Leadership: The Journey With No Summit

The theme of this episode is “Trust and Empower, ” and my guest on this episode of our podcast is Jamara Wilson. We discuss building trust, the importance of authenticity and the human connection, the pursuit of excellence, and more! Jamara Wilson is the co-owner of Progressive Cleaning (https://progressiveclean.com/). Jamara is a multifaceted and discerning businesswoman, recognized for her leadership abilities and passion for evolution. With over 19 years of experience, she has successfully participated in the research and program implementation of various for-profit, non-profit, and civic organizations on their operational agility. Jamara supports and educates other business professionals in small business management, operational agility, and vendor relationships through consultations, published articles, success and accountability coaching, and public speaking. More info can be found on her personal website here: https://jamarawilson.com/ Check out our conversation below:   Episode 15 – Jamara Wilson interview  Robert Mixon:   Well, hello everyone, and welcome to the Level 5 podcast series.  Today’s guest is someone who I’ve had the privilege of knowing for about a year and a half now, and we’ve had the privilege of serving together here in the greater Melbourne Chamber ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee’ — It started out as a task force — but Ms. Jamara Wilson is someone who’s an accomplished leader who understands, I think, the impact and importance of effective leadership and I want to welcome you to the show today, Jamara, and ask you for help… Just tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey, if you would.    Jamara Wilson:   Absolutely, and Robert, first of all, thank you for having me. I do appreciate the opportunity and to sit here, and have a conversation with you about leadership… and I’ve respect you from the day we met, so I’m happy to be a part of this, and to have enjoyed the work that we’ve done so far here in the Brevard County and the Space Coast community.  A little bit about me, I have a very diverse background.  It’s not where I’m at now. Right now, I am the an owner, one of two owners… I do have a business partner… Progressive Cleaning — which we are a commercial cleaning janitorial service organization that serves all of Brevard County, Florida, but prior to that, I was in consulting, where my background mainly involved around project management, operations… through grassroots organization, nonprofits, or political organizations, corporate America.  I have diverse skill sets when it comes to different industries, so a lot of transferable skills, mortgages, through retail, through infrastructure.  There’s just a plethora of things that I’ve been able to do.  With all of that said, my main goal and one of my common factors or denominators have always been when it comes to whatever I do, make sure you do it in excellence and that you’re involved with the community while you’re doing so, right?  So you’re utilizing your skills and talents, not just for personal or professional gain, but also to give back, and to elevate others that are around you.  So right now, even in the role that I am in as a business owner, that I also, as you mentioned earlier, the way you and I met, that I am also very involved in that community… through sitting on boards, through donating and or sponsoring time, talent, and or treasure here in the community where we both live.    Robert Mixon:  Wonderful, wonderful. Thanks, Jamara.  Today’s topic that you and I had sort of war gamed together was on one of the Big Six principles that I think most of our listenership has been exposed to over the over the journey, the Level Five journey that we’ve been on together.  But today, I wanted to talk about principle three of the Big Six, which is called ‘trust and empower’… and ask you for to give us your insights on the concept of trust and empower and what it’s meant to you in your leadership journey, both at leading yourself … the first person you have to lead is you, as we know, leading others and then…  … then what you’ve learned also from people you admire and respect or have not really admired and respected because they’ve been more negative than positive in their trust and empower.  So I’d like to ask you a few questions and just see where it takes us here.  The first one, in this trust and empower concept would be, what’s the most important aspect of building trust that you have observed in your leadership journey? What does it take to build trust?    Jamara Wilson:  That’s actually a good question, and I would say for me that is authenticity and being able to set boundaries, right?  So authenticity comes from both ends, right? You as the leader need to be authentic of what it is that you’re doing, what you’re leading, how you’re leading, why you’re leading, right?  And also… the relationship and the interpersonal skills, the soft skills specifically when it comes in leadership, making sure that you’re able to be authentic and genuine and the people that you are responsible for leading, right?  No one wants to be in a position where they’re having to follow someone that they really don’t think they can relate to in any one way or the other, right? We’ve all heard that the phrase that people follow folks … you want people to follow you because they want to, not because they have to, right?  So that always stays in my mind when it comes to leadership.  The other thing when I mentioned is the ability to make sure that you set boundaries.  I believe that in leadership, setting those boundaries where I like to say even I say this to our employees, “our supervisors that are out in the field that, being a position where you are, you know someone, you have a relationship with someone … but don’t become too comfortable with them, if you have to be in a position to lead.”  Because if something needs to be said, then you need to be able to say it for them, for the organization… the people as a whole… and take the emotion out of it when it comes to things that need to be said.  But authenticity … as well as the setting of boundaries, allow someone to build that trust because they know and begin to understand that what, hopefully, what they see is what they get.  Who you see with me, is what it is that you get.    Robert Mixon:  Excellent, that’s a great insight. Thanks, Jamara. So, having built the trust, how does trust affect your ability to empower others?    Jamara Wilson:   I would say that it plays a part, again, it goes into twofold, right? The receiver and the giver.  When it comes to empowering others… one, I like to say that I’m hopeful that in any public setting that I’m in, group setting or, again, community-based setting, that I’m able to empower, hopefully, at least one person around me.  That’s a new someone, that’s meeting me for the first time, or someone that has seen me around before.  But the trust factor is important because of the fact that, again, it goes back into if I don’t think you are who you are, right? If I don’t think that there’s authenticity and genuineness there, then it will be hard for me to believe what it is that you’re wanting to tell me, that you’re trying to teach me… teach me that you’re hopefully wanting to empower or encourage me with.  Because if you don’t have that human connection, that soft skill, where you at least let people know that you can relate, you are relatable, and hopefully in some way or the other, some form or the other, then it just goes back to human nature that I can’t trust you if I don’t really know you, right?  And I know it may sound a little backwards where… guilty until proven innocent… that whole phrase where it’s like, no, it’s like, ‘I’m not, I’m not guilty until, unless you prove me otherwise,’ because of the fact that when it comes to the trust factor is, in leadership, you have to show yourself approved before the latter follows. Does that make sense? … I hope so!    Robert Mixon:   Yeah… I think it does. Jamara, the idea of authenticity is obviously important to you. And I think it’s important to me.  And I know it’s important to a lot of our listenership out there. You got to be the real deal. And if you don’t ‘walk the talk,’ people see through that pretty quickly.  And they’re not going to trust you.    Jamara Wilson:   Exactly.    Robert Mixon:   You’re not going to have that environment of trust.  So, empowerment really is not going to follow because the two are, I would say, integrally connected, if that’s the right term, right?  Empowerment is where trust comes to life.    Jamara Wilson:  Exactly. Good point. Exactly!     Robert Mixon:   The next question I’d like to ask Jamara is, in your view, what are the characteristics of a world class culture?  What does it take to build that ecosystem that people want to be in?    Jamara Wilson:   I think passion, talent, resilience is another characteristic of a world class culture, the ability to be agile, of course, making sure you do things in the spirit of excellence in all that you do.  That’s one thing that’s a personal thing of mine, ‘if you’re going to do it, do it well,’ right? Or just don’t do it at all.  That’s from getting up in the morning and leaving your house for that day, right? That is, you got to brush your teeth, scrub in the way you should! …  I think that’s my humor coming in here…!   But when it comes to world class culture, it’s always going to boil down to the common factor, the people which are the people, they make it go around.  So, in an organization, in a community… the resilience, the value… being in a position where people are going to do it well, again, going back to the spirit of excellence, and then having that group or that culture, that organization, working together for the good of the whole, right?  But it all boils down to and falls down to, ‘you’re going to do it, do it well.’    Robert Mixon:   Excellent. And, of course, leaders who build trust and empowerment…     Jamara Wilson:  Yes.    Robert Mixon:  … enable that culture to come to life. I think that’s where you’re going as well, right?    Jamara Wilson:  Exactly, exactly.  Because when you have the trust, and you’re able to empower others, you have their buy-in.    Robert Mixon:  Yeah.    Jamara Wilson:  … It makes it easier for folks to actually follow leaders who have already gained their trust and gained their buy-in.  And then as a leader, when you have the trust, and you’ve been able to empower others in that regard… you’re able to … you should be … in a position to identify the talent, or unknown unidentifiable talent and the people who you are following.  That becomes very powerful, because there are some people that may not realize, ‘you know what, you’re very good at public speaking,’ or ‘guess what, you’re good at solving problems from the back end’… ‘let’s figure out how we put all those things together, and create this world class culture’ … Trust and empowerment allow people around you as a leader to also be vulnerable with you, right? And when they’re vulnerable with you, they become a little bit more transparent.  When they’re a little bit more transparent, if you’re a good leader who’s attentive, you should be paying attention.  And you should be able to identify and or see the resources that that individual brings to the group, brings to the organization, brings to the table… that as a team, now we can come back together and elevate, and do what it is that we that we set out to accomplish.    Robert Mixon:  Yeah, I really like that concept of vulnerability… I think a lot of times in my experience, with leaders, a lot of the guys and gals were hesitant to be vulnerable. They thought it was a sign of weakness. And so, they wouldn’t admit mistakes.  They wouldn’t say, ‘I don’t know.’ And as a result, the people around them mimic the same behaviors, they wouldn’t admit mistakes, and they wouldn’t say, ‘I don’t know.’ And as a result, we were not genuine and all of those things…    Jamara Wilson:   … And that’s another thing, it’s leadership, you have to… a good leader, with that trust and empowerment, you have to be willing to say, “you know what, I’m wrong.”   It’s okay to admit that you’re wrong, or you know what, “I don’t know… but I’ll get back to you with an answer,” because you don’t know what you don’t know.  Right. And you have to be able to hear what everyone has to say, even if they don’t agree with you.    Robert Mixon:   Right… well said, Jamara.  Who’s your hero or heroine? And why?    Jamara Wilson:  So, that, for me is, Angela Bassett. And the reason is, again, is because this is an individual, a human, a woman who takes ownership and what it is that she does, she does her job well, she’s good at it.  She’s great in her profession. But at the same time, she understands that outside of work, there’s other things that still need to be done, right? It’s a selfless act of thinking about her community at the same time.  So, she goes out and she does what she needs to … still empower folks around her. And it may not always be or it’s not always just about elevating her personal career. It’s about elevating the community around her and be I respect her and that because of her leadership abilities to do that.  