Interview With Invisible Mentor Dan Elash, Principal, Syntient

Mentor Yourself – Interview With Invisible Mentor Dan Elash, Principal, Syntient

To get the most from The Invisible Mentor Interview, while you are reading it, answer the following questions:

1. Are their similarities between the Dan Elash and yourself?
2. In what ways can you use the information?
3. In what ways would you respond differently from Dan?
4. What are your five takeaways from the interview?
5. After reading the interview, what is one concrete action you can take?

Invisible Mentor: Dan Elash, Principal

Company Name: Syntient

Website: http://syntient.com/ 

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Dan Elash:  I started off life as a clinical psychologist. I have a PhD in Psychology from the University of Kansas, and it has served as my credentials, my platform for all the work I’ve done in my life since. After some time doing therapy in various clinical settings, I was drawn to the world of business and organizational effectiveness, and I worked there for about 35 years until now. I’m back doing a wide range of different things. I’ve lost my travel calluses that kept me going for all those years on the road, and I’m enjoying life a little closer to home.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Dan Elash: What I love is that no day is typical at this point in my life. I’m still responding to various client needs and challenges which put different problems in different contexts in front of me all the time. I also take some time to write and publish. I have a wife who loves life and manages to bring adventures to us quite often. I love the variety of my work-life.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Dan Elash:  Motivation has never been a problem for me. When I was young, I decided I wanted to find a career that allowed me to go to work every day and be myself. I found that in behavioural science in being a consultant dealing with people and organizations with people-to-people kinds of opportunities and issues. For me, I’ve always been fascinated by it. I’ve been curious about it, and I’ve found it a rewarding place for me to go to work and be myself.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Dan Elash:  The biggest thing I would do is seek more guidance and mentoring through close relationships with people who might have been looking to teach or guide me. When I was younger, I was very self-sufficient, and didn’t know what I didn’t know. Now as I look back over the dumb things that I said, bad choices I made, I wish I would have been wise enough to seek more mentoring.

Avil Beckford: What's the most important business or other discovery you've made in the past year?

Dan Elash: It wasn’t a discovery, but I came across a book called the The Power of Impossible Thinking: Transform the Business of Your Life and the Life of Your Business by Jerry Wind. I was excited about his excellent articulation of the power of belief, and how our mindsets can create our realities. It’s something that resonates with me and I found his articulation to open my mind to other ideas.

Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Dan Elash:

1. The first threat would be staying in touch. Being an independent consultant, many of my clients are remote from me and so staying in touch is a challenge. I wind up doing a fair amount of networking using some of the social media options. I made a commitment to write nine to 10 articles over the course of a year, so I put those out in a newsletter to my clients.
2. The second is staying relevant. I try to do that by listening to the clients’ issues. What are they wrestling with? What are their struggles? Enquiring about what they are learning and excited about, what they have discovered and what innovations they are using or embracing. And it’s in that way I try to stay relevant and open to learning new tools and skills myself.
3. The third challenge to my business in staying successful is my need to embrace technology and weave it into the way I practice, whether its’ doing long-distance coaching over Skype, sharing ideas and product development, or going to meetings, even though that’s not cutting edge technology but it’s the ability to continue to look for ways to do what we do in an updated fashion.

Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Dan Elash: I think what’s fundamentally unique is my personal perspective. Lots of people consult, and lots of people come from the behavioural science field to do their consulting, but I have in addition to a PhD, I was trained as a community organizer, as part of my graduate training. I’ve consulted to businesses and not-for-profit organizations for a long time earning my spurs and developing my perspective. I’ve been invited to teach everywhere from universities to the US Naval War College to US boardrooms. All of those things have given me a perspective that is honed out of my experience, and I’m sure it’s not the experience of anybody else on the planet. And I guess that’s what makes me different in the world of giving advice and brainstorming with clients to help them find tools and solutions.

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?

