Finding your inner circles and cultivating those is essential so you don’t have to face the changes or problems alone, and instead, you have a team that supports you. Today on the Tremendous Leadership Podcast, Vicki Glogg, a Licensed Therapist and owner of the NEED Company, expresses the value of building and cultivating the people around you. She reveals that her higher power lifts her and giving herself the grace to find herself, snuffs out the flames of burnout. Vicki also discusses the importance of providing care for those around her. In this inspirational episode, Vicki highlights how Nine Eight Eight Design Company makes a difference. So, tune in to this episode now.
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Vicki Glogg - Leaders On Leadership
Welcome to the show where we pull back the curtain on leadership and we talk with leaders of all ages and stages about what it takes to pay the price of leadership. In this episode, I am tremendously excited because my guest is Vikki Glogg. I want to tell you a little bit about Vikki. Vikki is a licensed therapist working at Penn State Health and Hershey, but she is also the small business owner of Nine Eight Eight Designs Company. If you're dialing that, it's NEED company. She has taken her love and passion for designing and making apparel and merchandise. She has combined it with her profession of mental health and suicide prevention awareness to sell products that help our community and the stigma. Vikki, thank you so much for agreeing to be my guest on the show.
Thank you for having me.
I'd like to tell our audience, because they're always like, "How do you meet all these tremendous people?" This past October, I was at the Tanya Nabis Women's Conference, the Be Extraordinary Conference. I was there with my table connecting and networking with people and the tremendous Miss Vikki came by. We shared some words and she shared a transition she was going through in her life. She got a copy of SPARK. Fast forward to about a week and a half ago, I got a note from her on LinkedIn. We immediately connected like you're supposed to. I got a note from her about this tremendous new chapter in her life. I'm like, "I got to have you on the show to share with it." I'm sure she's going to talk about that at the end of our show. Vikki, welcome again.
Thank you so much. I'm very excited to be here and I'm honored that you had me on the show.
You're so welcome. Vikki, we're here to talk about the price of leadership. My father, Charlie "Tremendous" Jones wrote a book or gave a speech, I put it in a book format, many years ago. It was one of his keynote speeches and he called it the Price of Leadership. In it, he said that if you are truly going to be a leader, there are four things that you are going to have to deal with, all of us. No matter how successful or the worst leader in the world.
The first of them is loneliness. We've all heard that it's lonely at the top. Heavy is the head that wears the crown. Can you share with us a time in your life maybe where you went through a season of loneliness? If we have any of our audience out there who are in that season, maybe a resource or a word of advice that you would give to them?
It is and it can be very lonely at the top. I couldn't agree with your father more than that. Before I transitioned to the therapist role at Penn State, I was the clinical director of a rehab facility. I had to oversee a lot of staff. It was challenging at times because you would know the ins and outs of what's going on behind the scenes that you couldn't tell your staff yet. It was hard because you want to be such a transparent leader and inform them of what's going on. At the same time, you have to wait for the right moment to present that to your team and you want to present it to all of them at the same time. It's not whisper down the lane.
The most powerful thing that I've learned along the way is to utilize the other leaders that are in your army. I've always found that to be the most beneficial, whether it was having a clinical supervisor working underneath me, discussing these transitions, getting those feelings out like, "I can't believe we're doing this," processing behind closed doors, and processing those feelings because change isn't the greatest for everybody. How is each person going to respond? Also, look at the personalities of every member of your team.
Utilize the other leaders in your army.
By having those conversations with the director of nursing or the executive director or the chief clinical officer, all those other leaders who are in this army with you taking on that role and know what the processes are that are going on behind the scenes that the rest of the staff don't know, that's the most imperative thing to utilize. Those members that you can rely on and that you can process these things.
For me, it was always imperative that whenever we were having a meeting in regards to something changing, I would look at who was invited to that meeting and say, "These are people I can talk to about this." It's because I'm keeping it confidential until it's ready to roll out, but at the same time, these are the people who are going through this change with me. Even though I would work with a director of nursing, something may be changing with her in the medical field versus me in the clinical field. At the same time, as both leaders, we’re able to utilize each other. At the same time, there is that moment of loneliness in how she can't relate to me in regard to clinical.
It's like, who do I look at to support me in that element? It seems like being able to be aware of who is around me. For me, it was the chief clinical officer and the executive director, individuals like those that you can process those, and start looking and saying, "I looked at this process that we're about to change. Here are the pros. Here are the cons. Here's where I think we're going to have hiccups." The most important thing is processing and bouncing ideas back and forth on how to present this effectively, appropriately, and in a healthy manner to the team.