And because she’s someone who knows how to set boundaries, she empowers, and because of that, she has people that may have never even met her, that feel like they can actually trust her, myself included.    Robert Mixon:   That’s interesting. People who have never even met her feel like they could trust her. Very interesting.  What advice, Jamara, would you give to aspiring leaders to learn how to develop the skill of trust and empowerment?    Jamara Wilson:  I would say go… and I and I’ve said this throughout, our talk together here today … is that I’m always going to fall back on trust yourself and allow yourself to be authentic… and, at the same time, know when and where to set those boundaries, right?  The authenticity piece is powerful, though, because but because it starts with self, right? If you’re going to be a great leader, you have to know you.  You have to know what kind of leader you are, you have to know, what are your areas of opportunity, because none of us are perfect.  We’re always going, you should always, grow in some area or another.  But being authentic and who you are, just allow people to get to know you.  Just even if it’s just in a public stuff, because we have a public and a private stuff, but being authentic, and who you are, and what it is that you want, and why you are where you are, whether you’re at that table, that task force, that committee, be authentic on why you’re there.  That is first. The other thing is going back into and as I again, I mentioned before those boundaries, that’s important. Because boundaries also allow you to protect self, when self needs to be protected.  Because if you’re not your best self, if you’re not taking care of taking care of self first, you’re no good to anyone else.  And we’ve heard that before. But I think a lot of us have experienced that to where you understand if you aren’t taking care of self first, you’re not your best self.  So therefore, you are not going to be operating at the highest ability and aptitude that you can, to do your job and or to serve others and or to lead the lead the ones that you’re currently responsible for leading.    Robert Mixon:  It makes that makes a lot of sense that, again, we mentioned earlier, the first person you have to lead is you. And you got to take care of you. If you don’t take care of you, how are you going to how are you going to take care of others?  And I, unfortunately, I’ve seen a lot of leaders who didn’t follow that… guideline, and as a result, they weren’t as effective as leaders because they weren’t leading themselves very well, or taking care of themselves very well.    Jamara Wilson:   Exactly. You think about some of the most successful, leaders that we may see or and or know of, whether that’s executives or in a C-suite of some large corporation, whether that’s nationally, globally or statewide… some of the common denominators you see in successful executives or leaders are high and high-empowered leaders is the ability to take care of self, right? Even if that’s just a job once a week or a jog every morning, right? Or from health from the inside to the out, they take care of self.    Robert Mixon:   Yeah … another of the Six Principles is ‘Balance.’  And we haven’t talked about that today, but perhaps in the subsequent one, we can talk about balance. But, there’s a lot of misunderstandings about what balance is.  Part of balance is really in terms of energy, and not time. How do you sustain your four ‘battery’ levels, ‘physical, mental, spiritual, emotional,’ so that you can lead yourself and enable others to be all they could be, as we used to say in the Army, “be all you can be.”  So, the big idea you’d like for our listeners to take away from our conversation, Jamara, would have … you really already mentioned it?  I think it sounds as though you have… but please, tell us, is there one singular idea that you’d like the listeners to take away?    Jamara Wilson:   I would say for me, and something I live by, is treat everyone with respect, regardless of who they are, right?  That’s something I will always say, because even as a leader, you don’t want to get caught up in the fact that, okay, ‘I’m the leader, or, I’m responsible for this, or everything else, or everyone else can be irrelevant.’  No, because treating everyone with respect, no matter who they are… because you don’t know them, right?  Even from … headed to the coffee shop, and the barista making your coffee, you have no idea who he or she is, right? Just because they’re making your coffee, because you don’t know who they know. More importantly, you don’t know who they may be tomorrow, right?  The person that hold the doors for you when you’re walking out of a restaurant or retail store… again, respect them, say thank you, you don’t know who they are, you don’t know who they know, you never know who they will be tomorrow, right?  People don’t forget the acts or how people remember how you make them feel.  And if you make them feel in a negative or bad way, they will not forget your face.  And so … then as a leader, I feel like you just respect people for who they are. And that will help you again in return, for folks to actually return that same level of respect.    Robert Mixon:   Yeah, thanks, Jamara. That’s, that’s, I think, a very wise takeaway for all of us that, we, we need to demonstrate respect for ourselves and for others, every day, in whatever we do.  I think kindness is one of those indicators of respect, when you’re kind to people, you treat them as they deserve to be treated.  There’s a golden rule idea, but I think sometimes we can paraphrase it a little bit.  If someone wants to learn more about you, and about your journey, how would they contact you Jamara?    Jamara Wilson:   The best way to contact me to just get in contact, get in touch with me and learn more about me, feel free to send me an email. And my personal email is Jamara, J-A-M-A-R-A, at jamarawilson.com. Again, that’s Jamara, J-A-M-A-R-A, at jamarawilson.com.    Robert Mixon:   Well, thanks, Jamara. I’m sure some people will.  I also want to thank you for your insights today and, and giving myself and I’m sure our listenership some real insights they can take away and use… and practice every day, and perhaps audit themselves a little bit and say, at the end of each day, how well have I done… at being a trusting and empowering leader, at being authentic, at demonstrating respect and regard for others.  So, thanks very much, Jamara. And I look forward to our journey together and your successful journey in in the days, weeks and months ahead. Thanks very much.     Jamara Wilson:  Thank you, Robert.    Don’t forget! Subscribe to our podcast to get our latest episodes right away, as well as have access to our past episodes.   Did you find this podcast beneficial? If so, please consider sharing it with your audience. It’ll just take a second, but could improve someone’s work habits for a long time to come. The post Podcast Episode 15: Jamara Wilson — Trust and Empower appeared first on Level Five Associates.

A few weeks ago, I was a guest on ‘Excellent Executive Coaching,’ a podcast hosted by Dr. Katrina Burrus. Dr. Burrus is a leadership coach and has spent years analyzing the essentials: what makes leaders succeed — or fail. Let’s dive in a bit to some of what we discussed: Differences between military values and private-sector values. the need to turn a profit creates behavior that isn’t always admirable! what to do instead: create a work culture with caring people. That is an organization that will attract talent, and profit will follow from there. The Big 6 Leadership Principles® are a basis to grow a better work culture. Values are the cornerstone of behavior. but, it is important to remember: values are brought to life through behavior. having a values-based work culture helps ensure that positive behaviors become the norm. Leadership coaching workshops. reverse planning: starting with the goal in mind, and working backwards to build a plan. feel free to contact us to learn more about our leadership coaching.   You can listen to the full episode here: This episode is also available on the Excellent Executive Coaching podcast website. Enjoy the journey! Did you find this post beneficial? If so, please consider sharing it with your audience using one of the choices below. It’ll just take a second, but could improve someone’s work habits for a long time to come. The post Excellent Executive Coaching appeared first on Level Five Associates.

In this podcast episode, my guest is Lt. Col. (Ret.) Jack Matthews. Jack spent time in the Army, in corporate life at Intel, and in a civilian capacity at the Air Force. The launching point for our conversation is one of The Big Six Leadership Principles®: “Trust and Empower.” We discuss how to begin building trust into the framework of a team, the meaning and importance of the phrase “Power Down,” and more! You’ll learn from these leadership insights.   Podcast Episode 14: Jack Matthews interview  Robert Mixon:  Welcome to the Level 5 “Journey With No Summit” podcast series. I’m Robert Mixon, glad to have you today.  We are privileged to have a guest to interview — our 13th I think, in the series here — Mr. Jack Matthews, retired Lieutenant Colonel, United States Army.  I should address him in that fashion, Jack, so I apologize for that, but you know, we’re just thrilled to have him on the podcast today, as we’re going to talk about trust.  First, I want to tell you a little bit about Jack. Graduate of West Point, my alma mater, so go Army! Spent 20 years in the United States Army, in various levels of command responsibility, ultimately commanding a battalion of several hundred engineers.  Later … joined the corporate world, was with Intel Corporation, then served with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in a number of positions of increasing responsibility across the U.S. and in Europe… then became a U.S. Air Force civilian in another context over the past several years, and is currently the director of the Mission Assurance Group of the Integrated Capabilities Office of the Department of the Air Force. I think it’s wonderful to have you here, Jack.    Jack Matthews: Thank you, sir, it’s a privilege to be here, and I really appreciate the invite. I hope I can add something of value to the long line of people you’ve already had walk through these doors, so I’m excited to give a talk on this topic as we interact.    Robert Mixon:  Thanks, Jack. Today we’re going to talk about the third principle of the Big Six principles, as you know they are:  Set the Azimuth,  Listen,  Trust and empower,  Do the right thing when no one’s looking,  When in charge, take charge,  Balance the personal and professional.  With Jack’s background and experience, I thought that ‘Trust and Empower,’ the third principle, would be an appropriate topic for today.  So, Jack, I’d like to start with… first question… what’s the most important aspect of building trust you have observed throughout your leadership journey?    Jack Matthews:   Well, sir, I think the most important aspect is initially a commitment to both being trustworthy and trusting. I think dancing, like in a relationship, ‘it takes two to tango,’ and I think that that is really the bedrock.  But beyond that, it’s about building a relationship. Trust, in my opinion, is a belief in your reliability.  Do I have confidence that you’re going to carry something out? Do I have confidence that you’re going to do what I’ve asked you to do?  That’s that initial trust that I also personally believe — and this may be a debatable topic, I know it is — I think trust is not earned, at least not initially.  Trust has to be a default value. If I don’t trust somebody that I’m just meeting for the first time who’s coming onto the team, I’m starting in negative territory. I’m implying they’re not trustworthy, and for me, a ‘glass is half full’ kind of guy, I like to say at least an entry level of implicit trust is gained right off the bat in a relationship.  Now, we may go to PhD levels of trust over time as we build that relationship, but I really believe that the assumed good intent, assumed trustworthiness in similar fashion is a good place to start!  Then I think beyond that, if leaders can do a good job of modeling, keeping a commitment, being transparent, caring about their people, I think that sets the tone that allows people to follow… so to go back and answer your question simply in a word, I would just say it’s all about “relationship.”    Robert Mixon:   Hmm. Thanks, Jack.  Having said that, how does trust affect your ability to empower others?    Jack Matthews:   I think the ability to empower others is a direct linkage with trust.  I’m reminded of when I was a very young officer, and had a lot more hair on my top, at least on the top of my head in those days!  I remember a cover of an Army Times, which showed the father of a classmate of mine at West Point, actually he was a year ahead of me… but General Walter Ulmer, was one of the Army’s pioneers in organizational climate and the whole theory of decentralized leadership… in a two-word phrase, “power down.”  