empower people to achieve their absolute best. You can listen to a recording of the interview or read the transcript below.

Intro 0:01
Welcome to CloseUp Radio, where our hosts Doug Llewellyn and Jim Masters, bring you the amazing stories of people who answered the call to unlock their potential and take control of their own success with authenticity, creativity, persistence, and resilience. Close Up Radio special guests share their knowledge and wisdom, so you the listener can live the most empowered life possible. Close Up Radio. And now here’s today’s host, Jim Masters.

Jim Masters 0:36
Thanks so much for joining us, everybody. We’re live worldwide on Close Up Radio. It’s a pleasure to have you today. It’s always a pleasure to have you with us. And we’re very excited to welcome Amy Salapski of Cambium Development Group. Now, Cambium is part of the tree where cells reproduce and grow. When a tree is nurtured with sunlight, water, and nutrients, its growth is accelerated through the rings of the cambium. And this is where Amy Salapski comes in. Yes, believe it or not. She’s the founder of Cambium Development Group where she accelerates individual and organizational growth through coaching, leadership, and organizational development. See, that’s where the link is. Amy’s mission is really to nurture professional and personal growth and to empower people to achieve their absolute best. Amy works with organizations as well as individuals to help reach their leadership and professional development goals. She works with individuals focused on self-development and with emerging leaders whose organizations have identified their growth potential and are investing in their development. She’s worked in every level of leadership from entry-level supervisors all the way up to an organizational department head and prior to launching Cambium, Amy held leadership positions for about 25 years. And she left corporate America to open her own practice, and expand her reach to multiple organizations. Amy has a real passion for women in leadership. She says she found that when she worked with women, particularly in a group coaching environment, they were able to create a very strong bond and almost a lifelong network of support. When you bring your group of women together, they tend to be vulnerable, authentic, and transparent. They’re not worried about how they’ve been perceived. So they immediately build trusts with each other, which accelerates their development. Very excited to welcome her live and direct from Aurora, Ohio. Amy Salapski of Cambium Development Group. Amy great to have you with us on a Monday. Thank you very much for joining us, and good afternoon. Welcome to the show.

Amy Salapski 2:46
Thanks for having me today, Jim, it’s such a pleasure to be here.

Jim Masters 2:50
You are very, very welcome. It’s a pleasure. And I’m very excited about sharing your story and your passion for what you do and have done for quite some time. You know, taking a look at your own life’s journey and some of the things that have inspired you along the way, Amy, which resulted in the creation of the group. Tell us about some of your background as a leader, and about this strong desire you have through your own inspirational journey to help people in the beautiful way that you do.

Amy Salapski 3:21
Absolutely, yeah, I entered leadership very, very early in my career, I was just identified early on as somebody who had leadership potential. And I muddled my way through it and did the best I could with just, you know, gut instinct, and did pretty well with it. I eventually got to a point in my career where I was part of a team where we were developing an internal coaching group in my company.  I was selected to be trained as one of the coaches as part of that group. Going through that process, being coached first of all, as part of my certification, and then having, you know, internal leaders that I was delivering coaching to, I fell in love. I thought, wow, this coaching thing is,  it’s phenomenal what it can do. The first person I ever formally coached in that program is absolutely thriving now. And it was just fascinating to me how much you can accelerate the process when you bring a coach into the mix of things. In fact, if you think of the term coach, it actually is derived from stagecoach that old, you know, old western thing that gets people from point A to point B. You can always walk that journey, but you get there a lot faster if you’re using a coach to help you get there. And looking back, I wish I’d had the opportunity to work with a coach when I was in my first leadership role. I’m sure I would have been much more effective and I would have accelerated my career more rapidly as well as a result of it. But I’ve learned a lot along the way and I’m at a point in my life and in my career where I just really want to give back and I want to help people like like you said, in my introduction, empower them to achieve their absolute best.

Jim Masters 4:59
Which is again a beautiful thing to be doing. And having that passion led to the creation of Cambium Development Group. Tell us about that. And what your mission is. And again, the title, I mentioned a little bit of the nature sort of relationship. Tell us about the selection of the title, as well.