I know leaders like myself are like, "I dream of a team like that." If you are tuning in and you're blessed with a team like that, then you know how imperative what Vikki is talking about. Great wisdom. Vikki, how many people would you say were in this inner circle of yours that you could go to and help? I think there are a lot of misconceptions maybe about what that inner circle looks like.
For me, in the direct facility that I was working at, there were about five leaders. There were five of us, all of different backgrounds, all having different departments. Above us, we had our corporate leadership team that was very heavily involved. They were brilliant servant leaders. That's another little niche I will put in there that when people are asking, "What's your leadership style?" Servant leadership is the most profound, unique, and beautiful type of leadership style anyone can possess.
In corporate leadership, I had about three individuals that I would go to who knew what was going on. That was our chief clinical officer, our CEO, and our chief marketing officer. Those three people threw out the ideas, and then how are we going to work as a team to build that? The five of us would then develop those things amongst us.
That's so important for leadership. You have this tight inner circle, and then you have your other early adopters, and then it goes out from there, so there are ripples. For leaders out there, you will encounter loneliness. It's what it is. There's only one of you and you're the only one getting paid to do what you do. By the nature of what it is, you're going to be alone. Loneliness, like you said, I love that you talked about that. It's imperative as leaders, whether you've been in the job for 30 years or 3 minutes. Find those people in your in-group or your inner circle and make sure you cultivate that relationship because you're going to need them. I also like the waves. Rather than blast it all, get the ones who need to know the closest, the ones who can give you some whys before you broadcast it out to the masses or everybody else.
Leadership: Find those people in your inner circle and ensure you cultivate that relationship because you will need them.
That's one thing that I learned that skillset most recently in my previous position. Our executive director was amazing. He was outstanding and he had this process of his own for new processes that developed. He's like, "We have the introduction. We have the thought process of the pros, the cons, the hiccups, and the bumps in the roads that we may face. How are we going to present this to the team? Let's develop it." We would then have an early launch date. "We're going to pilot this new thing first."
We would then pilot it for about a month and it's like, "Here are the hiccups. Here are the changes. Here's this, that, and the third. Now, here's our official launch date." That's something that I took away from his leadership. Don't just gun it. Take those baby steps. Take it one small bite at a time. Don't gobble the whole cake. If you want your cake and eat it too, you have to take it piece by piece.
The next topic we're going to talk about is weariness. I'm sure in your role, especially in your new role, it's tiring. You have to be strong and mentally, physically, spiritually, everything to be a leader. My father would talk about weariness. A lot of times you have brilliant people on your team who fill you up or the wind beneath your wings. A lot of times, you also have people that aren't doing what they need to do and are fighting against you. They don't want to see you no matter what you're doing. No matter how much of a servant you are, they're not going to follow.
How do you deal with weariness? You are dealing with people in distress before. You have that empathy and you have that drain as you're pouring into them. How do you stay strong? Who pours into you and how do you stay at your top form so you can be this blessing that so many other people need?
In my last role, I didn't do as much of this as I do now. The one who lifts me up the most is my higher power. It took me a while to figure that out truly because I poured everything into my work, into my passion, into my drive, and into the facility I worked at. It was a 24/7 facility. I led everyone to believe that if the facility is 24/7, Vikki's 24/7. I burnt out. I literally killed myself and it wasn't healthy. When this previous position ended, I had to sit and reflect with myself on what happened. What happened in my life?
As you and I discussed when we first met, it was eye-opening to me that I needed to find myself again because the last thing any leader wants to do is be a hypocrite. That's how I truly felt when I look back on it because I was pushing so hard for my staff and my team to engage in self-care, to have boundaries with work, and to spend time with their families. I wasn't doing that but I was telling others to do that.
For me, when I got to this place of complete burnout, I said, "If I'm going to continue to do my passion and have that secondary drainage, I would always feel that emotional drainage from providing therapy to others, I need to look at myself first.” Through some self-awareness and some guidance and prayer with my higher power, I realized that I needed to take a step back.
I thought it was interesting that your dad talked about it a little bit in his speech and you as well in the book about taking that step back for a minute of being a leader and realizing, "I know down the road I'm going to be a leader again. I'm a born leader." At the same token, sometimes we need to find ourselves again in order to get to that place. For me, I took it as God's way of saying, "You need to reestablish your boundaries. You need to reestablish your self-care. You need to find your passion again." I had lost all of that because I had given so much to everything except for myself.
Take a step back for a minute from being a leader.
For me, the weariness, we can give so much to others, but eventually, our cup will empty. If we pour every single drop that we have into everybody else's cup and there's nothing left for us, then we will have nothing left to give. It took a turning point in my career to realize that, but it was the most powerful life event that could have happened for me.