I latched onto that when I was a junior officer, and the whole life I’ve lived since then has been all about how do you ‘power down’ … how do you put the level of responsibility and ability at the right level in any organization, only retaining the things for yourself that only you can do, but enabling others.  I think that… the more you trust someone, the more you have an ability to empower them, to transfer that power to the right place… If you do that, you can scale, you can impact much wider swaths of any organization, and you help people grow, you build the bench, you entrust with them responsibilities.  We always used to say in the Army, ‘we learn by doing’ … it was one of the ways we were going to always beat the Russians if we’d ever had to fight them, because we had decentralized leadership, we had people willing to work autonomously, and with agility, and with the ability to be bold, and not have to wait for orders on high.  So, in remembering my own journey, that’s very important, and I think in today’s world, we have to resist the impulse to micromanage, because of what technology does for us, we can be commanding something halfway around the world, like in the movie ‘Eye in the Sky,’ where you can have complete control over the battlefield or a situation simply with technology, and I think that can be a real danger as much as it can be a benefit, so we’ve got to be careful about that.    Robert Mixon:  Great point. What or who is the best example you’ve seen of precedent powered by another leader?  I know General Ulmer’s ‘power down’ was a great role model for all of us, but how about someone that you personally observed, who walked the talk?    Jack Matthews:  This is exciting for me to be able to talk about this person because in General Ulmer, I was looking way up the chain of command, as a second lieutenant to a three-star general.  In this example, I’m looking just slightly in the other direction. When I was a branch chief working for the Army Corps of Engineers in Fort Worth, I had a section chief who worked for me by the name of Jessica Napier.  Jessica was amazing at ‘leading from the rear,’ so to speak. Sometimes you think you only can lead if you’re out front of everybody, but a lot of times you set the example from lower levels of that chain of command for the more senior people to observe, and you influence tremendously people even above you in the chain of command.  Jessica had a team that she built, I think, by turning the traditional organization chart upside down.  She became a servant leader. She trusted her people implicitly because she knew them intimately.  She was able to tell you birthdays. She was sending cards. She was asking about kids. She was listening to them, training them, tailoring their work schedules to meet medical needs from time to time.  There’s a phrase, an old missionary… said, “wherever you are, be all there.”  Jessica was all there in her leadership.  There’s a cost to that. There’s time. There’s energy that you have to commit to doing that.  But when you do that, and you engage each person as you go, and you put them in a position to succeed, and then turn them loose, and then put them in an environment where they can fail, and it’s not ‘zero defects.’  To me, that was a very powerful success story as I observed Jessica’s leadership, and I know she’s continued to do well since then, and it will serve her well throughout the rest of her career, and I think that’s contagious. Other people will see that and hopefully adopt it as well.    Robert Mixon:  That’s a great story, Jack, of someone who embodied trust and empowerment. I think, Jessica, what you’ve said is that person.  So, in a little shift here, I would ask now, Jack… what are the characteristics of a world-class culture?    Jack Matthews:   I think culture is an evasive thing. We can certainly define it as the environment that you’re working in, the sets of beliefs, the values, the behaviors, but I’ve been in so many cultures over the years — outside of the petri dish! — it’s a little bit different everywhere I’ve been… but if I was going to distill it down, I would think that any good culture… the main seed in any kind of a good culture is that people are valued above anything else.  That won’t surprise you probably with some of the stuff I’ve said already, but to me, it all starts with people. It ends with people.  Leaders will communicate and listen to those people. They’ll set the tone. They’ll instill values.  I think you could come up with a whole bunch of different values.  The Army certainly has, and they’re a very good set of them.  If I was only going to take a few away, though… I think it’s those ideals of the honesty, or you can say transparency in some ways… integrity, being able to do the right thing, being counted on to do that, the commitment that people make.  Kind of when I went back and said commitment is the first element of trust… the commitment to do your best, to do a good job, to value others, to buy into that culture, to be a team, to be a team of teams.  I think leaders who encourage this, who model this, who enforce this from time to time, they can be more caught and taught … if it’s an appealing culture like that where people are truly valued, people have a voice, and people thrive. They want to be there. They want to be a part of that mission.  The ‘mission first, people always,’ is an old saying, but you can accomplish any mission that you set out to accomplish one time if you don’t take care of your people… but if you take care of your people, you can keep going back to that well.  For me, the single most important characteristic of a culture is the people — on top of the right values and norms that you establish.    Robert Mixon:   Okay, well that makes a lot of sense to me, Jack. Going back to Jessica or General Ulmer or others, who would you say is your hero or heroine as a leader and why?    Jack Matthews:   This is one that is probably an answer … when you think about the person who I look to most as a hero in my life. I’m sure a lot of people would say something very similar … when I say it was my father.  I don’t think the reasons for that are as traditional as they might be. You know, you admire a hero for their courage, their bravery, their action, but also for their skill, their strengths, their accomplishments, things like that.  My father was many of those things. You know, he was a high school athlete, very famous in that. in the local area. He was a sportswriter later in his career. He served in World War II.  But, the things that really make me say my father is my hero are the things that really began to materialize in my mind over time as I was growing up through my early teen years, as the blanks began being filled in.  We were a family that grew up in central Florida. We went to a Southern Baptist church every Sunday morning.  My dad would drop me and my mom off at the church. He’d go park. We’d go to Sunday school in our age group, so my mom was one place. I was another place. I assumed my dad was another. When we’d go to church, he was never there until about halfway through the service, and I never knew why.  We used to go to Morrison’s Cafeteria on Sundays for lunch after church, and every once in a while, the waiters would take our tickets and not let us pay for lunch. That should have been the clue that really clued me in, and it did turn out to be what my father used to do.  This was in the mid-60s. You may know that the Civil Rights Movement was in full bloom in those years. We were wrestling with all of the things we needed to fix in America with race relations, and my father used to sneak out after he dropped us off at church to go teach the waiters at Morrison’s Cafeteria, Sunday school, because they had to work to provide for their families. They couldn’t go to church.  My dad was a white man teaching African-Americans on a Sunday morning without anybody really knowing, but I wonder how much flack he took for that. I wonder how many relationships he might have strained because of that because that’s what he was doing in those years. He took a stand for what was right.  He valued people regardless of the skin color, and you talk about an example that carried with me the rest of my life, especially in this day and age. That’s a very powerful message, and I’m very grateful to have experienced it.    Robert Mixon:   What a wonderful story, and certainly, Jack, that your father was obviously somebody I think all of us would aspire to be, as servant leaders.  I would now ask you here, Jack, what advice would you give aspiring leaders to learn how to develop the skill of trust and empowerment?    Jack Matthews:   I think the advice I would give is to go back to some of the stuff we’ve said before.  First of all, you’ve got to get out and practice it. You’ve got to try some things.  You’ve got to step out. You’ve got to invest some time and energy. You’ve got to build some relationships.  Be an active listener. Learn what buttons people need to have pushed. What is their ‘love language’?  Is it acts of service? Is it affirmation? Is it recognition?  There’s time people have to invest to be able to really understand who their people are, and I think that it is a continuation of that culture discussion, to be able to value the people.  I think to recognize that as you ascend the ladder… your job, as we call it, is probably less about doing — and more about equipping and enabling people.  I think, be available. I used to say that my office didn’t have an open door. It had a revolving door. It seems like somebody would come in about the moment somebody was leaving.  I got to a point where I’d go home at the end of the day and tell my wife when she’d say, ‘what’d you do today?’…  I wouldn’t say ‘absolutely nothing’ anymore. I’d say I was ‘helping build into people.’  I was helping to coach and teach and share experiences with them that would have been helpful to me when I was at their place.    Robert Mixon:   … One big idea you’d like our listeners to take away from today’s discussion. What would that be?    Jack Matthews:   No pun intended, sir, but I would say the big idea that I would offer is to think small.    Robert Mixon:  Hmm!    Jack Matthews:   I look at a phrase I heard a few years back when the Europeans handed the Americans a crushing defeat in the Ryder Cup golf tournament. They were winning every match by one stroke, one point, one hole.  At the end of the three days, they had killed us because they’d won almost all of them. It looked like an absolute slaughter, and yet every match had been really close. I think whether it’s in that… or in banking with interest rates, it’s that accumulation of marginal gains.  If you look at just small improvements, small advances over time, you have an opportunity for things to build up to really large things. Big things have small beginnings.  I think quality over quantity, if you’re having a focus that’s a little bit narrower, you’re not overwhelmed with trying to achieve so much at once.  A quality over quantity, incremental approach, is both achievable and sustainable.  I think just to have that overall idea of when you went home at the end of the day, like I talked earlier, when you’re asking yourself, ‘did I help someone today? Was I able to?’  Your legacy is not in the things you build or the things you accomplish. It’s in the people that you were able to work with, and help coach and guide and build into. Over time, that’s a legacy that keeps giving. I think that’s the ripple effect.  I used to always like the story of the turtle on the fence post where you come around the corner and you see this turtle on a fence post and you go, ‘how in the world did the turtle get there?’ The answer is the turtle had help.  I’ve had a lot of help in my career, sir, that has been very indispensable for where I’m at now. I’m grateful for it. I’m excited when anytime I have an opportunity to help others wherever they are.    Robert Mixon:   I think that’s really some insightful answers today. We’ll give our “Journey with No Summit” listeners some real food for thought.  Hopefully, they’ll listen to this podcast and the others in this series on a regular basis to help everyone equip themselves with the tools for your toolbox.  The Big Six are all interrelated, those principles. I think today, Jack, you alluded to several of them in the discussion about ‘trust and empowerment.’  I really appreciate your being here and your level of engagement and interest.  I’m sure listeners out there in the Level 5 audience will have some wonderful takeaways that they can employ, today and tomorrow, next week and next month and next year … to grow as listening, learning, servant leaders.  Thanks very much, Jack, and wish all of our listeners well. Take care.   Don’t forget! Subscribe to our podcast to get our latest episodes right away, as well as have access to our past episodes. Did you find this podcast beneficial? If so, please consider sharing it with your audience using one of the choices below. It’ll just take a second, but could improve someone’s work habits for a long time to come. The post Podcast Episode 14: Trust And Empower, with Lt. Col. (Ret.) Jack Matthews appeared first on Level Five Associates.

