
The Profiles in Leadership series features conversations with organizational leadership experts to discuss important lessons they have learned and what “Hiring for Good” means to them. This series helps us better understand how leadership drives positive transformations and growth for people, organizations, and the world around us.
This episode features a conversation with Phil Chun, Founder and Principal Of Polaris Leadership Consulting. Polaris provides leadership development and training for organizations that need to develop their leaders but don’t have the time or the resources to do so. Polaris specializes in 1:1 executive coaching for c-suite and director-level managers, a six-month training program for new managers, and facilitates leadership retreats. Phil resides in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.
Quote: “I don’t believe our world needs more positivity. I believe our world needs minds that are equipped to be with the complexity of life. Minds that can hold nuance and polarity.” -Cory Muscala
Phil’s Contact Information: phil@withpolaris.com | 971-270-0599 | www.withpolaris.com | https://www.linkedin.com/in/philchunconsultant/
Suzanne’s Contact Information: Suzanne@AcumenESearch.com | 503-679-6008 | www.AcumenExecutiveSearch.com | https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzannehanifin/
The PIE model was created by Harvey J Coleman in his book “Empowering Yourself: The Organizational
Profiles in Leadership Transcript
Suzanne Hanifin: Welcome, I am Suzanne Hanifin with Acumen Executive Search, and I’m really excited today to have Phil Chun join us in our Hiring for Good podcast. This is a Profile of Leadership and where we really dive into what is leadership and what makes a good leader.
So welcome, Phil.
Phil Chun: Thank you. I’m excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Suzanne Hanifin: Phil is a leadership consultant and an executive coach. After many years in human resources and organizational development in Corporate America, Phil has started his own entrepreneurial consulting practice, Polaris Leadership Consulting. Beyond working with leaders and organizational development, Phil also sits on a number of boards. He is with the Korean American Chamber of Commerce of Oregon, and also Advocates for Life Skills and Opportunity.
Welcome, Phil. I know I did a very condensed bio, so why don’t you take it from here and walk us through this journey, especially going from Corporate America to an entrepreneurial startup.
Phil Chun: Happy to share. I like to call myself an HR Survivor. So a quick shoutout to anybody still in the HR field. As in any kind of HR position, you are all doing the Lord’s work. I appreciate you all.
I didn’t make it past almost a decade of being an HR leader. But during my time as an HR leader, I learned quite a bit about leadership development, what it looks like to – how important it was to have great leaders. And whether that be personal experiences of being on a director-level position for an organization, also or providing training for managers, new managers, writing management development programs at the different organizations I was at. The emphasis on how important it was to have effective leaders was something that followed me along the HR journey.
To make a long story short, early in 2020, I went through my own existential crisis and decided to leave corporate HR. Because originally it was my dream to climb the corporate HR ladder and become a CHRO and all those kinds of things. But I found after almost 10 years, it just wasn’t for me. And so after months of therapy and eating Costco-sized bags of Hot Cheetos and trying to evaluate my whole life, really landed on the thing that I loved most. Which is working with leaders, developing leaders, and providing management training for leadership.
Suzanne Hanifin: No, isn’t that funny? I, too, was a corporate ladder climber and decided to leave that and do..do my own business. But you know, I always wonder how to start. Like again, not starting your own business but when you come into an organization, how do you start the assessment and know where to begin working with these leaders?
Phil Chun: Such an important question. I think this is something that at least at Polaris, especially over the years as I’ve run my business, it’s something I’ve gotten better at. I think the key piece when I enter into any organization is really understanding the perspective and philosophy of upper management. With any kind of organizational change or change management, it really is the leaders that set the tone and pace for the kind of change they want to make.
And so, it’s critical for me and our team at Polaris to really understand the mindset of the people at the top—why they do what they do, what kind of change they’re looking for. And in our work when it comes to leadership development, what do they want to accomplish with equipping their leaders? What is the ultimate outcome? Is it preparing for an acquisition, or is it really for growth? Is it for stabilization? What is the ultimate goal in wanting to develop the leaders? All of that really begins with the perspective of the CEO, COO, or whoever it is at the top that really wants to initiate some of this training and potential change.
Suzanne Hanifin: You’re speaking my love language to be honest because culture starts at the top. And it is not only does it set the tone but it gives organizations the guidelines of what is acceptable and what’s not acceptable. So I’m a big believer. So you start with the culture. You understand goals, and then you can into practice what change they want to see. Yeah. No, it makes total sense and ever and I would imagine every engagement is different.
Phil Chun: Yes, absolutely. I mean, you know we we have our menu of services that we provide in our internal frameworks. But absolutely, every engagement is different. Because you know, no organization is the same even in they’re in the same industry. And I imagine especially you know in the work that you guys do with Executive Search Firms, you know you can you can hire for a a COO or a CFO or whatever it might be. And the title and the job description might more or less be the same but you know the stage of the company, the number of people in the company, and really what their goals are, even down to the personality of the executive team that you’re trying to plug into really vary and can be very different. So we make sure to ensure that we customize what we’re trying to do specific to the people within that organization.