Amy Salapski 5:24
I love the pun on nature, there didn’t it was a good one. Yeah, I had gotten to a point in my career where I felt like I had just learned a lot. And thinking that I was ready to do something different. And you know, what is it that I want to do? I just love the coaching and the training, aspect of my job so much, that I decided I want to do something where I can just really focus on that. And I also want to broaden my reach. When you work inside one organization, you’re able to impact the people in that company, which is fantastic. But by going external, I can work with a variety of companies from around the world and a variety of people from around the world, and really broaden my impact. When you coach someone, the impact you have is like, just to give an example, I was coaching, this woman and worked through an exercise with her. In the next coaching session, I came back and talked to her about it, and she said, I loved that exercise so much I did it with my team. So right there, I worked with one person, and 10 people had the benefit of the work that we did together. And that’s really what I wanted to do when we started the business and went out on my own.

Jim Masters 6:33
That’s terrific. Yeah. And you took the bull by the horn, and you went with it. And your background as a leader, of course pointed you in that direction as well. You mentioned having the coach yourself and wishing you had a coach like you. What was the specific thing that you would have wished you had to coach for? If there was anything specific?

Amy Salapski 7:00
Yeah, I would say it’s common for a lot of people, when you move from individual contributor to leader, your focus needs to be different. As an individual contributor, you’re focused on being the person that does all the work and gets the results and gets the recognition for the results. When you’re a leader, it’s about empowering your team to do that. It’s giving them direction, it’s removing roadblocks, coaching and developing them, and enabling them of all the tools and resources they need to deliver on your vision. And so that transition to leadership I made the same mistake a lot of new leaders make. I rolled up my sleeves and did a ton of work. I should have delegated more, I should have developed more, I should have led very differently than I did. I lead by example – I’m working hard, so everyone else underneath should be working hard. And a coach would have helped me to figure out to focus more on development.

Jim Masters 7:53
Right, exactly. So you’re very aware of that, which is, which is really amazing. To have it so focused. Your coaching process, you know, everybody has their own style and their unique take and what they bring to their approach. Tell us about your specific coaching process, say for example, you’ve been hired by a client, what are some of those first steps with the initial contact? Is it an assessment that you do? I know, establishing trust, in the very beginning is essential between you and them, them and you because they might be opening up and sharing things with you that they don’t share with their closest loved ones and friends. So that trust is essential in the beginning and throughout the process. So tell us a little about your style, and what the initial steps are like.

Amy Salapski 8:49
Yeah, absolutely. And you hit it right on the head there with you got to build the trust upfront, because it is it’s a confidential relationship. But people don’t open up unless they trust you. So the very first session, I just refer to as my intake session, it’s really about a “get to know you” you type of thing. So I self disclose things about me, I always start with, “let me tell you about myself.” And I share a lot about my background, personally and professionally, and just start building the rapport. And then I asked them to share what they’d like to share with me about themselves. And then we go and we talk about, you know, what it is that they want to get out of coaching. You know, if we got together a year from now, and said, “this coaching engagement was a success,” what stories might they be telling me that indicates it’s a success? So I’m able to start building kind of what is it that they want to achieve out of it? I don’t jump in right away with doing assessments like formal, you know, approved assessments. I usually do a few sessions just to better assess what’s going to be the best fit for my client what they need most. I always start my coaching process with building a vision. And I have people look out 10 years from today. And you know, Jim, if I asked you “Hey, Jim, what do you want your career and you’re in your life to look like in 10 years?” you probably look at me go, I have no idea, Amy. And that’s what my clients do. People are so focused on the day to day and getting just through the motions of life, that we forget to pause and dream, and figure out what it is that we want. So I have a bunch of exercises and activities that we do to help draw that out and, and get these adults to be like children, again, where the sky’s the limit and are dreaming about whatever, there’s no boundaries, they can have anything they want. And then we really distill it down into a realistic vision. And I find that when I do that, it creates an emotional shift for the person. They hired me because they want something different, they’re at a point of pain, if you will, like, maybe they’re trying to get to a promotion, or maybe they’re a leader, and they aren’t as effective as they think they can be. And they’re trying to take it up a notch, whatever it is, there’s, there’s something wrong, if you will. But when we create the vision, we switch from pain pushing them to desire pulling them. So now they’re so excited about this compelling vision, that they’re ready to roll up their sleeves and do whatever work is involved, to change their behaviors to learn and grow and develop, to get to that vision.

Jim Masters 11:13
And that’s a beautiful thing, right? Because the best investment you can ever make really, is the investment in yourself.

Amy Salapski 11:19
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I have clients that will hire me directly, pay out of their own pocket to work with a coach. And I usually see a huge success rate, like 100% success rate with those clients, because they’re financially investing as well as investing the time. And I also work with the corporate sector where the company is paying and sending somebody to work with me as a coach. And part of what I do with them is just make sure that they’re ready. And we’re going to invest the time that they need to to make the changes that they want to make to get to that vision.