My guest in this podcast is Dr. Jeanne Hurlbert (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeannehurlbert). She is a leader in the realm of surveys, employee/customer satisfaction, and data analytics. The theme of this episode, one of The Big Six Leadership Principles®, is “When In Charge, Take Charge.” Jeanne and I also talk about the importance of recognizing unchanging values while adapting to change, building a culture where team members feel supported, and more!   Podcast Episode 13: Jeanne Hurlbert interview  Robert Mixon:   Well, welcome, everybody to the Level Five Associates “Journey With No Summit” podcast series. And today we are privileged to have with us Dr. Jeannie Hurlbert, the president of Hurlbert Consulting Group and the partner in CJ Innovations. And I know, Jeannie, that you specialize in helping companies, teams, organizations understand their customer base and maximize their effectiveness in dealing with people.  So that’s why I think it’s very germane today that we talk about the principle “When In Charge, Take Charge.”   And so welcome, Jeannie. Thanks for being here.    Jeanne Hurlbert:   Thanks, Robert. It’s nice to be here.    Robert Mixon:  So today our topic is, “When In Charge, Take Charge.” And so first, I’d like to ask you, Jeannie, when was the first time you were placed in charge of people and resources? And what did you learn?    Jeanne Hurlbert:   Well, it was probably when I was a young graduate student, and I was a teaching assistant at the University of North Carolina. And the way they ran introductory classes was, they had these enormous classes. And then there would be a TA like I, who was teaching once a week.  And that’s where they got into a smaller group, and were able to ask questions and engage in the material. And like most of those survey introductory courses, it was a mile wide and an inch deep. And so, trying to engage the students and get them to really, find them something other than utterly boring was challenging.  And I learned very, very quickly that it’s not nearly as easy as it looks to get those students involved and engaged. And the constructs that, you know, I knew so well and found fascinating, weren’t just inherently fascinating to them!  So that that became my first challenge in trying to engage them and convey material, not just to get the constructs across, but hopefully to spark some real interest in what this all meant and how they could use it.    Robert Mixon:   So, what tools did you take away, in terms of getting the group engaged?    Jeanne Hurlbert:   I think what I took away was, a better understanding of my own discipline, first of all, because when you have to engage material and convey it to people, you learn it in a different way. And I learned how valuable that is.  I learned a lot very quickly about what to do, and what not to do when you have 18 year olds who are interested in almost anything except what you’re trying to talk to them about!   So it was… it was fascinating.    Robert Mixon:   Great. Well, that’s an important part of it, I think, is the connectivity part. You know, in my journey, I found that many times if you could connect early on, then you get them in the moment.  But I don’t know… I think I saw something recently that we’ve got the attention span of a goldfish… 16 seconds, which is kind of scary.    Jeanne Hurlbert:   It’s very scary.    Robert Mixon:  But by adolescence or, you know, almost adulthood, then you have, you know, kind of a scary scenario here to get people engaged early on!    Jeanne Hurlbert:   Well, this was an age before cell phones. Once cell phones entered the picture, they’re sitting in class on their cell phones! It’s really remarkable!    Robert Mixon:  So, what’s the best example of you’ve seen of someone else taking charge? Somebody you saw, read about, worked with?    Jeanne Hurlbert:   I would say Russell Honore after Katrina. Yeah, he had he had a joint task force… Katrina… he went into a city that was just utterly chaotic.  And he came in… And famously, the first thing he did was to tell the National Guard and New Orleans Police Department to put their weapons down. He said, ‘this is not Iraq. Put them down and put them down now.’   And he took charge, and he took charge very quickly. His language is salty. His manner is somewhat gruff and coarse.  But as Ray Nagin, who was mayor of New Orleans at the time, said: ‘he gets stuff done.’  He did get stuff done. He was even credited with saving the lives of a couple of twin babies. He walked their family to a Navy ship and got them on the ship.  And I think I have a tremendous amount of respect… I served on a couple of panels with him after Katrina, and I have tremendous respect for him. He used text messages to call down the helicopters, and texting was really relatively new at that point.  The cell phone service was completely… even in Baton Rouge, where I live, the cell phone service was completely disrupted. And so the text messages became a very effective mechanism to call in those helicopters.    Robert Mixon:   Yeah, I had the privilege of serving with General Honore… actually working for him for a period of time, as he was promoted to three-star general and… held in tremendous esteem by a lot of people.  I certainly think that General Honore was a great example. It seems to me that he took charge, not necessarily by a force of language.  It was more by, it seemed to me, being … some of the calm in the chaos. Do you agree with that?    Jeanne Hurlbert  I agree with that totally. I mean, it’s really hard to overstate how chaotic New Orleans was at that point. I served on the IPET after Katrina, which was the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force that the Corps put together.  I was one of 10 teams who documented what had transpired. And I walked the levees with the Corps. And it just, it was a surreal place after Katrina.  And I think you’re exactly right. I think the calm and… it’s hard to think of an individual with more confidence than Russell Honore. And in that situation, that confidence was critical because … he was completely in charge.  He was completely confident in his ability to do this. And I think everyone felt that.    Robert Mixon:   And in the transformed world we’re in… do you see a direct corollary between some of General Honore’s leadership in the chaos of Katrina, and some of the principles that we need to see and have today in our environment?    Jeanne Hurlbert:   I do. And I think it’s sort of ironic, because I think sometimes we think the world is really more transformed than it is. It’s hard to overstate the amount of social change that we’ve seen.  One of the things that sociologists know about social change, is it’s not just that change accumulates, but the rate of change increases. It’s a curve rather than a straight-line slope…  This is really one of the first times in human history that people have been conscious of having to adapt to social change.  So we’re very aware of it. But at the same time, I think there is much that is constant, even in the midst of all that change…   For example, I grew up in a small town.  I grew up in a town of 200 in a county of 9,000 in Northeastern North Carolina, where my father was a country banker.   … I remember distinctly, he shook the hand and looked in the eye of pretty much everyone who came in that bank. And I can remember a guy saying that my father had taken a chance on him when nobody else would, and he was able to build a house for his family.  And that may sound like it was liberal loans policies, but in fact, he had one of the best loan ratios of any bank around. And the reason was really simple. The reason was, he knew the people.  He knew on whom he could take a chance and on whom he could not take a chance. And that was really the secret to his success. He had what we call ‘business intelligence’ now. They didn’t call it that then.  If we can go back to basic relationships and engagement, and in those basic principles, those things are timeless. And there, I think we forget that in the midst of what is a very transformative time.    Robert Mixon:   Excellent point, Jeannie. You know, in some cases, the enduring principles, in fact, I think most enduring principles haven’t changed. It’s the adaptation that we need to make, as leaders, to keep those principles alive, such as being in charge.  … In that context, I’d ask you, Jeannie, so what do you think characteristics are today of a world-class culture in an organization?    Jeanne Hurlbert:   That’s a really, really interesting thing right now. I think COVID has really underscored for us that it’s not enough to bring good people into the organization. You have to support those people. You have to invest in those people.  People are kind of worn out after COVID. And I think that’s reminding us of the importance of this.  And I’ve got a couple of notes here I wanted to use because there’s something else that I think underscores that. And that’s an SEC ruling that came out in November of 2020.  This was the first time since 1977 that the SEC had changed the definition of human capital.  So what they’ve done is require that public companies not only report how many employees they have, but what they’re doing to support employee well-being. And that’s a fundamental change. And I found some data that I thought were really interesting.  If you go back to 1975, and you look at the S&P 500, 83% of the value of companies in the S&P 500 in 1975 came from physical capital. And by 2015, 84% of the value came from human capital.  That’s a really rapid change. This new SEC ruling is interesting, because it’s putting the focus squarely on what companies are doing to support well-being. And I had a quote, basically there are a couple of quotes from the ruling.  They have to describe their human capital resources, and any human capital measures or objectives, that management focuses on in managing the business, including any measures that address attraction, development, and retention of personnel.  One of the former SEC chair people has said that human capital is so critical to every organization’s success that every public company should be reporting on this. And I think that’s a really interesting shift.    Robert Mixon:   I think so too, Jeannie. You know, human capital has in some ways, I think earlier we sort of took it for granted.    Jeanne Hurlbert:   Yes.    Robert Mixon:   And today we cannot afford to do that… in every way, shape or form. The environment that we’re in now, human capital, as you said, has already been designated as being the most important aspect of a company’s culture.  But then again, we come to the point of, okay, so we all have a culture, and it’s either getting better or getting worse, every day.  So how do we influence it to get better? … It takes persistence, don’t you think?    Jeanne Hurlbert:   I think it takes tremendous persistence. I think it takes conscious focus and effort… Drucker is famously quoted as saying that culture eats structure for lunch.  I have never found the evidence that he actually said that.  But culture is a really interesting thing, because it’s a hard thing to get your arms around. And we’ve been in a world where everyone was virtual for the last year.  And that has been transformative. And I think what that did, was to make people sit and really consciously think about what culture is, how you create culture, how you maintain culture.  I have a retainer client that is a completely virtual company, and they have a fantastic culture.  It can be done, but it takes a tremendous amount of effort and work. And it takes constant vigilance.    Robert Mixon:   Yeah… I agree with you 100%. That vigilance is absolutely fundamental. And so today I’m talking about culture as an ecosystem, and as you know, I’ve been fascinated by it.  That’s why I wrote a book about culture.   But, I think that there’s opportunity here for us in the world that’s changed to bring our culture to a new level… What do you think?    Jeanne Hurlbert:   Yeah, it’s a chance to do things over into them and hopefully do them better this time!  You know, this was a huge reset. And in terms of social change, it’s going to be fascinating.  The biggest thing to me as a sociologist, is seeing what is going to be the net change coming out of this. What’s the net change in remote work? What’s the net change in business travel? What’s the net change in commercial office space?  You know, those are all open questions at this point. And IBM was virtual pre-COVID, and they came out with a paper two years before COVID, that said virtual work/remote work doesn’t work.  And I’m a little hesitant to go there… because I think it can, but I think it takes a very, very deliberate effort and structure.  It takes ways to essentially create opportunities for those water cooler conversations to happen… that we have to substitute for what we do in a physical space.    Robert Mixon:   Excellent point. We’ve got to figure out how to have the water cooler conversations, even when we’re not in person, face to face.    Jeanne Hurlbert:   Exactly.    Robert Mixon:   So, who’s a person… I mean, we talked about General Honore and the great leadership he demonstrated and being in charge… what other leader or person perhaps in the current environment that you’re working in, our environment, would you say is really stepping up… someone who is maybe a hero of sorts is overstating it… but someone who is really setting the example in terms of establishing a culture where people feel as though they belong.    Jeanne Hurlbert:   I think we have a lot of creative companies who are doing that right now.  I don’t think it’s the tech companies right now. You know, I think they’re struggling.  