Kyle: You walk towards that job or that career and you don’t quit, you’re going to make it. And so, take the lumps, learn from the failures. How are we to grow if not through the gift of failure?

Welcome to the Heard & Empowered podcast presented by National Industries for the Blind. You’re not just a listener here, you’re a catalyst for change. Whether you’re blind, visually impaired or an ally, this is your ultimate resource for building a fulfilling career and an enriching life. We’re on a mission to shift perceptions, open hearts and minds, and unlock unparalleled job opportunities for the BVI community. Ready to be heard and empowered? Let’s welcome our host, Dr. Hoby Wedler.

Hoby: This is a special episode recorded at the 2023 National Industries for the Blind Conference in Washington DC. Please excuse any audio quirks as we capture these conversations, but we guarantee the wisdom is pure gold.

Welcome back to the Heard & Empowered podcast. Today I’m beyond honored to welcome my guest, Kyle Johnson. Kyle, how are you?

Kyle: Hey, doing great. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Hoby: Well, it’s great to have you and you’ve got such a fun story to tell. So tell me what your current role is in the world of… in the blindness agency world.

Kyle: I am president and CEO of Lighthouse Central Florida and Lighthouse Works in Orlando, Florida.

Hoby: That’s awesome. That is really exciting to hear. And we’re going to talk about sort of your philosophy of leadership and use one of your employees as a lens to really dig into that philosophy in a minute here.

Kyle: Cool.

Hoby: But I really want to get to know the man behind the scenes here and understand how you arrived. Tell me a little bit about your background and how you arrived in the world of working with blind colleagues.

Kyle: Yeah, I’ll say on the onset that when I met Lighthouse Central Florida, I was in the private sector working for a wealth management firm.

Hoby: Okay.

Kyle: And we did a seminar for nonprofits, and the previous CEO, Lee Nasehi, came. And so for us, it was a business development play, right? We connect with these CEOs, some of them will let us come out and take a tour, we make friends with them, eventually get in front of their donors, and win clients, right?

Hoby: Sure.

Kyle: So that was kind of the scheme.

Hoby: So the idea was, just to understand, to ultimately get to know the donors of this organization. And the organization can make that introduction as, hey, we’re helping you Mr. or Mrs. Donor.

Kyle: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Hoby: Got it. You would come in and help them manage their wealth.

Kyle: Yeah. So I came in and met with Lee Nasehi and the previous CFO, Donna Esbensen, who’s now passed. And we had a great conversation. And for the first time ever, I took a tour, and I learned about blindness. And I also recognized that I never really thought about blindness or blind people, and I’m a very caring person.

Hoby: Right.

Kyle: But to that end, I guess it was kind of like I didn’t care about blind issues or blind people, because I never even thought of it. It opened my mind. But then a few months later I was at a cocktail reception and as Lee will do, she “voluntold” me that I was going to help start a young executives committee. And so I volunteered for a year.

But at that time I was a rudderless ship. I was living very dysfunctionally. I had a great personal life, but professionally I had no bearing, no direction whatsoever. And I’ve said many times that 50/50 I’m not alive anymore if I continued down the path I was going just from the way I was living my life. And so being a volunteer at Lighthouse was helping that. But then I reached out to the previous director of fund development and said, hey, you’re in the community all the time. Can you let me know if you hear of anything good? Here are some bullet points of what I think I’m good at.

And she said, well, some stuff is going on here. And it turned out she was going on maternity leave and didn’t want to be a director when she came back and thought I might be a good fit. And, luckily, Lee took a risk on me to run fundraising and communications, admittedly knowing nothing about blindness fundraising or nonprofits.

Hoby: Wow!

Kyle: And everything in my life changed, everything.

Hoby: And did that give you the positivity that you needed in your life?

Kyle: Yeah, well the purpose. Yeah, it seemed for the first time I aligned purpose, passion, and profession.

Hoby: Wow!

Kyle: And literally my life transformed overnight. And here we are. Five and a half years later, I was fortunate to follow Lee, as she went on to VisionServe Alliance I became the president and CEO in 2019.