I want to chime in here because I met you at that point. I don't know if it was that day or that moment, but I love that you said you're going to step away from being a leader, but it's going to happen again. God knows when. Remember, he's already seen this through all eternity. The fact when I met you, you were so raw. Thank you for sharing.
We've all hit burnout. My dad hit chronic fatigue. It happens to us because you've got to be very intentional about who pours into you. We work ourselves almost to death. You were so vulnerable in what you shared with me. You were so hurt in a tender way, not in an angry way. You owned it and you said, "I have to make a change, I don't know what it is," but then you took the time for self-reflection. For anybody tuning in out there where you're on the edge of the bottom have fallen out. Vikki, I would say when I met you, the bottom had fallen out, correct?
It did.
Everything you loved professionally, your identity because of pouring out too much, they said, "This is it." They gave you honest feedback and you took it. You were open to receiving it and then we connected and you were open to share with me. You didn't know me from anybody, but you were so up. I think God already was working that he already knew we were going to meet on October 16th or whatever it was even if you're broken. That's the time when you stay open because that mess got put away.
You give yourself grace. We all try so hard. We rely on God. We have great friends, but we still mess up. You gave yourself the grace to heal and reflect and not hide. I meet a lot of leaders when they go through burnout or the loss of something, they hide, they're embarrassed, and they're shamed. That's a self-imposed emotion that we don't want. I'm sure you're going to talk a lot about suicide. That's when people get so tired and they're like, "I can't do this anymore. Literally, I can't do this anymore." We want to fight that. Thank you for sharing that because we all go through it. If you're pouring out, sooner or later, it's going to hit you. It's a very delicate balance.
Based on what you said, how many times did Albert Einstein fail trying to figure out E = mc2? He didn't give up. He just said, "This one didn't work, so now we try again." That's so important that it's okay for leaders to fail. We are allowed to fail. For the longest time in my career, as a young leader, I thought failure was not an option. I'm not allowed to fail. For the first time, failing to the point where the bottom fell out, I realized I failed. That's okay because by failing I realized what I needed to fix. It couldn't have been more powerful than that.
Leadership: It's for leaders to fail. We are allowed to fail.
I had my family, my friends, and everyone supporting me, but when your entire passion, drive, and dedication to something completely goes out the window, you do get to a place of, "What do I do next? Where do I go from here?" That's where it's so important that you need to look at yourself and what happened because even if we want to blame others, we still have a part in it. It's a piece of accountability that we have to take grasp of that I don't think we always want to when we fail.
Also, you run and jump back into something else because it's a hot market. You don't take the time to realize because otherwise, you're going to repeat the cycle. It's about us and what's going on with us. Vikki, thank you for that. Thank you for sharing that. We did loneliness and weariness. The next thing you talked about was abandonment. It's not abandonment in a term of abandoning a pet or fear of abandonment that a lot of people deal with. I'm sure you know a lot about that in the field you work with.
My father would always tell me, "Tracy, I do more in a day to contribute to my failure than I do my success." He was talking about abandonment as being very hyper-focused. Abandoning the habits, the conversations, the time sucks. The habits that don't contribute to us becoming the most brilliant version of ourselves. Even if we think of carrying the weight of the world and being everybody's savior, is something you need to abandon, that savior complex. Can you share with us how you pruned away all the things? I'm sure when you work with people in rehab, you have to prune off a lot of self-doubt, "I can't do this," and people telling you this. How do you abandon the crap so you can stay highly focused on what's next?
What I realized is that in my last role, I was doing a lot of abandonment, but it was abandonment to my team. As I always have and always will be, I'm a transparent soul. I always have been. Truth is the best medicine. What happened was I lost my position as a clinical director due to an unhealthy and unsupportive environment. That's the gist of what I got.
I had to sit with them and think, "What does that even mean?" I thought I was supportive. I was making sure that the facility ran while we were waiting for our next executive director to come on board. I was making sure things were going smoothly, plans were going in place, data was being done, and budgets were being figured out. I was doing all these things but the number one thing I was abandoning was my team, the support that they needed, the care that they needed, and the time that they needed.
I thought in my mind I was providing those things but in reality, I wasn't taking the time to sit with them and say, "How are you doing today? What do you need help with? What can I do for you?" That's so important that when we start to abandon the needs that we have because of fear of failure, we then abandon everyone else who works beneath us. Always remember this quote. "It's not the clients that we need to take care of, it's the staff. If we take care of our staff or our team, they will take care of the rest." It's so important to remember that and I lost sight of it.