And in terms of culture, it used to be that we pointed to them, you know, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, we pointed to them as sort of iconic, you know, in creating and maintaining culture. I think people are a little over that at this point!   But … I think there’s some companies out there, and some leaders out there who are changing our notion of how we invest in not just in companies, but in people.  And I think that’s a really fundamental shift.    Robert Mixon:   Is there any one particular leader or person that you think is setting the standard?    Jeanne Hurlbert:   I don’t know… I thought about the question a little differently. And I’m a little bit off guard and I’m not, I’m not sure I really have an answer for that.    Robert Mixon:   That’s fair!   I mean, again, we’re in the conversation here, I think for our listeners, what we want to be able to share with them is a greater understanding of the idea of being in charge and leading a culture without a lot of uncertainty.  You know, people ask me all the time, how do I tell people where we are if I don’t really know where we are?  I think a little bit is… we’ve got to have greater candor and transparency.    Jeanne Hurlbert:   We absolutely… we absolutely do. And I think… I think there’s some, some really problematic expectations right now… about what people… when people come into an organization, like what they’re going to contribute and how they’re going to contribute it.  … I think we’ve got to change some of those fundamental assumptions.  You know… you sent me these questions beforehand and I was thinking about them.  When you asked about a hero or a heroine, I actually went back to my family… because my father and my aunt and my uncle were left by their father in the depression.  My father was the oldest of four and he was seven years old.  And my grandmother had a lot of challenges. And my father went to work when he was seven years old after school and on weekends. And, you know, they grew up with just tremendous dysfunction.  And if you think about that fact, they can and should have been dysfunctional in their lives… And what happened was that they determined not to let that happen.  My aunt, for example, was pulled out of school in the sixth grade.  And she married later, married a great guy, and he died of cancer. And she was left with two very young children. She didn’t even know how to drive a car.  She learned to drive. She got a job. She supported her family.  One of the things my cousin likes to talk about… is the fact that they lived in a neighborhood with a lot of kids. They were the only kids in a single parent household… And they were the only ones to finish college.  My uncle became an engineer. He went on the GI Bill with support from the GI Bill.  My father got through. My father became a banker.  All my cousins and I are professionals. And it’s kind of remarkable.  To me, that is leadership. That is amazing leadership.    Robert Mixon:  Leadership by determination and example. Is that fair?    Jeanne Hurlbert:   Yes.    Robert Mixon:   Okay. So, Jeannie, what advice would you give aspiring leaders on how to learn to be ‘in charge’ in the world we are in, and going in to?    Jeanne Hurlbert:   That’s an interesting question. I think agility is probably one of the best characteristics that someone can have because things are changing rapidly.  I think going back to those basic principles, and the fact that the fundamental rules of the game haven’t changed.  People are still people.  … I think they need to recognize, we live in an environment right now where your customers can buy from anywhere. So, people are just radically connected technologically, but they are disconnected interpersonally.  And that is documented to create depression.  People crave community. They crave engagement.  They crave connection.  If leaders can remember that, and if they can take the time and trouble to answer two fundamental questions, which is:  … what do my customers want?  … how well am I giving them what they want?  … If they go back to those fundamentals, then they’re going to change the game because most companies aren’t even thinking that way.    Robert Mixon:   Interesting. So, the customer focus has to be really in terms of leadership of an organization or a team… You have to be able to look inward as well as out.  Is that what you’re saying, Jeannie?    Jeanne Hurlbert:   Absolutely. Absolutely.    Robert Mixon:   Okay. That’s terrific insight. Thanks very much.  … Is there another big idea you’d like our listeners to take away from today’s conversation?    Jeanne Hurlbert:   I think what we just hit is probably the big idea right now.  I think the fact that people are so disconnected, and that we’ve just spent a year getting even more disconnected, I think that’s left people reeling.  We know that there was a lot of weight gain in COVID. We know that anxiety and depression rates went through the roof.  Suicide rates escalated. Those things are not going to abate quickly.    Robert Mixon:   Yeah, those are excellent points, Jeannie. Thanks very much.  I noticed an article… USA Today, I think yesterday or the day before, about onboarding and how important it is that we as leaders and organizations pay particular attention to the onboarding process, which may be totally or at least partially not in person. It may be virtual.  One of my heroes used to say it’s almost impossible to undo a bad first impression.    Jeanne Hurlbert:  Yes.    Robert Mixon:   I think as we go forward here, we got to pay attention to the basics, as you said, the fundamental principles, such as, for example, the Big Six and today’s topic, ‘When In Charge, Take Charge.’  But I think the human capital discussion that you teed up, is also very interesting in terms of… that’s really where our opportunity resides, is in investing in ourselves as a leader, being personally accountable to ourselves, and be persistent and focused on people and their needs and the ability to communicate. I think that was really insightful, Jeannie.  Thanks very much for spending the time with us today in our Level Five podcast series on the “Journey With No Summit.”  We look forward to putting this out for your audience, and our audience, and all leaders to benefit from and look forward to the continued opportunity to learn together in our journey.  Thanks very much, Jeannie, and wish you all the best.    Jeanne Hurlbert:   Thank you, Robert. It was great to be here today.    Robert Mixon:   All right. Take care.   Don’t forget! Subscribe to our podcast to get our latest episodes right away, as well as have access to our past episodes. Did you find this podcast beneficial? If so, please consider sharing it with your audience. It’ll just take a second, but could improve someone’s work habits for a long time to come. The post Podcast Episode 13: A Conversation With Dr. Jeanne Hurlbert appeared first on Level Five Associates.

My guest is Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Craig Whelden, who I’ve known for many years. He’s the author of “Leadership: The Art of Inspiring People to Be Their Best” (https://craigwhelden.com/buy-the-book/). The topic of our conversation is one of our Big 6 Leadership Principles®: “Do the Right Thing When No One is Looking.” We also discuss the importance of character, taking responsibility, cultivating a great organizational culture, and more!   Podcast Episode 12: Do The Right Thing When No One Is Looking — Craig Whelden interview   Robert Mixon:   So welcome everybody to the Level 5 Associates, “Journey With No Summit” podcast program — and today in our 12th episode in the series, we’re privileged to have Major General (Retired) Craig Weldon as our guest leader.  Craig and I have known each other off and on for many years, more than we should admit! We’ve had opportunity to be soldiers at a number of different levels, through our careers in the armored cavalry units.  Craig also spent, I believe, nine years as a senior executive service member, which is a general officer equivalent, working primarily for the United States Marine Corps I think at that point in time, Craig, after your retirement from active duty.  He’s written an outstanding book here called “Leadership: The Art of Inspiring People to Be Their Best” — and Craig, I’ve certainly enjoyed it.   Thanks for being part of our program today, as we talk about your work, your journey. I’ll ask you a few questions about one of the principles that I believe in, I think we both do, in “Doing The Right Thing When No One’s Looking.”     Craig Whelden:  Sure.    Robert Mixon:   Craig, good to have you.    Craig Whelden:  Thanks for the invite, Robert.    Robert Mixon:  The first chapter of your book “Leadership: The Art of Inspiring People to Be Their Best” is entitled ‘Character: Leadership’s Basic Building Block.’  Could you tell us why you think that’s so important?    Craig Whelden:   Yeah, so let me back up a little bit and tell you how the book came to be.  About two and a half years ago or so, I was the executive director for Marine Corps Forces Pacific in Hawaii, and I thought I was going to do that for a few more years, and then kind of retire into the sunset of the Pacific. My wife said she wanted to move back to the mainland, because we were too far from family. So, that changed my career path pretty dramatically.  I told the Marine Corps that I wanted to retire in about a year and then somebody asked me, “what are you gonna do next?”  I said, “I want to give back what I’ve learned over four or five decades to the next generation, so they can benefit from that. That’s the legacy that I’d like to leave.”  They said… “well you need a book” and I said, “are you kidding me? A book? I can’t write a book.”  I’d never even thought about writing a book. I’d written a few articles in my life, and I thought I was a pretty decent writer, but a book sounded awfully intimidating … particularly for a fellow that’s in his mid-60s.  To make a long story short, I wrote a book.  I wrote a manuscript, in the fall of 2018, and then I didn’t know what to do with it, so I reached out found an editor/publisher and I said can you help me get this across the finish line? He said sure.  I said, “the first thing I need from you, is to tell me what you think” so he read through it, he called me back and he said… “nobody’s gonna read this book”…   I said, “are you kidding me? What wrong? What’s wrong with it?  He said “it’s a memoir. It’s a story of your life. You are not Michelle Obama or Omarosa. You’re not famous, or infamous, and quite frankly you need to be a personality or a celebrity that people know to write a memoir and sell it.”  I said, “well, I didn’t intend to write a memoir. I intended to write a leadership book. What do you suggest?”  He said, “you’ve got all kinds of wonderful stories in here, and you’ve got lessons that are buried in those stories. Find them, pull them out, make them chapter titles, and then fold the stories up underneath.”  So… took a yellow highlighter, went through the manuscript, found those nuggets, those leadership and life lesson nuggets, picked certain ones to be chapter titles, folded my stories underneath, gave it back to him.  He says, “now we got something.”   So, that’s how this thing evolved.  He then asked me, “what’s the most important component for an effective and great leader.”  I said, “having strong character”… and he said, “well, that should be chapter one in your book” and I said “okay.”   So that’s the reason chapter one is about character.  When I try to define character, it’s really an umbrella term that includes so many characteristics like: ambition, perseverance and self-awareness, empathy, humility, honesty, trust, integrity, charisma… but always subordinating your personal interests — sometimes for the organization — for the interest of the organization.  There’s also a component of resilience which is what some people characterize as ‘grit’ — and I talk about that in my book.  I dedicated my book to my dad, who really taught me about character, and also taught me about grit as I watched him through his career.  So, character is the first chapter in my book, because I think it’s the most important trait for an effective leader. It’s a foundation for all effective leaders and without it, I think a leader stands a great risk of failure… particularly when the pressures start mounting.    Robert Mixon:   Okay thanks, Craig — that’s insightful.  I certainly agree with you that character is sort of the foundation stone on which leadership is based, and I can see why you’ve went to chapter one in that direction.  I’d like to ask also while we’re on this topic here, in terms of character… who’s the best example you’ve seen a leader doing the right thing, whether or not anybody was looking?     Craig Whelden:   Yeah, well I’ve seen that a number of times, as I know you have and let me tell another story if I can.  I have a chapter in my book where I talk about mentorship, and I talk about four different kinds.  One of them — which is the one that I ascribe to mostly — is what I call ‘virtual mentorship.’  So, imagine for a moment that you’re walking down a path, and the path represents your journey in life.  It can be your professional life, or your personal life, and along the path you see rocks… and each of those rocks represent an experience or a person that you come across in that journey.  What I tell people is, “pick up those rocks that you’re particularly impressed with and put them in your backpack and carry them with you.”   You can repeat those as you become more senior. But also, pick up the rocks of the ones that are not very endearing! The things you want to make sure you never do, and put those in your rucksack as well, to remind you of the of the things not to do.  