Hoby: That’s incredible.

Kyle: Yeah, it’s kind of magical.

Hoby: No, I love that story. And like you said, Lee now is running VisionServe.

Kyle: Yeah.

Hoby: Yeah, I love that. And it comes through your personality so tremendously well that you’re a very caring person and someone who really thinks about what other people are doing and what they need, and really just considers everybody so thoughtfully. And I have not known you long, but I tend to be a pretty good judge of character. And you just seem like such a strikingly thoughtful person.

Kyle: I appreciate that.

Hoby: And I don’t throw that out there often. And I really, I see that in you. And I also see that you lead in such an eloquent way. I want to better understand your philosophy of working with people and leading. So maybe you can just chat with me a little bit about that.

Kyle: Yeah, well, the first thing I’ll say is I very much wish I could take credit for that, but I just don’t know how to do it any other way. So this is how it’s just turned out. But I think that not only in leadership, but as a human being, authenticity is very, very powerful. And so whether I’m giving a talk or performing my functions as president and CEO or what have you, you’re going to get authenticity because I think being inauthentic is boring and stupid.

Hoby: Right, I do too.

Kyle: So it makes life a whole lot more fun when we can be authentic. But I also believe that the work that our teams are doing is truly honorable work. And I care very much that the people performing that work are well taken care of, that they know they have a voice and they’re listened to, that they have talent around them that’s not always turning over, that they have tools, and they are respected. And so there’s no strategic intention with me as a leader, it’s… I’m going to be myself That’s just how it’s going to go.

Hoby: Yeah.

Kyle: And I happen to authentically care because I really do care.

Hoby: For sure.

Kyle: Companies have mission statements, obviously, yours do, ours does. But for me, I also have a personal mission statement. And that mission statement is to motivate and inspire people to care about themselves and each other.

Hoby: I love that.

Kyle: And I’m just a dork about it.

Hoby: I freaking love that. Thank you for sharing that with me. And then the other sort of question that I have, I’ve heard you talk a lot about your team and the people you work with. And you don’t talk about them as we have employees, you talk about them as your colleagues.

Kyle: Yeah, because they are.

Hoby: Yeah. And you are a deep believer in culture.

Kyle: Yeah, to a dorky degree. Yeah.

Hoby: Yeah.

Kyle: Because I think it’s so powerful.

Hoby: It is. It really is.

Kyle: And there are aspects of it that I guess in the business world you can’t necessarily put KPIs on. You can try, but when you have a great culture, you know it because you feel it.

Hoby: Yeah.

Kyle: It’s not something that we have to tell you, right?

Hoby: No.

Kyle: And I think that we have very high standards. We are a business just like any other business, it just turns out the outcomes that I’m generating, that we’re generating happen to matter to me. That’s what I discovered in that journey, right? That if I’m performing work and the outcomes don’t matter to me, I’m not too good at that kind of living.

Hoby: And that’s the sort of rudderless ship example you were giving.

Kyle: Exactly.

Hoby: You need to care about the outcome.

Kyle: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. What drives your inspiration for having so many projects, including this podcast even?

Hoby: Yeah.

Kyle: Where does that come from in you?

Hoby: Thanks, Kyle, that’s a great question. And what I can say is it comes from my desire to leave the world a better place than I found it. And I’m kind of a dork about that, too. I really just want to do work that matters. And whether that’s getting more people excited about the possibilities of what they could do in the workplace, because a lot of my blind friends unfortunately have a hard time finding work. And our unemployment rate hovers right around 70%.

And, for me, whether it’s – This is going to sound kind of funny, but whether it’s inspiring people to get off of state and federal benefits and to go to work and feel that rewarding power of being an adult in the workplace, or making a delicious whiskey for another client on another totally different hemisphere, it’s all the same thing, man. It just drives me to feel really good about what I do. And I leave curing cancer to my chemistry friends, I got my PhD in chemistry.

Kyle: I’ll join that. I’ll join you on that.

Hoby: There you go. And they can do that while I work to just give people a little more excitement and make Tuesday night a celebration.