Suzanne Hanifin: Yeah that makes sense. Along your personal journey, you know we’ve all had these really formative experiences, whether it’s with a mentor or through a failure that we’ve learned. What are some of those formative experiences that you’ve had?
Phil Chun: Yeah, there are two really formative experiences that stand out. And admittedly, they’re they’re on both ends of the spectrum. So, I’ll share the first one. One of the first jobs I had coming out of college, was working at a day program for adults with developmental disabilities. I was there for seven years. And over my time there that was where my love for people development began. Both in terms of the clients that we served of working with adults with development to disabilities, teaching them different life skills, behavior intervention, and things like that. But also maybe more importantly, the CEO who was the founder and operator for that business really believed and breathed, in her DNA and everything that she did, how the people in the organization, the culture of the organization and having a team, a high trust team really impacted my perspective on what it meant to to run an organization well. And over the time that I was there, you know, I was fortunate to be a part of their growth process. So it started with kind of a half-day service, we doubled our service size and model and then we eventually expanded into other locations. It was really formative because I was able to see her grow the DNA of high-trust, high-growth culture, people at the forefront and do that really well and be a part of the executive team that was able to that and so deeply formative time.
What happened though after as I started to go into more corporate and this is probably not too much of a surprise is one of the last corporate jobs that I had was one the worst personal experiences that I’ve ever had. Now, I was getting paid the most I’d ever been paid from a salay perspective. It was a company that at least where I was living was pretty well known. So you know, I..there was a lot of pride, a lot of ego and in being the Director of HR there. But it was probably the most dysfunctional executive team and organizational culture that I’ve been a part of. And in many ways, it was deeply formative because I had firsthand experience as a leader and as an employee in the organization of what it felt like to be at a place that was really dysfunctional. And so much of what I learned about what to do, what not to do, what works and what doesn’t work even in that workplace. And even how to create small pockets of trust in a deeply dysfunctional environment was an extremely formative time, especially for me now as a consultant. Where I can proudly say that I’ve been on both ends of the spectrum, right. I’ve got the scar tissue to prove and show what it feels like to present in an executive team meeting and be totally embarrassed and beat down. I’ve got the experience, the show of what it looks like to be part of an executive team that deeply cares for each other and hold each other accountable and is able to live in that nuance. So those are two really extreme experiences that were really formative to my perspective on work and what I do now.
Suzanne Hanifin: And so, let’s continue on this. You go into a new organization and whether it’s highly experience people or or new managers…because I know you have an expertise working with new managers and developing them up, so what advice would you give them and how do you…how how are you able to communicate that? And more importantly, how are they able to operationalize it?
Phil Chun: Yeah you know I think at the end of the day with any position you have, especially as a manager, your performance is is such a key component of even being able to influence anything beyond your job. And so a great framework that I like to use especially when we’re working with new managers is an acronym PIE(1) – Performance, Image, and Exposure. and this isn’t something that I I made up myself. It is a a framework that was presented by a Management Consultant years ago that I blanking on the name of and hopefully I can add into the show notes. But basically to break it down. Performance is what it means to win every day from a very tactical perspective, you know your metrics your KPIs, your OKRs. And you have to start there. You have to be good at the very technical aspects of your job. And so for new managers we spend quite a bit of time in helping them gain clarity on what those metrics are what those goals are. From that we start to dive into their Image. And this this is essentially how people experience you. Right. So this dives into everything from what you wear, what you, how you want to present yourself, your tone, your volume, your cadence, if you’re early to meetings, how you manage meetings, how you give feedback and receive feedback. Because that really does complete the experience of of what uh of how you want to be perceived. And last but not least E stands for exposure. Which essentially is are you at the right place at the right time. Especially dependent on uh the phase of the organization. So a really oversimplified example is some people micromanage, right. That would be an overexposure of yourself as a manager and some managers will be become totally invisible, right. They’re they seem to not be present, they seem to not be available. And finding that balance dependent on what the team needs is is critical. And so for new managers a really easy framework we use is that Performance Image and Exposure to help them understand what it means to be successful.
Suzanne Hanifin: Yeah and and it’s interesting. I can apply that in operationalize that at all levels of the organization, not just in leadership. But how do you show up to your job every day? I love that. That’s that’s an incredible way of thinking it through. So here you’ve gone, you know, you’ve had this this career in corporate. You’re you’re in a successful consulting practice right now. What advice would you give your 20-year-old self?