I’m reminded and I think you remember this the NCO the non-commissioned officer, the sergeants, which are really the backbone of the Army… had an informal motto at one time: “never walk by a deficiency.”  If you embody that kind of principle, that even when nobody’s watching you’re doing the right thing … when you see something that’s wrong, you stop and you do what you can to fix it.  So I’ve probably got … hundreds, as you have, of examples of non-commissioned officers, civilians, and even young enlisted guys who are just in, who did the right thing at the right time even when somebody wasn’t watching.    Robert Mixon:   Well that’s true, there are dozens of examples. It’s kind of hard to pick out one that stands out above others.  I think it’s nice to have those ‘rocks in your rucksack,’ in terms of you were talking about, where you’ve seen examples of people doing right, or standing up for what’s right.    Craig Whelden:  So, let me give an institutional example.  You and I both grew up in the 70s 80s 90s of the Army, and we saw the evolution from the post-Vietnam era of the 70s which was a difficult time — that entire decade was a difficult time — into the 80s where it started to get better, and we instituted some things when we got into the 1980s which really changed the Army I think.  We had going into the 80s, in the late 70s, what I remember what people commonly referred to as ‘zero defects army’ and which means if you make a mistake, you’re gone, essentially.  So, what that did, was it got everybody’s ‘pucker factor’ to a point where they were reluctant to take any risk.  That started to change in the 80s, and we started to evolve. We started to power down authority, allow people to make mistakes. We introduced a concept which is very common now, broadly known throughout all the military, used in the corporate world, called the ‘after-action review.’  The after-action review was an opportunity to reflect back on whatever it was you just did, whether it was an operation or a training exercise, and say: “this is what we did right, this is what we did wrong, this is how we can make it better the next time we do it, let’s move forward.”  I’m oversimplifying it, but you get the idea. What was poignant about, that that I recall, is they encouraged the leader of the organization to be the very first person to stand up and say, “let me tell you what I did wrong.”  What that did, is it freed up everybody else in the organization to feel like they could step forward and admit things that they didn’t do right, even when nobody was watching.    Robert Mixon:   I think that leads in well to the next question I had in mind here, Craig about the last chapter of your book, you entitled “The Buck Stops Where” …   You cite President Harry Truman, “the buck stops here,” quote at the front of it.  Isn’t that also part of the framework that you’re talking about here, in terms of doing right and being accountable?    Craig Whelden:  Yeah, sure absolutely. Taking responsibility… when it’s appropriate.  What prompted that chapter in my book, was an experience I had in 2018.  I was in Hawaii, I was the executive director of Marine Corps Forces Pacific. I was attending an official event, on a Friday afternoon at the governor’s mansion, representing the Marine Corps.  At the table across from me, was sitting the director of the state civil defense — he was a friend of mine, he was a retired National Guard major general his name was Vern Miyagi. I remember when I arrived at the table, and I saw Vern sitting on the other side of the table, I leaned over and I said, “hey Vern, I just want you to know how well I sleep at night knowing that you are protecting us all the time.” He got a kick out of that, and he laughed, and I laughed, and we went on our business.  Now that was about one o’clock in the afternoon on a Friday. The very next morning… there was an alert on my phone, and there was a message from state civil defense… I’ll read it to you, it said, “Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.”  Now, that made national and international news, because it was a false alarm. Somebody in the state civil defense watch team pushed the wrong button when they were doing a training event, and they sent out a real alert to everybody in the state. They absolutely panicked an awful lot of people and it took about 40 minutes or so before that got cleared up.  They put out another message saying “that was a false alarm, blah blah blah blah blah…” but you can imagine, in the days and weeks that followed, that everybody was saying, “how in the world could that have happened?”  The ramifications were pretty significant. Vern Miyagi stood up and said, “I’m the director of state civil defense. I take full responsibility,” and ‘I will fall on my sword,’ and basically turned in his resignation in that position.  Vern Miyagi is a hero in my eyes, because he stepped forward. He said, “the buck stops here”… well, the buck really stopped at the governor’s desk one could presume. The governor didn’t take responsibility for it, in fact he got reelected just a few months later! But Vern Miyagi … he became one of my heroes, because he stepped forward and said “That’s my organization. I’m responsible, and if anybody’s gonna point the blame, blame me.”    Robert Mixon:  Quite a story. Taking responsibility, and doing the right thing — and set an example by doing so. It seems to be harder and harder these days, to find leaders like that, at least in the ‘lanes of the interstate’ that I’ve been moving in here recently.  So I think the issue is, what can we do as leaders to help build a culture that others want to belong to, by doing the right thing.  I’d kind of like to know, Craig, in your view, what are the characteristics of a world-class culture?    Craig Whelden:   Well quite pragmatically, achieving a world-class culture is difficult to achieve, and once you do achieve it, it’s also challenging to sustain.   It involves the participation, the contribution, and the buy-in of everybody in the organization, obviously — and the bigger the organization the more difficult it is to manage.  But as you know, in the military, in our experience with the Army… and my experience, nine years of experience with the Marine Corps… it all starts out with a set of values… “These are the values that we hold dear in our organization, these are the character traits that we want people to adopt, these are the negotiables, these are the non-negotiables.”  When I wrote my philosophy of command as a battalion commander over 30 years ago, I put a section in there about non-negotiables. Non-negotiables mean: if you screw up doing this, then you don’t need to be in my organization, or quite frankly in the Army.  Violating people’s trust… lying, cheating, stealing, those kinds of things, violate the values of our institution, and our organization.  So, establishing the tone… the leader establishing the tone, early on — very early on — like the first day they get there… “this is the direction I want to go, this is my philosophy of command, or this is my corporate vision for the organization” …   Then telling people what you value, what your values are, and what your non-negotiables are… gets everybody established at a certain place where you can move forward. Then maintaining that, and having the discipline to respond when you see violations of that is important.  So yeah, in a perfect world world-class culture is achievable, but difficult to sustain. I’ve been in organizations where I thought we had a pretty darn good culture, and some that that were cracking at the seams.    Robert Mixon:  Like you say, you got to nurture the culture. You can’t just “Set it and forget it,” as they used to say in one of the infomercials!    Craig Whelden:  Yeah.    Robert Mixon:   You’ve got to nurture it, right?    Craig Whelden:  Yeah, absolutely.    Robert Mixon:  In your view, in your experience, your journey, Craig… who are your heroes, or one or two people who stand out for you as leaders who really were heroes to you, and why?    Craig Whelden:  One of them is on the wall right behind you… Colin Powell. Now, I never worked for him directly, and I know that you did.  He was a hero of mine all growing up through the Army as I watched him get up to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and so forth.  I’ll tell you a quick story about the connection between us.  I commanded the Buffalo Soldiers, the 10th Cavalry. The 10th Cavalry was famous for an all-black regiment back in the 1800s, very, very brave, nicknamed the Buffalo Soldiers by the American Indians. They have a tremendous historical significance to our Army, and so I was a very proud to be their commander. When the Buffalo Soldier monument was begun at Fort Leavenworth Kansas, which I know you’ve probably seen… I happened to be the commander of the 10th Cavalry, and I took all my stuff out there, I took a color guard out there, all the silver for the regiment. General Colin Powell was the guest of honor for that, and so I met him there. That’s the only time I met him, but I watched him from afar, and he was always one of my heroes.  Another one, that I think I’ve always admired, I learned about when I got to Purdue University and I joined a fraternity. The fraternity I joined had as a member, a generation before me, John Wooden… who was a basketball coach at UCLA for decades, and won more NCAA championships than anybody else.  But what John Wooden is not known for as much as his championship teams, is the way he pulled those teams together as a team. The way he developed, and encouraged, and taught character to his players.  He was a 5 foot 10, three-time All-American from Purdue University in his own right, but when he was a coach UCLA he turned out not only championship basketball teams, but some tremendously contributing valued citizens.  I actually quote him at the beginning of my chapter one on character, he said, “Talent is God given – be humble, fame is man given – be grateful, conceit is self given – be careful.”     Robert Mixon:   Well stated by the coach! He’s described as a Level 5 leader — and I think General Powell is too — in John C. Maxwell’s book on Level 5 leadership.  Coach Wooden is the the subject of the last chapter, where he talks about an example of a Level 5 leader who was represented by two things that stick with me, two qualities. One is personhood, and the other is respect. I think those two qualities give you the ability and the courage to do the right thing.  I’d like to get your advice Craig, on what advice would you give aspiring leaders on how to learn to develop the habit of doing the right thing, in the midst of all the threats that are out there?     Craig Whelden:   Well, having a strong foundation in character is a good start, I think and again that’s the reason it’s chapter one in my book. When I got done writing that chapter I thought, “have I given this topic sufficient focus?”   I didn’t want to write a book exclusively about character, but I wanted to make sure that the reader had opportunities to dive deeper into that topic, if they wanted to. So, I looked around for a couple of books I thought that were worth pursuing, and I recommended those, in my in my book at the end of the chapter.  I’ve got them right here… this is one of them: “Building Your Leadership Legacy: It’s All About Character,” by Robert C Carroll… he’s a retired Army Colonel, used to run the leadership department at West Point, you may know him.   The other one, which was just published this past year, is: “The Character Edge: Leading And Winning With Integrity,” by General Bob Caslin and Dr. Michael Matthews. Bob Caslin used to be the superintendent at West Point, now is the president just up the road from me of the University of South Carolina.  Both of those books take a pretty good crack at what it takes to have strong character… which again, I think, is the foundation of all good leaders.  I think next, I would tell people to focus on their relationship, and on trust.  Trust is the second chapter in my book. If you don’t have… I used to tell people when I came into a new organization and they kind of looked at me eyes wide open I said, “I trust all of you, until you demonstrate that you are not worthy of that trust.” That put what I think, was kind of a healthy pressure on them to not violate that trust.  Most of the organizations I joined, I thought that’s a pretty good roll of the dice because I think institutionally, the United States Army had people in it that were value-based, strong character, and you could assume a certain level of trust. I think Booker T. Washington once said, “the way you can determine whether or not you can trust somebody, is to trust them” …  … I think there’s a lot of value in that.    Robert Mixon:   Okay thanks Craig. That’s really good. I think very useful for our audience too, of leaders and aspiring leaders.  Lastly, I’d like to ask for your thoughts on… what’s a big idea to leave the audience of leaders, aspiring leaders, what would that be, for their journey?    Craig Whelden:  Yeah, the big idea… I’m not sure if I’m gonna answer this way you hope… but what I have seen over time, in the evolution of leaders from young leaders to very senior leaders, is that some of them start to crack when they become more senior — because they kind of forget those basic foundational elements of character, of integrity, of values, of remembering their roots, where did they come from? …They were there at some time.  They start treating subordinates differently than they would have would like to have been treated, when they were subordinate.  There’s a certain leader who maintains the same values, never forgets where he or she came from, and then there are those who don’t.  