Dan Elash: When I was in graduate school, I had started a family, and I was working part-time to supplement my student income. I was going to school working on my PhD, and still in training as a community organizer, and in the middle of all of that taking my comprehensive, written examinations to qualify for my PhD. I failed one section and I had never failed anything academically. It led to a good deal of soul searching. I re-prioritized and recognized that getting through school, and getting the credential was the most pressing need I had to address and I had to scale back some of the other activities and focused on what was going to get me what I needed. So that’s my challenge and what I did about it. The lessons I learned was learning my own limit and I needed to be more disciplined in my focus, and also learn to say “No.”

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Dan Elash: My big break came from Dr. Bob Medina. He ran a consulting firm, Medina & Thompson out of Chicago. He took a chance on me and hired me as a consultant to work with Fortune 500 Companies. He put me in a complex and demanding environment that pushed me to grow both in my knowledge and sophistication. At the time I was young and not deeply experienced in working with businesses and he provided me with the opportunity to learn and develop.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Dan Elash:  I was divorced at one point in time. I had four boys and their mother went to study abroad – the youngest two went with her and the oldest two, who were in high school and university, stayed with me. I couldn’t parent as if I was onsite day-in-and-day-out. And for me, I had to redefine parenting. What did it mean? How could I do it from a quarter of a world away? How I dealt with the failure was to experiment in the nature of my relationship with the guys and try to be a loving mentor and ally, someone who had their best interests at heart. I had experience in some broader perspective than they did, but recognizing that I didn’t have the power to control. I could influence. I could persuade, but I couldn’t make anybody do anything.

In doing that, what really became clear to me is my idea that validating your child is the most important role of a parent being able to send him or her out into the world as a competent, confident and secure individual is a necessary part of doing a good job raising children.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

Dan Elash:  I had to fire a man who was a direct report. He was middle aged and was into a rut and settled into a routine. He wasn’t doing his job, and coaching and supervision didn’t seem to make a difference. He liked the security of the job and the image of himself in the role, but he wasn’t willing to learn and grow, and really go out of his way to serve what were supposed to be his clients. I had to let him go. He felt victimized at first, and all the drama with it, but in the end, he wound up in a job that he could handle and he felt good about himself.

What it taught me was that being in a job where a person is in over their head, is a very destructive place to be, both emotionally and psychologically. It’s like you are always waiting for the other shoe to drop. On the other hand, if you embrace your fears you have a chance to beat them or move away from them and protect yourself. If you spend your life avoiding dealing with painful realities you wind up stunting your growth, limiting yourself, at best, to mediocrity, and at worst, to a life of anxiety. While it was a hard thing to do, and never pleasurable, I took away a lesson that I have gone back to time-and-time again for my career.

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

Dan Elash:

1. Growing up blue collar taught me the reward of work, the value of responsibility, and dedication to a purpose. It was the times I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it’s a blue collar city and it has a work ethic and attitude about it that I took away.
2. When I was younger, I learned martial arts and it helped me to gain confidence in my body to balance out the confidence I had in my mind. It stretched me and again supported the idea that with hard work you can see progress.
3. Going to graduate school in clinical psychology with its focus on professionalism caused me to understand dedication, and commitment to those who look to you for value to do your best and be as excellent as you can be because other people are depending on your for the quality of your skill. I take myself and my work more seriously as a result. I have always appreciated the repetition and the focus that the faculty had on what it meant for us to become professionals.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Dan Elash:  Learning as an adult to become a writer. To be able to articulately express my thoughts in words has led to numerous opportunities for work, and has allowed me to influence and inspire countless people who I otherwise would not have met.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Dan Elash:  Mentors influenced my life by broadening my perspectives. They caused me to expand on my current point-of-view and to look on the world from a different perspective than I brought to the problem originally. They helped me to realize that the right answer is not always the best, and they helped me to think more complexly when dealing with problems, and to stretch my thinking to produce my best outcome.

Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Dan Elash: There were many mentors along the way and I’m always amazed after a lifetime of learning, there is still so much that I don’t know. If I had to boil it down, one message would be that you can learn from anyone, everyone if you are humble and willing to listen – people have things to teach you.

Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Dan Elash:  The past is gone and is unchangeable, but the future is not. We can create our lives by the choices we make going forward, particularly if we use today’s feelings to cause us to learn new information and skills. The future is before us to create by how we choose to react to the circumstances that come to us.

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