Jim Masters 11:50
Right, exactly. And that’s all essential. It’s all part of the whole equation. What are some typical challenges that you tend to work with, and that your coaching clients on now I know, speaking of their great pause, and opportunities to pause, the last two years of our lives, have given us this opportunity to reevaluate, recalibrate, reboot, and a lot of people have been trying to do that looking to do that, finding ways to do that. With everything that’s gone on, I would imagine you’ve been helping guide your clients through navigate through all of this and find some refocus and repurposing, and clarity. So that has been added in. That’s the atypical. And then there’s the typical challenges. Tell us how you’ve been weaving all of that in and working with your clients on the, you know, the usual things that they come to you for. And then sometimes these unscripted things like we’ve experienced the last two years or so.

Amy Salapski 12:59
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve seen an uptick in in clients coming to me, saying, I don’t know what I want, but I know it’s not this. Like I’m ready for something to be different, but I haven’t figured out what’s different looks like to me. So with them, that whole vision process helps get them to figure out what that looks like. And then from there, we figure out how to navigate. I’ve had clients do complete 180’s with where they are now, like complete career transitions where you know, somebody that’s in a very technical career field and doing very, very well in that area that wants something different. That’s now exploring a creative aspect. And what she wants to do there and the possibilities of making a career from the creative side of things. And that would not have been available to her previously, if she hadn’t felt this, this need for a shift. Because the world is different now and she’s having some challenges with it. But some other typical challenges that I see from from clients, it’s all around, I’m going to I’m doing air quotes here, the soft skills is which I think are really hard to develop. It’s things around you know, your communication, your style, and how to approach things more effectively to build relationships, work through conflict, influence, just communicate more effectively, how to build trust, credibility, gain respect, how to navigate through career transitions. And even just, you know, the foundations of emotional intelligence. A lot of my clients come with a really good solid baseline of positive emotional intelligence, and just even take it up another notch or two to be more effective in those roles. So all those different skills that are a little bit more difficult and take more time to learn, to develop. That’s, that’s what I usually see.

Jim Masters 14:43
That’s great. That’s terrific. And again, I know you’re very passionate about it as as well. You know, very rarely you’re working with people with some degree of ambition, but once they’re promoted into a position of leadership, sometimes it becomes not about them anymore. And that’s an important pivot point right for them to realize that it isn’t just about them being the leader. There are people that they’re leading, and that they need to inspire and be empathetic towards and team effort, roll up the sleeves, and let’s all dive in together. Tell us about that.

Amy Salapski 15:24
Yeah, absolutely. And like I said earlier, that is a challenging transition for people to wrap their head around it. A lot of times when people step into that first leadership role there, they feel a little bit lost. They have accountability to deliver results to the organization, and they’re used to doing it by themselves. So figuring out how to inspire your team, to create a compelling vision, versus, you know, delegate out the work, you got to get people to want to do the work. It’s very different than like, say, military situation where you follow your commander, your commander says, do this, you need to follow. In corporate America, people can go get another job, especially in this economy, people are leaving in droves from their companies. So it’s even more critical that leaders are inspiring, they’re motivating, they’re developing, and they’re tapping into their team. and allowing them to work on things that fuel them. It not only moves the company forward but also the the individuals gain some benefit through new experiences, opportunity to work on parts of teams and engage in different ways.

Jim Masters 16:31
Which is important. Engagement is critical to all of this, the leadership challenges that are unique to women. As I know, you’re really, really super-serve the demographic. Tell us about those leadership challenges that you see that are unique to women specifically?