There’s a interesting story… I have a chapter in my book called ‘Memento Mori’… and in Latin that means “remember you are mortal.”  So if you imagine for a moment, the Roman general coming into Rome after a huge victory on the battlefield, and he’s being feted by all the Roman, they’re on either side of the road, he’s in his chariot going through and they’re dropping confetti, and throwing gold coins at him, and all that sort of thing… and standing behind him on the chariot, is his slave and one of the tasks his slave has is to lean forward whisper into his generals ear “Memento Mori,” which means remember you are mortal! “Tomorrow you could fall.”  We have seen too many examples — and I’m ashamed to say, in the military — of senior leaders who have fallen, because they had a character flaw… that shows either when they’re under great pressure, or when they become senior and they forget the roots, they forget the basics, and there’s a certain amount of arrogance.  … A technique I learned from a fellow you probably know, Monty Meigs who retired — for your listeners — as a four-star general … I worked for him three times.  I was his cavalry squadron S3, I was his base commander as a Colonel, then I was his chief of staff, when he was a division commander.  When he was a division commander as a two-star, he did this regularly: he would pull his immediate staff in, and he would say to… and I’m talking about the people who were closest to him every day… me, the staff, Secretaries General staff, his driver, his secretary, his aide-de-camp, his communications team… all those folks he would bring into a room every quarterm and he would say, “Look. I will never cross an ethical boundary by design. Circumstances may pull me, and you with me… because you’re with me all the time… across that boundary line. The more senior you become, the more temptations, the more opportunities there are to step over that boundary, and I’m not going to do that… or I’m not going to do it consciously. I’m charging all of you, who are with me every day, to keep your antenna up and let us know if you see us crossing those boundaries… and the lawyer here, is going to tell you now where those boundaries are.”   Then the lawyer would go through his little spiel — which I know you’ve seen many many times as I have — about “here are the ethic rules that you must abide by”… and so everybody including the driver, and the secretary and all those people, had an awareness of where the boundaries are and the General was telling him stay inside that boundary.  I thought “that’s a pretty good tactic, technique and procedure! … I think I’ll put in my rucksack and carry with me, I as I go forward.”  I did and when I became a general officer, and when I became a senior executive I did exactly the same thing. When I was in the Marine Corps, I saw a number of three-stars that I worked for do exactly the same thing.    Robert Mixon:   Well, that’s certainly great insights Craig. I want to thank you for taking the time today to come on the “Journey With No Summit” podcast series, and talk to us about your leadership journey.  Your book again, “Leadership: The Art Of Inspiring People To Be Their Best,” I know it’s available on Amazon… and I’m sure some people are gonna Google it … and hopefully buy it and read it.  I read it, and I thought it was really well done. A very readable account about a practical leadership tools.    Craig Whelden:  Thank you.    Robert Mixon:   I don’t think we need to be terribly esoteric in our lives as leaders, we just need to be authentic.    Craig Whelden:  Yeah.    Robert Mixon:  I think you are indeed authentic, Craig. So thanks for taking the time to be with us today and share your thoughts.    Craig Whelden:  Thank you Robert. Enjoyed it.    Robert Mixon:  Wish you all in the audience well, and we’ll talk with you next time on the Level 5 podcast series. Thanks very much.     Don’t forget! Subscribe to our podcast to get our latest episodes right away, as well as have access to our past episodes. Did you find this podcast beneficial? If so, please consider sharing it with your audience. It’ll just take a second, but could improve someone’s work habits for a long time to come. The post Podcast Episode 12: Do The Right Thing When No One Is Looking appeared first on Level Five Associates.

In this episode of our podcast, my guest is Michael Ayers, President of the Melbourne Florida Regional Chamber. Some of the topics we covered include: How listening can create trust How to begin to empower your team The importance of mentors, and more. Be sure to tune in!   Podcast Episode 11: Building Trust — Michael Ayers interview  Robert Mixon:   Well, welcome everyone in our ‘Level Five audience’ to our continuing series of podcasts on “The Journey With No Summit.”  Today, we are privileged to have Mr. Michael Ayers, the President and CEO of the Melbourne Florida Regional Chamber with us today. Michael has been the President and CEO of this great organization for over three years now, and has led the organization to be — in my humble opinion — one of the leading entities of its type here in central Florida.  He’s a graduate, I believe, of the University of Illinois, if I got that right, Michael…    Michael Ayers:  Got it!    Robert Mixon:  All right, the University of Illinois!  We had a chance to meet a month or two ago, and I had a chance to meet with his team.  I really think his journey will be of great interest to our audience today, particularly with a theme that we’re going to talk about in terms of the Big Six, “Trust and Empower.”   So, Michael, again, thanks for being here today.  I’d like to start by asking you… in your journey, what’s the most important aspect of building trust that you have observed throughout your career thus far?    Michael Ayers:   Well, first off, Robert, thank you very much for having me as your guest today. It’s a privilege to speak with someone of your background and credentials. So, I’m very happy to be here with you today.  That’s a great question.  For me, and from my perspective, and what I’ve observed in my career…   …the biggest, the most important aspect of building trust is to be a good listener.  That’s something that sounds so simple, but it’s oftentimes very difficult for people to comprehend, and actually follow through.  The best leaders I’ve seen in my time… are the ones that are very good at not only listening, but actually hearing what people are saying… getting varying opinions and different points of view.  That doesn’t mean they’re always going to do what is said. Part of being a leader is also deciding what’s the proper course forward.  But I think it’s important that, to be a good leader, you must have good listening skills, listen to what the individual is saying.  Then as you balance the different viewpoints, then you go forward and decide what’s the best course forward.  So definitely, listening would be the most important aspect of building trust that I’ve encountered.    Robert Mixon:  Okay, thanks, Michael.  How does that listening or development of trust, how has that enabled you to empower others?    Michael Ayers:  Well… I’ve obviously tried to be a good listener.  The more that you listen to your team and your staff around you, they feel like you are actually really wanting to get their input.   They feel like they have a say, if you’re listening to what they have to say, and then moving forward and implementing some of their suggestions.  So I think, by being a good listener, and then following through, you are empowering others on your team, because then… they have skin in the game, and they’re saying, “Well, my leader really cares what I have to say. So I need to be really thoughtful of what I’m going to say, and how I’m going to respond in situations.”  It empowers your team to perform at a high level, because they know that whatever input they have, you’re going to really take it to heart, and take it into account, moving forward for your organization.  So… being a good listener will empower your team to buy into your mission and your culture, and what your organization is doing.    Robert Mixon:   Good. That’s a great insight, Michael. Thanks.  In terms of being able to hear what’s said, and give people the chance to speak their piece, whether or not it’s going to be the way we go or not.    Michael Ayers:  Definitely.     Robert Mixon:   I think that the ability to listen is really magnified by the ability to ask what I call ‘power questions.’  I think you and I’ve talked about this before.  But, a lot of the ability to listen, in my experience has been being able to ask the right questions. Do you agree?    Michael Ayers:   Completely. I think that’s probably the biggest mistake leaders can make: asking the wrong questions.  It doesn’t matter what your team or what the responses are, if you’re not getting to the heart of the matter.  So, definitely asking the right questions is a critical, critical skill set.    Robert Mixon:   How did you develop that skill?    Michael Ayers:   Well, I’ll be honest, I think it’s something that you never really attain. I think it’s something you always have to hone.  Part of it is through observation.  When I’m new to a group, or I’m in a meeting, or I’m in a larger setting, I often try to listen first before I speak — and really get a feel… what are the issues? What are some of the critical inflection points?  Then by listening, I then can understand better.  ‘Okay, here’s what I need to move forward.’  It helps me to hone in on what are the critical points for an organization moving forward.    Robert Mixon:   Okay. Yeah. Thanks, Michael.  What do you think the characteristics are of a healthy world-class culture?  What are the qualities that you’ve observed in your experience?    Michael Ayers:  That’s a great question. One that probably has many different answers, because I think there’s… different objects… different characteristics that can go into different cultures depending on the organization.  But I think there’s a few in particular.  Clear expectations of the team, and what are the goals you’re striving for? What are the expectations you have on your team members is very critical.  Giving them appropriate autonomy, to where you need to not only set the expectation and say, “here’s what I need you to accomplish,” but then you need to take a step back as the leader and go let them do it.  They may not have the exact approach that you would have, but if you really trust your people, you need to be willing to let them do it their way and figure it out on their own.  That’s going to help in the long run, that’s going to build up their confidence, that’s going to build up their trust… them knowing that you trust them, that you’re empowering them. So, I think definitely giving autonomy.  Proper recognition of achievements and effort, making sure that people know that you are observing the work they’re putting in, the effort they’re making, the accomplishments they’re achieving — giving positive feedback.   That goes a long way.  Another aspect is: seeking input from your leadership team and from your employees.  So they know — it’s not just my direction, it’s the direction of the organization. It’s something that is collaborative. I think that’s always been critical to a world-class culture: being very collaborative.  … Leadership still starts at the top, and leadership means taking responsibility, good or bad.  More importantly, when things go poorly, it means the leader takes responsibility for that.  When things go well, it means you share the credit… give credit where it’s due, and shine the light on all the stars in your organization.  Last but not least, I’d say making sure to make time for extracurriculars or socialization outside of the workplace. The bonds you form in the workplace are one thing, but you can strengthen those relationships outside of the workplace. So, making time in your organization for that type of interaction outside of work is definitely critical to the culture.    Robert Mixon:  Okay. Thanks, Michael. That’s a pretty good list.  As far as a world-class culture goes, I think that’s awesome.  And I think the last one you were really, what I heard you say was that you were talking about building the bonds among the team by promoting the idea of having fun. Is that right?    Michael Ayers:   Exactly.  … You gotta be outside of your elements.. away from what’s going on at work… go take an afternoon…  … One thing we did in the past was a scavenger hunt.  It was something that we broke up into teams, and we just went for the afternoon, and went around downtown Melbourne.  It was a fun exercise where we really got to know each other.  We had the challenge of doing something that was not at all work-related.  Definitely bringing fun into the organization is a good idea.    Robert Mixon:   Scavenger hunt! That’s cool.  So, who is your hero or heroine as a leader, and why is that person your hero?    Michael Ayers:   That’s a tough question because there’s a lot of different ways you could answer this. I think probably for me personally, it would be my father, Steve Ayers.  … Growing up, I had the opportunity to observe him and how he interacted with people.  One, he was a very hard worker, but he always had his priorities in line with his family. He always made time for the family… he was also very selfless.  It was not about “what am I getting out of this” or “what’s in it for me?”  It was, “how can I help other people? How can I get more involved to help our community?”   He really instilled, not just a strong work ethic, but “what can I do to better the community, and make sure that we’re all working together to move things forward.”   So definitely, I think my father was an inspiration and a hero for how he, how he’s always lived his life.    Robert Mixon:   That’s great. That’s great, Michael. Thanks.  