Kyle: Yeah.

Hoby: That’s what I like.

Kyle: That’s great. Thanks for answering that. Yeah, and to leave the world better than we found it. What the hell else are we here to do, right?

Hoby: It’s true. It’s true.

Kyle: I mean, and it’s just so much more fun to love on people.

Hoby: That’s true.

Kyle: And by the way, loving on people also requires accountability consistently.

Hoby: It does. And it also, frankly, requires us to be excited about what we’re doing and our outcomes.

Kyle: Yeah.

Hoby: It’s hard to really love people and get them excited about potential and what they can do and get them to dream bigger if we’re not excited about the outcomes we’re providing.

Kyle: Right. Absolutely. Or we can’t really accept or embrace a vision that’s so big. And I facilitate sometimes pro bono for, like… the recent one was a group called the Winter Park Achievement Foundation. They are a foundation that’s kind of built off of this historically black fraternity.

Hoby: Sure.

Kyle: And these guys are trying to take it from almost hobby level to legitimate. And so we were working on their mission and their vision. When we did their vision work, they just could not wrap their heads around going big. And so I said, “all right, let’s stop. Let’s reset this. Let’s write a vision statement that is absurdly unrealistic, right? And we know it.”

Hoby: I love it.

Kyle: It was, let’s do a ridiculous one. And guess what? At the end of that exercise, they had to change one word and they had their vision statement. Because people are intimidated by going big.

Hoby: Dream big.

Kyle: Yeah.

Hoby: Dream big. You seem like one of these CEOs who really could walk into any room with your colleagues and know everybody’s first name.

Kyle: Oh, for sure. I hope so, they’re my teammates.

Hoby: Yeah, I love it. I love it. And that’s the way I am, too. So we really share that in common.

The idea behind this podcast and what we’re talking about here is really to take people at all levels of their journey, of taking the leap of getting employment and being excited about joining a team, or talking to their families who might be scared of them stepping out into the world, and seeing new opportunities rather than just receiving benefits from social security income or what have you.

Hoby: Well what parents don’t worry about risk when it comes to their kid, right?

Hoby: Right. That’s absolutely true.

Kyle: Risk of rejection. Risk of failure. I get it, yeah.

Hoby: Absolutely. So, to that end, I’d like to just talk through a little bit of a lens, use one of your employees as a little bit of a lens. We announced the podcast officially here at National Industries for the Blind convention in 2023 at a fireside chat called the Heard & Empowered chat. And you were on a panel with me along with one of your employees of the year, Sophia.

Can you chat just a little bit about Sophia’s journey, because I think it’s a really beautiful way to see the way that you approach this stuff.

Kyle: Well she’s a shining example of what it means to overcome, right? So I mean, 2016, she’s a single mother of four. All kids are around high school age. She can see but her vision is getting blurry. She has diabetic retinopathy. 2017 she’s blind. And the story I heard is that when her kids would leave for school, she would go into her bedroom, lock the door, and not come out until they came home. 2017 that’s not that long ago.

And so she went through Lighthouse Central Florida’s services. And people that go through the rehabilitation process and services, it looks differently depending on the age, but there’s a stabilization of crisis, a restoration of hope, like, hey, maybe my life is not over. And then there’s empowerment. And Sophia is an example of that arc, right?

So she went through that, Lighthouse Central Florida’s services.

Hoby: Sure.

Kyle: Again, get the confidence back, start to feel like life isn’t over. Say, hey, I am still able. And then she heard about call center jobs at Lighthouse Works. She worked in a call center before losing her ability to see and she came on. Her AT skills weren’t quite there for being in the call center environment. So she started as a receptionist, then became an agent, then became a lead.

When I became CEO, back then, we had 83 employees around in 2019. And it was a manageable thing. I met with every employee one on one and, you know, what’s life like here for you? But one of the questions is, where are you trying to go? Because I feel like as leaders, it’s incumbent upon us to help them achieve their goal. And, hell, if the last step means they work somewhere else, I don’t want to lose a good employee, but it’s not about me.