Phil Chun: Man, so much. You know I think probably the first one would be to to to surround yourself with really good people. You know, at least for me, when I was in my 20s, I thought I was—I thought I was the best. I, you know, I thought I all did. Yeah, I thought I knew—I knew everything, uh, you know, highly confident, high ego. And what was really interesting about that time, and something that I—I don’t know if I share often, is I was also, uh, very lonely. Only, you know, especially as—as an early manager.
And so, this weird experience of high ego, high confidence, also feeling really lonely, can create a really strange experience, uh, as you go through your 20s. And so, if there was anything I could really push my 20-year-old self to do, it would be to find, uh, a community of people that would continue to invest in me and hold me accountable and give me different ideas and perspectives on how to live life, whether professionally or personally.
And it doesn’t have to be, you know, a mentor or—or anything like that. It could just be a group of friends who, uh, are kindred spirits that share your values. But I think creating that community of people and doing it together is probably something I would really emphasize, uh, to my younger self.
Suzanne Hanifin: Well, and—and I’m glad you brought that up, and the vulnerability of that, because even having your own business—that—that’s lonely in itself also. So how do you build community today?
Phil Chun: Yeah, you know, being a business owner is a really strange experience, and I know it’s something you can relate to. The way I would describe it is, at any hour of the day, you can be on one end of the spectrum. You know, this morning at 9:00 a.m., my business is going well, but at 9:00 a.m., I—I apply to an HR job out of panic, right? And—and I’m not going to take that job, job, but just—just, you know, it’s—it in that one moment, it was like, it would be much easier just to get paid a salary and have PTO and all those things.
Uh, but the next hour, at 10:00 a.m., you know, I had a great client session, and I feel on top of the world, and I feel like I’m living my life’s dream. And so, that experience of being an entrepreneur and business owner is—is—is kind of a crazy extreme experience.
Um, to answer your actual question, I’ve been really fortunate, uh, especially here in the Portland community, to find a group of entrepreneurs that—that I meet with regularly that—kind of what I was saying before about community—is willing to invest in me, provide, you know, share their thoughts, their frameworks, and hold me accountable. And really, at the end of the day, help me feel a little less lonely about feeling like this crazy person on this entrepreneurial journey.
And I think when you start even Googling entrepreneurship network groups, there are actually quite a few out there that exist. And so, you know, I’m deeply appreciative of the entrepreneur community that I’m a part of.
Suzanne Hanifin: Absolutely. Well, I tell you, Phil, it’s—it’s interesting to me, listening to people’s journeys and, you know, and then seeing their success when you take that leap. And not everybody has that risk tolerance of just doing it, so good for you. Well, as you know, yeah, as you know, this podcast is Hiring for Good, which has a lot of different connotations. So, I want to ask, what does hiring for good mean for you?
Phil Chun: It’s a great question. And having heard your podcast before—the different episodes—I know people have given lots of different answers. I would say my take on what comes to mind when I hear hiring for good is—years ago when I started to journey down the HR journey, I was fortunate to work with an HR consultant named Ron Smedley. And he was very formative in, you know, training me technically but also philosophically on my perspective on HR.
And I remember one time I had asked him, “You know, Ron, what’s your—what’s your philosophy when it comes to hiring?” And he sat back, and he thought about it for a moment, and he responded with, “Always try and hire people who are better than you.” That philosophy has—has really stuck with me.
And, you know, for—for me as a—as a firm owner, for the team that I’ve hired around me, the fellow consultants that I partner with, I can confidently say that, in many ways, they are much better at their job than I am as a coach and a consultant. And, you know, I’m a very confident consultant. I’m—I feel I’m very good at what I do, but I’m fortunate because I have been able to hire people who are better than me.
And within that, they all have the value and perspective of—of learning together. So, we have really animated and wonderful discussions about how we could have approached the client more effectively, how we could run our sessions more effectively, maybe areas that we need to improve on. And so, really, hiring for good, again, means for me surrounding yourself with people who are better than you at, you know, different aspects of their job so that, as a collective, they can make a greater impact in whatever it is they’re trying to do.
Suzanne Hanifin: Oh, absolutely. Again, you’re speaking my language right there. And—and it shows that, again, I think a good consultant always comes in with that sense of humility, which you are definitely, you know, showing. So the ego of 20 years old is now the wisdom of all those years put to practice.
Well, I tell you, Phil, this has been fantastic, and there’s been so much learning throughout this very short conversation. All of Phil’s contact information and how to reach him is, you know, at the end of this, but I just want to say thank you. I truly do appreciate it.
Phil Chun: Thank you. Thank you for having me. It’s an honor to be here, especially with all the interesting people you’ve interviewed, so I’m honored to be a part of that roster.
Suzanne Hanifin: Oh, awesome. So, contact Phil. He’s such—well, you’ve heard from him! All right, thank you so much.
Phil Chun: Thanks, everyone.