Amy Salapski 16:52
I would say leadership challenges are leadership challenges – men and women both experience them. What I typically see,  let me give an example the particular client I worked with. She was in a male-dominated environment in a male-dominated industry. She was really the only person that looked like her, when she looked around her, she supervised men, she was led by men. And when we started working together, she was really struggling, she was just miserable in her environment. And the first thing she looked to was, I look and think differently than everybody around me. And that kind of became her focus about they’re treating me differently, because I’m a woman. And we had to work together to really shift her mindset around that. One of my mantras is, “the only behavior you can change is your own.” So rather than looking and saying all these people are treating me differently, why don’t we take a look at how might I adjust my behaviors to be received more effectively? And that’s the work that we did. So, we talked about the her environment, her scenarios, and I remember her coming to one of our coaching conversations, and this was where we were able to get together in person. When she walked in the room, I could see a different person was walking into the room. She walked in with so much more confidence, she was absolutely beaming, and you could feel the positivity coming off her. And I’m like, “Hey, what’s going on?” She says, “let me tell you about what just happened last week.” She was in a situation where there was a problem going on with her team trying to deliver results to the customer. There was a problem going on, and the behavior that she’d been doing before was to go in and tell everyone what to do to – to direct the work, take charge, and take over. As a result of our coaching, she changed her approach to, instead of directing, she went in asking questions. She asked them, “What do you think we need to do?” She empowered her team to come up with a solution, and then she trusted them to do it. That became a turning point for her and her relationship with their subordinates. So it’s things like that, I help women work through to figure out what behavior might they adapt, to still be authentically themselves, I don’t want people to change who they are at their core. But how might you adapt your behavior and approach things a little bit differently to increase your effectiveness?

Jim Masters 19:18
Now, you work with individual clients, but you also have a group coaching program for women too. Right? Tell, tell us about that.

Amy Salapski 19:28
I put this together because I felt the power of bringing women together. Women tend to support women, when we’re in these types of environments. So I’ve worked both in groups within the same company all working together, as well as I have open enrollment programs where any woman can join and they meet each other in the program and we work together. I follow the same type of coaching process I use with individuals. We start with the whole vision and all of that, but we do it with a group. The benefit of that, is, we coach each other. So I’m facilitating the process, but I always invite people to come to the session and say, hey, who needs “spotlight coaching” today, who just needs some insight or some help with something. Somebody will bring up a challenge they’re facing or something that they just want to discuss. And then the whole group chimes in and shares thoughts and ideas. So, they walk through with a variety of perspectives about how to approach things, not just my own perspective with it. So when I do the public program, I break that one down into what I refer to as three months sprints. So we’ll work together every other week for three months, we’ll take a couple of months off, and we’ll come back together again and work for another three months. And I have three levels that they go through in this program, which all build upon each other. And essentially, it’s the same program, I deliver to somebody individually.

Jim Masters 20:50
Absolutely, yes. I like the fact that you offer that. There’s also an organizational development aspect of your work. Define that for us. And then tell us a little about how you incorporate that into what you do as well, Amy?

Amy Salapski 21:10
I work with small to midsize corporations as well as nonprofit organizations and help them with organizational effectiveness. So, this could be coming in and working with them on their learning and development strategy. What is it they’re trying to accomplish to achieve their goals, first of all, and how might learning development help them get there? I’ll put together strategy, I’ll come in and facilitate training, whether it’s virtual, or physically coming in person. I’ll help design training materials. If they’re working through some sort of organizational change initiative, I can help them with that. I do a lot with employee engagement and retention. That’s huge right now, because of what’s going on in our economy. A lot of companies are focused on how do we not only attract talent to come join our organization, but the ones that are here, how do we keep them from leaving? What do we need to shift and do differently to keep everyone here?

Jim Masters 22:03
Right, exactly. And that’s key to all of this as well. This really would be an interesting question, because, you know, it’s not one size fits all. So I don’t know if there really is an ideal client, because you work with so many different people from different backgrounds, and, you know, hopes, dreams, desires, fears, experiences. But is there an ideal client?

Amy Salapski 22:34
I would say the ideal client is somebody that is willing, and wants to do the work. Sometimes I get calls from corporations where they have somebody who is underperforming. They’ve had lots of difficult conversations with them, and they’re very close to terminating the employee. In that situation, it is so hard to turn it around, if the person doesn’t recognize the need to change and is not willing to change. So, I work better with people that want something different, want to change, and want to do the work to get there. As you mentioned, I specialize in working with women, but I also work with men. And I really enjoy working with millennials as well. It seems like where the millennials are right now in their career path, a lot of them are at the point of needing some sort of transition or transformation. They’re looking to get to the next level of leadership, or some of them are still looking to get into their first leadership role. I just really enjoy that sector because they are willing to do the work and invest in themselves to to get what they want. Yet millennials, a lot of their tendencies, is they crave balance. They also crave giving back to society. And a lot of the work I do is around the whole person. So it works really well with them when I say okay, what’s your vision for your social contribution over the next 10 years? What’s your vision for your fun and entertainment side of yourself? We can look at all aspects of that, and really put together the full picture of the pie of what they want, and then start working toward it.