If we take care of our team, they will take care of the rest.
For me, it was imperative to realize that if I ever get into leadership again, I need to remember that my team has to come first. That budget can wait. That data report can wait. If my team comes to my door and says, "I need to talk to you. I need help with something," whatever I'm doing that is for administrative purposes at that moment can wait. I can't abandon my team because, without my team, I have no services to provide to the population we serve. That's the number one thing I took from abandonment in my role as a leader.
Again, you're not a leader if you don't have any followers. Followers are not clients, customers, and shareholders. It's the people in your professional home. That is the essence of all leadership theory and why people struggle with leadership because they think it's about doing things. It's about your immediate team. You take care of them. That's the whole reason you're getting paid for. Yes, budgets and all that other stuff, but your number one priority is them. Thank you for sharing and articulating that so beautifully.
It's also so important that when we're doing or creating job descriptions, those first five points are your five crucial job duties. As leaders, we get lost in the other 50 bullet points instead of remembering those first five. If I would've been more mindful and not abandoned my job description and taken on all these other things, I would've realized within the first five points to provide supervision and guidance to the clinical team.
We've all been there and done this. Even my friends who are generals, even my friends who are administrators, even my friends who are salespeople, this is something we deal with. Thank you for sharing that wisdom. That’s great for our audience to hear. Last of all, but certainly not least, vision. I'm excited to hear how you craft your vision. My father always told me that you don't have to be an Elon Musk or a Nostradamus. Vision is about seeing what needs to be done and doing it. It’s the Law of Attraction plus action. How do you hone your vision, Vikki?
My vision has always been about care and providing care to those around me. When I first started in the field, I started as a therapist. My care was focused on my clients. As I became a supervisor and a director, my care changed to my team who worked under me that I supervised. Also, as a director of rehab, my vision is focused on the care of a facility, a team, and all of that. I did lose that vision.
After meeting you, going to the women's conference, and reading your book, I was able to have that reignition of a vision because my flame had burnt out. When I decided to take on the venture of a new role, completely different. I went from working in substance use for seven years. I switched over to a chronic illness therapist, working with individuals with chronic illness and their mental health needs, and looking more at a mental health basis. I said, "We're going to hit every single type of disorder here."
Also then, the vision of my company that I decided to create that I was terrified to even consider starting. I didn't tell anyone that I was doing it because I was afraid of failure. I said, "No, this has to happen. I need to make this happen because this vision is so important." I have about 3 or 4 different visions within my company that I hope continue to grow so that more people can see that vision, that power of support, community, unity, and ending a stigma. There's such a hateful stigma toward mental health, substance use, and suicide. If we got rid of the stigma from it, more people would be open to the help that we all need so that at the end of the day, we all can be cared for and care for others.
I love that you talked about providing care. Kevin McCarthy did his book Tough Shift and he has this, on purpose, whole genre. He says, "Your purpose in life is a verb and a noun." Yours is providing care. Anything else that orients back up to that will always keep you down. As you grow your new thing, look at different apparel, speaking, and all this other stuff, writing a book I'm sure, all those things orient back to that because that's what keeps you grounded and keeps your identity and your singularity focused on that spark. Vikki, can you tell us a little bit about this Nine Eight Eight Designs company? We wrapped up the price of leadership and I want to thank you for that, but I want people to hear about what's next for you.
Leadership: Your purpose in life is a verb and a noun.
I'm still a therapist. I love to practice. I'm still doing that at Penn State as my full-time job. When I was looking at what I wanted to do for my self-care, because when I lost my last position, I said, "You're going to engage in more self-care. You're going to take care of yourself. You could have a stressful day at work talking to eight different patients, come home, and be completely emotionally drained. What are you going to do for yourself?" I had to find that because I had never had so much free time on my hands in my life. I had a Cricut that I purchased a year and a half ago. It was still sitting in the box that it shipped in. I hadn't even opened the box. I was like, "Let's give this a try." My sister-in-law helped me learn how to use it and things like that.
Tell our audience what Cricut is.
Cricut is a machine that creates decals and designs. You cut it out and you have to make the design whole and then you can put them on tumblers, shirts, hoodies, bags, everything. That's how people get decals for their cars on the back of their cars that say, "Dog mom" or "Cat mom." For me, I started out by doing the decals that I would throw on my own mug. I was like, "That came out weird," so I'll throw that on my own mug. One day I said, "I'm going to try doing shirts." I made two shirts, one for me and one for my mother-in-law. My significant other looked at me and he said, "You should start your own company." I said, "Honey, that's very sweet of you, but no." He's like, "No, really, those turned out beautiful. I love what you did with them."