And so it’s our job to help motivate and inspire them to reach and to strive. So she said I’ve always been curious about a career in HR. And so okay, we hook her up with our HR team and help her acquaint with the function of human resources and the ins and outs of it. And then flash forward, she’s a lead in our call center and we’ve gone from 83 employees to 500, 600. Now we have an eight person HR team instead of one person HR team, but we needed to add, for the first time ever, a recruiter.

And Sophia competed and won that position. She earned it. And now she’s our senior recruiter and she’s nowhere close to the top rung of her ladder. It’s going to be very exciting to see where she goes.

Hoby: It’s just incredible to hear examples and success stories like these, where people can go from really not feeling like life is worth living anymore to being a recruiter in, like you said, six years.

Kyle: Yeah, it’s remarkable. Locking her bedroom door, scared of the world, to our senior recruiter in six years.

Hoby: Six years. And you said something this morning that I want to touch on here, which is that you’re not doing her a favor. She earned this.

Kyle: Yeah.

Hoby: She’s working hard. And she got there because she’s tenacious, and she tries, and she pushes herself. And it’s because of that empowerment, and that’s why the blend… And if you’re someone listening to this out there who is maybe new to blindness, doesn’t necessarily have the skills that you feel that you need in order to jump out there and take one of these jobs that we’re talking about, agencies out there, like all the ones that NIB supports that we’re talking about, can provide that training.

And, to me, the most powerful part of learning to use a cane and learning how to send an email and learning how to cook yourself dinner is that empowerment. That part where you just take that jumping off point.

I’ll tell you a quick story because it may allow people to get to know me a little better. And I think it’s a timely opportunity. The most empowered I felt during my career, and during my life for that matter, wasn’t graduating with a PhD in chemistry. It wasn’t graduating from high school. It wasn’t these big milestones. It wasn’t starting my first company and hitting financial milestones. It was none of that.

To this day, I learned how to walk from my high school campus to the local bus depot downtown. That was a pretty easy walk, less than a mile. I was learning, as a junior in high school, how to walk from my high school campus back to my house, which was kind of in the country, had some dangerous pieces to the puzzle. And it’s about two miles. And my orientation mobility instructor was an incredible human being. Someone who just pushed us, pushed me all the time to do better because she knew I had it in me.

And she would walk parts of the route with me, and I was just itching to do this thing on my own. One day she said, “Go ahead, get out there. Do this walk and do it yourself. Tell me how it goes.” My dad was at home, he knew I was walking home, but he was just there.

Kyle: Not necessarily alone, did he?

Hoby: What’s that?

Kyle: Did he know you were walking home alone?

Hoby: He was surprised to see me get home, but he was ready for a phone call anytime asking for help.

Kyle: Sure.

Hoby: But I’ll tell you, when I stepped off that curb at my high school–and I was confident, I’d done the route a lot of times with my teacher, and I knew I would make it home–it was just nothing short of incredible because now I knew the route from my house to school. I knew the route from school to the local bus depot. I could get anywhere in the world.

Kyle: Yeah.

Hoby: And it’s those things that might seem a little bit small to people, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Whether it’s getting the training you need or going out there right now and seeking employment. These things are the starting point. These things are where you need to take that leap of faith. And you know what? I tell people here that you’re not alone in this. We’re here to support you. People like Kyle.

Kyle: Big time.

Hoby: Everyone you’ve heard on this podcast so far, and that you will hear, we’re all supporters. That’s our goal.

Kyle: Absolutely.

Hoby: That’s what we live for. And I could talk to you for hours.

Kyle: Likewise.

Hoby: We’re running a little bit short on time, but I’ve got a couple more questions for you.

Kyle: Okay. I’m a Libra. I like long walks on the beach.

Hoby: Oh, I love it. That’s great. No, you know, one of the things that I see in your agency and in your work in particular is that you like to see people grow and you like to see people achieve things that they never thought were possible.

Kyle: That would be an accurate observation. Yeah.

Hoby: What would you tell the person who is currently on federal subsidy, who is terrified of thinking about taking that leap? Anyone who’s listening to the show has at least some interest, I would say, in taking that leap. But what advice would you give them?