Jim Masters 24:09
That’s important. Yes, striking out and achieving the balance. And harmony seems daunting, but you can help them sort of at least put one foot in front of the other and head in that direction in this crazy and sometimes what seems like an upside-down world. I’m sure that you also have a wealth of success stories, case studies, testimonials. You have one or two that you might want to share? And you’re particularly proud of the results and the progress and where they’ve headed, going initially from point A to point B through your guidance and your expertise and your approach.

Amy Salapski 24:55
If you don’t mind, I have a couple like to share. One of them was the first group program I put together, I actually did it while I was still within my organization. We had taken a group of women that were on a succession plan and ran them through, they were all going through a training program, and then I was brought in to help coach them as part of that. When I looked at some of the data around what we accomplished there, before incorporating that group coaching into it, our high potential women on succession plans, our retention rate was probably about 50%. So we’d invest in sending them the training classes, and then they leave and go get a job someplace else. And we’d only keep half of them. We also found that the promoteability, they weren’t ready for promotion for a good three years. After doing this program, I looked at the results, we retained 100% of the people in the program. And 50%, I’m sorry, 80%, were ready to promote within two years. 50% were promoted within the year in fact, while we’re still from the program, that got promoted. I talked to some of the leaders and inside the organization. I said, “I saw the succession data, when this person entered the program, and you said it’s going take three years for them to be ready for that role – what shifted?”  And they said, “Well, their behavior. I thought it was going take three years, but the things I’ve seen them do and how they’ve changed their behavior, and their leadership style, has shown me that they’re ready now.”  And in some cases, the company actually created a position and promoted them earlier, because they didn’t want to lose them, because they knew the person was ready. And they want to make sure that they were able to retain them. So, just the power of, like I said, when you work with a coach, it just accelerates your growth in your path. And then individually, I worked with a gentleman at the beginning of COVID, who was just completely overwhelmed and stressed out, and just very felt very scattered in his life. That transition to working from home, the whole family’s at home, childcare, all of that, plus meeting all the demands of work.  He was frazzled. We were able to get him more grounded, figure out his boundaries, and figure out what his day needed to look like. And also some of the things that he needed to stop doing. Either didn’t need to be done anymore, or somebody else needed to be doing it. And then once we got him more grounded, then we were able to really take off on some leadership characteristics and prepare him to step into a future future role with it, which he’s already been promoted. I think twice now since we’ve worked together. I know at least once.  He was able to get a lot more responsibility yet, he’s working less hours than he was previously. That’s really a direct quote from him was one of our last sessions together before he rolled off as being a client.

Jim Masters 27:53
Isn’t that credible? That’s really sensational. When that happens like that. What if somebody, we have just a few seconds left? I’ve got a minute, I think maybe we can squeeze this in quick. If someone’s not ready to work with a coach yet, are there ways that you can support them?

Amy Salapski 28:09
Yeah, if they want to subscribe, I produce a weekly newsletter called “Amy’s Insights.” And it’s not like a sales thing at all. I send out professional development tips and exercises that people can do. So they can go out to my website at cambiumdevelopment.com. And, and sign up for that. And then occasionally I do some complementary training programs, they can also sign up for some of those as well. They get delivered directly to your inbox every week, little tips and tricks they can work on to help develop their leadership and professional skills.

Jim Masters 28:41
And that’s cambiumdevelopment.com, C-A-M-B-I-U-M and then the word development.com. Amy, this was fantastic. I appreciate your sharing all of this with us here on the show. It’s obvious that you’re very talented, skilled, and all in with that and you really want to help people encourage folks to make contact with you and hope we get a chance to explore some more down the line on the show. Maybe hear some more success stories and it was a pleasure having you on Close Up Radio as my guest today. I hope to catch some more down the line.

Amy Salapski 29:15
Thanks so much for having me, Jim. It’s been great to meeting with you today.

Jim Masters 29:19
You as well. Continued success and best of the holidays and I’m sure we’ll chat some more down the line again. Amy Salapski of Cambium Development Group, cambiumdevelopment.com is the website. I’m your host Jim Masters. Thank you for your time this time till next time. We appreciate you as well and wish you the best of the holidays. Stay tuned. We’ll be back momentarily with another great guest right here on Close Up Radio. So then for all of us have a great day and bye for now.

Outro 29:47
You have been listening to a broadcast from CloseUp Radio, a division of Close Up Television Incorporated. For more information about our show and to be considered for future broadcasts, please visit closeuptelevision.com. You may also learn about us on social media and listen to us on podcast and Internet Radio. Thank you for joining us, and we hope that you have an empowered and productive day.