Both of them were in regard to mental health and suicide prevention awareness. I sat more with it the more he talked about it because he is an entrepreneur, he has a couple of businesses of his own. I said, "I don't know." I thought more, long, and hard about it." I was like, "Let me make a couple of other shirts." I made some more shirts and they kept getting better and better. I made different designs focused on mental health awareness and suicide prevention awareness. I said, "All right, God, I see you. You're telling me that I need to do my own line of mental health and suicide prevention awareness apparel and merchandise, but you can't start a business without a name. You need a name before you go somewhere."
I was driving home from work one day. As we all know, our electronic devices like to listen to what we're talking about. On my Pandora, there was this advertisement that came on the commercial and it was about, "If someone you love is at risk of harming themselves or suicide or anything like that, call our hotline at 988." As I'm driving, I'm thinking, "Nine Eight Eight Design. Nine is an N, Eight, Eight, EED.” We all need to be here on this earth because we all have a purpose that God gave us. I'm not going to go with an LLC. We need to do company because the company we keep is so important to help us continue our story and not end our lives.
It all came together. I'm not going to lie, I had a flood of emotions and I started crying. I was like, "I hear you. Loud and clear, I can hear you." I was emotional. I came home and I told my partner, I was like, "I came up with a company name." He is like, "What?" I was like, "NEED Co. We need company. We are needed on this earth. NEED is Nine Eight Eight Design." He was like, "Get moving, get started. You got the name, now go with it." That's where it took off. There are a lot of crafters, designers, and vendors out there who make everything and anything like, "I make funny mom things on shirts and stuff."
I wanted mine to be specific. I wanted it to be powerful and impactful to society. For me, it was imperative to be about mental health. I knew at that moment that it was my passion and my vision of what my education is based on, but what my love, passion, and hobby are. Combining those two things together to make such a beautiful line of clothing and bags and tumblers. I have more ideas down the pipeline, but I'm slowly trickling things in to gain individuals to help me and the stigma of mental health and suicide prevention.
For our audience, we will have the website. We will have all of Vikki's contact information out there. You can get in touch with her and check out and support her new organization because it’s such a crisis right now. It always has been since the dawn of time. It's wonderful that you got the call and are responding to that call. It's so great to see you come through this. You're so strong. You're so resilient. Well done.
Thank you so much.
You're welcome. Vikki, anything else before we wrap up that you want to share with our audience on all things leadership?
I want to add that I do have Facebook. My NEED, Nine Eight Eight Design Company is on Facebook and Instagram. Finally, earlier this week, I launched my Etsy page. I'm going to be at a bunch of crashes in Dauphin County, York County, Lancaster County, Berks County, even going back to my hometown of Schuylkill County. My goal is to get the word out to everyone. Even if I only have $100 in sales that month, as long as people are liking and sharing my pages, my posts, and my pictures. It's just getting the word out about the stigma and ending that. That's what's more important to me than anything.
For me or any leader, no matter if you're a brand new leader in your early 30s or have been in leadership for 30 to 40 years, the number one thing that I've taken away over the past 5 months is it's okay to fail. Failure only leads to success. Just remember, if everybody else in your corner walks away, you still have God by your side because God is always greater than the highs and the lows.
Beautiful. Thank you, Vikki. I love what you said. Whether you make $100, I always remember the verse that I think Paul said, "One of us plants the seed, and one of us waters, but God causes it to grow." You're planting the seeds. I pray this show gets out to people and they share it and they can help you water this vision. May God grant you tremendous growth in this new calling of yours. Thank you again, Vikki.
Thank you everyone for tuning in. I appreciate it.
To our tremendous audience out there, we would be nothing without you. We are so thankful you tuned in. If you like this episode, if you would do us the honor of subscribing, maybe even a five-star review, that would be tremendous. Please make sure you share this with other people because as Charlie "Tremendous" Jones said, "You're going to be the same person five years from now that you are today, except for two things, the people you meet and the books you read. Let's make them both tremendous." Thank you for paying the price of leadership and have a tremendous rest of your day. Bye-Bye.
Important Links
Facebook - Nine Eight Eight Designs Co
Instagram - NineEightEightDesignsCo
Etsy - Nine Eight Eight Design
About Vicki Glogg
Vikki is a Licensed Therapist working at Penn State Health Hershey, but also a small business owner of Nine Eight Eight Designs Co (Need Co.). She has taken her love and passion for designing and making apparel and merchandise and combined it with her profession of mental health and suicide prevention awareness to sell products that help our community end the stigma!