Kyle: Well, the first thing I’d say is there is no lack of dignity by receiving support like that.

Hoby: I agree.

Kyle: And I would also say that you don’t need to be blind to be intimidated by trying something that you’ve never done before. I think what I’m trying to say here, and I’m taking the long way to it since we’re running out of time, everyone gets nervous. Everyone gets intimidated. Yes, if you’re blind that feels differently than if you’re not blind. But either way, what I’m saying is people should understand, you said it a moment ago, you’re not alone.

You’re not alone in the fears that you have. You’re not alone in the doubts in yourself, in the intimidation of the world, or the intimidation of the idea of working. But the fact of the matter is, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people, many of whom may end up on this podcast, who took that leap, who failed here and there. But how are we to grow if not through the gift of failure, right?

Oftentimes, when children are growing up blind that’s the biggest barrier, their parents don’t allow them to benefit from the gift of failure. They protect them. “I’m sorry, I’m blind, I need you to help me,” versus every milestone saying, “I did it,” “I did it,” “I did it,” “I did it,” and that seed of “I can” growing in that person.

And so just the same, if there’s somebody out there who is working age, who has never done it before, they’re thinking about doing it, do something, right? Walk in the direction of that goal. And if you don’t stop, there aren’t many guarantees in this world, but one is if you walk towards that job or that career and you don’t quit, you’re going to make it. And so take the lumps, learn from the failures. I’ve got a lot of mistakes and failures on my rap sheet.

Hoby: As do I. As do I, my friend. And that’s how we learn. And boy, for me, not taking a challenge is really hard. I have to take the challenge. And what I would tell anyone, just like you, is take that leap, whatever it is that makes you feel even the smallest things. If you’ve never made yourself a batch of cookies before, I don’t know, that’s a stupid example, but just go with it.

Kyle: Well, yeah, but it’s small.

Hoby: If you’ve never stepped into a kitchen and done anything like this because you’ve always been told, “oh, the stove is dangerous,” or whatever the reason is, go make those cookies. And even if they’re not great, feel the success, feel the adrenaline when you do something and you succeed. Feel that.

Kyle: And it multiplies.

Hoby: It does.

Kyle: There’s something there, there’s a magic in it, right?

Hoby: It’s true.

Kyle: And you had said something earlier, Hoby, about people might think these are small things. But I’ll tell you now, in my experience as a human being, as a professional, as a leader, as a team, and as an organization, I used to think, “Gosh, it takes all these big things to do things that are spectacular and uncommon.” And what life has taught me is it’s the very small disciplines done consistently over and over and over and over again that unlocks the power.

And so to tie it to what you’re saying, just take that one step towards it because if you take small step, small step, small step, you’re going to unlock tremendous power on the back end of that baby if you don’t stop doing it.

Hoby: I love it. You just ended the show, man. You took it. That’s incredible. Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you want to share? We covered it, man.

Kyle: I don’t want to muddy the water after that beautiful monologue I just gave.

Hoby: It was pretty awesome.

Kyle: I’m just kidding.

Hoby: It was beyond awesome. And who knows, guests might be reappearing guests because this podcast is going to evolve.

Kyle: Sure.

Hoby: We are Heard & Empowered, and we are trying to empower as many people, as many families and as many levers as we can through this.

Kyle: Well I’ll tell you what, if there’s anything I or we could ever do to participate in that, count me and us in.

Hoby: You’re in.

Kyle: We’re in.

Hoby: You’re there.

Kyle: Yeah.

Hoby: Hey, do you mind if I share your email address as a contact in the show notes for this episode?

Kyle: Not at all.

Hoby: Thank you so much because I know there are going to be people who are going to be inspired by you, as I am most sincerely, who are going to want to chat with you.

Kyle: Bring it. Yeah, if it includes helping people, I’m typically down.

Hoby: This is the Heard & Empowered podcast and I’ve just had one of the funnest conversations with Kyle Johnson. Kyle, thank you.

Kyle: Thank you very much. Thanks for doing this.

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