I can almost get an image from your description of your father, Steve, of what kind of person he was and why he is your hero. So, that’s terrific.  What, shifting a little bit here, Michael, what advice would you give young leaders, aspiring leaders to learn to develop the skills that we’ve been talking about thus far in the conversation?  What would you say to them, to help them in their journey?    Michael Ayers:   One of the biggest pieces of advice I’d give… and what something that definitely helped me tremendously throughout my career was: to seek out, be intentional in seeking out mentors and other leaders… observe and try to mimic skills…  I think in my experience, especially over the last five to 10 years, there’s a lot of people that come into the workforce that are young. They’re very talented, but they’re not ready.  They think they know everything already, and they’re ready to go from right out of college to upper management.  They don’t want to put in the hard work necessarily. They’re not necessarily listening or seeking out guidance from others.  I had a lot of very strong mentors along the way, who I was able to sit back and observe and see… see how they lead, see how they listen, see how they empower.  So, I think if I could give one piece of advice, it would be to understand that you don’t know everything at the age of 22 or 23, at that point you have a lot to learn.  It’s important that you try to find role models that you can touch base with time to time and really follow what they’re doing in their career, and how they’re leading their organizations.  Hopefully, those people will be good leaders for them to follow.    Robert Mixon:   Okay. Yeah. So, I think seeking mentors is a great suggestion, Michael, great notion.  I don’t think I did that nearly enough in my career. Part of it was because, I think I felt as though if I went and asked somebody to be a mentor for me, they might think it was kind of awkward, and I think what I’m hearing you say is we need to do that. We need to go seek out people to be mentors, and not be afraid to ask them to provide that.  Correct?    Michael Ayers:   You’re right. I think you’re absolutely right that probably people don’t do that because they are worried about that fear of rejection, or they don’t want to bother someone because they’re so busy.  But in my experience, I’ve found that for the most part, anyone that I’ve talked to about it, or that I’ve had the ability to have as a mentor… when I’ve sought them out, they’re actually very flattered.  They’re very willing to share… If anything, it’s a boost to their ego that you’re seeking their input and their feedback, and you admire them enough that you’re asking them…  So, I think that that’s something that I think you’re spot on that people probably don’t do it as much as they should, because they’re not wanting to be a pest or a nuisance.  But I think, for the most part, a good leader is willing to do that, because they want to share their knowledge, and they want to help. They want to help bring along the next generation.    Robert Mixon:  Yeah, yeah, I think you’re right. I think we who could be mentors appreciate being asked, but I just don’t think we’re asked enough.  I don’t think we are encouraging young leaders as much as we need to, to seek out mentors, not somebody, perhaps in their direct chain of command, but somebody they admire and respect, who has experience in a leadership role who’d be willing to listen to a phone call — or, get on a proverbial Zoom call, as we say these days — and just share some thoughts and ideas.  You might get feedback you don’t want to hear, but you got to be willing to accept that, right?    Michael Ayers:   Absolutely. You’re right, it doesn’t need to be someone in your direct report or direct chain.  I’ve often found some of my best mentors are people that are maybe within my industry, but work for another organization, or they’re in a position that maybe I aspire to be years, years down the road, and I’ve had the opportunity to come in contact with them.  So I just seek them out.  … The mentors and the people that are guiding you can be from all walks of life, and they don’t have to be just within your organization at that moment.    Robert Mixon:   Great point.  Yeah, I think even if they’re in another profession, another field, they can still provide a lot of insight to you. Because leadership is leadership.  I don’t think necessarily the industry or profession is as important as the principles that we talked about, for example, in the Big Six and we talked about listening today, and ‘Trust and Empower,’ and a number of other valuable takeaways that you’ve given us so far, Michael.  Is there another big idea you’d like our listeners to take away from today’s podcast?    Michael Ayers:   … I usually tend to revert back to keep it simple… I don’t know how big of an idea this is… but I think it’s something that’s often forgotten in today’s culture, and in society today.  I think, in many respects, we’re very polarized. I think this most recent election is an example of that. But I think if I could give one — and I don’t know if it’s a big idea, but one more piece of advice — I’d say, to always try and seek out and look for the good in people.  Because I think oftentimes, people are immediately looking for the bad, or they’re noticing something that is troubling or bothersome.  If people would take time to really, when they encounter someone, or they’re getting to know someone, if they try and find the good qualities in those individuals, I think it would just make the world a much better place than it is today and much less polarizing.  I think at heart, most people are good.  They want to do good. But sometimes, it’s just a matter of how you approach them and how you interact with them. It can bring out sometimes a negative in some people.  So you have to really… dig a little deeper to find the positive.  I think that’s probably my big idea to people… something that’s not earth shattering, but it’s just kind of … a nice way to approach life.    Robert Mixon:   That’s terrific, Michael. Thanks.  You know what, I certainly agree with you that we need a lot more positivity in our interaction with others.  I think as leaders, we have to model that behavior. We model a behavior of positivity, and seeking out the good, and asking people questions that are positive and not negative in tone, then I think we’re going to develop each other more, and we’re going to learn more. So that’s really, I think, great, terrific insights you’ve given us today.  I appreciate very much you’re doing this interview, Michael, and the leadership you’re providing to the entire Melbourne community We’ve been in the midst of crisis for number of months now.  I think it’s evident in what I’ve seen with your organization, that you continue to lead from the front and lead from a standpoint that says, we can do this… this is what opportunities are in front of us, and not do a lot of hand wringing. So I respect that very much, Michael.  I encourage our listeners to stay involved in our podcast series, as we interview other leading executives and different types of companies and organizations, because it’s important as leaders that we have the ability and the willingness to grow every day.  So thanks, Michael, for being with us today, and sharing your insights and thoughts on trust and empowerment, listening, culture, just a number of wonderful takeaways. Thanks, Michael.    Michael Ayers:   Well, thank you, Robert, I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you today.  Definitely the questions made me think… I probably learned a few things myself… and will apply it in my everyday life.  It is always good to reflect on these types of discussion, qualities and how you can be a better leader and how you can better yourself.  So I appreciate your time and what you’re doing here with this podcast.    Robert Mixon:   Great, Michael. Well, certainly wish you well, and wish all of our listeners well, as you continue to enjoy the journey of becoming a leader you’re capable of. Thanks very much.    Michael Ayers:   Thank you.    Don’t forget! Subscribe to our podcast to get our latest episodes right away, as well as have access to our past episodes. Did you find this podcast beneficial? If so, please consider sharing it with your audience. It’ll just take a second, but could improve someone’s work habits for a long time to come. The post Podcast Episode 11: Building Trust appeared first on Level Five Associates.

This episode of our podcast is titled “Becoming A Learning Leader.” It features a discussion with Doug Wiles, president of Herbie Wiles Insurance and former minority leader in the Florida state House of Representatives. We talk about the importance of listening, planning leadership succession, the signs of a healthy work culture, and more — have a listen!     Podcast Episode 10: Becoming A Learning Leader — Doug Wiles Interview   Robert Mixon:   Welcome everyone to the Level 5 podcast series as we continue our journey today. We’re privileged to have as our guest for our interview today Mr. Doug Wiles, President of Hervey Wiles Insurance, and the former Democratic leader of the Florida House of Representatives.  I’ve had the privilege of knowing Doug for about four decades now, give or take, and he has been a leader in both the military, both in the active Army and in the Florida National Guard.  He’s been an active leader in the business community, with a very successful insurance company there in headquartered in St. Augustine, and he’s been someone that I’ve admired and respected as a leader and a friend.  So Doug, thanks for joining us today as we talk about the topic, an easy one here, on becoming a learning leader.  Welcome to you, Doug.    Doug Wiles:   Well, good to be here with you, Robert, always.    Robert Mixon:   So we have some questions that I want to put forward and then obviously you can take it however you want to go, Doug.  I want to talk about your journey as a leader and some of the lessons you have learned, and I think the first question that I had in mind here was to ask you: what’s the most important aspect of being a learning leader that you have observed throughout your journey?    Doug Wiles:   Hmm, that’s a tough one… because I don’t think leadership can be put into nice, neat little containers and set aside, and you pick a little one here when you need it and others.  It’s a package, but you know, when you look at what I admire most and I think is most important is the ability to listen. To reach out, to understand those that are working with you and for you and essentially those that you work for — to try to understand what they understand, and what they’re experiencing.  In fact, I really kind of like to work in the trench, as much as I like to work, for lack of better words, in the executive suite.  I think it gives me a perspective that is unique, and it allows me to hopefully make some good decisions, you know, in the future as well. Robert, when I was the minority leader in the House, Florida House, I worked with a very, very diverse group of members from all over the state of Florida.  Just like in Congress or in any political body today, everybody’s got their own idea, and they come to that based on where they’re from. And once you can understand a little bit better where they’re from and what sort of gave them their perspective, you begin to understand them a little better.  So one of my objectives when I first was elected to the House, goodness, now it’s 24, 25 years ago, I traveled around the state of Florida just to meet these folks, to get them to introduce me to their neighborhoods and their friends and sit around and visit with them for a little bit. I mean, heck, a lot of them, I didn’t agree with their positions… but the point was at least I could appreciate their position and understand. And with that came the ability to lead more effectively.  It was just as simple as asking or not asking somebody to do something when I knew it would be offensive to them, or perhaps not in keeping with their own set of values. You know, clearly something that’s missing in today’s political environment, but it certainly was valuable to me with a group of folks that had their own agendas and were sort of ‘type A’ personalities in the House anyhow.  I think that’s no different than really operating a business, but on a much lesser scale.  So, listening and understanding where those that work for you come from, I think has to be on the top of my list.    Robert Mixon:   Okay, thanks, Doug. You know, the Stephen Covey quote about, you know, “most people do not listen with the intent to understand, they listen with the intent to reply.”  I think that’s a powerful statement that you kind of echoed here, the importance of listening with the intent to understand.    Doug Wiles:   Absolutely.    Robert Mixon:  So as far as the Big Six goes, that’s a home run hit in my book, and good for you.  What’s the biggest mistake, perhaps, that you made as a leader when you could have learned through self-examination, or you observed someone else who didn’t learn through self-examination?  Can you share that with us?    Doug Wiles:   Yeah, another one that’s hard to pick. Robert, we could start with probably my first major mistake was not getting my armored platoon out the back gate one Sunday morning for a training exercise because of a complete failure of all of us — me, most importantly — of not properly conducting maintenance on our vehicles!  But setting that one aside, which I still vividly remember today, and that kind of serves as an example of sort of being prepared.  There’s a few years ago, well, more than a few years ago, in my business, we really relied on a very good and a very effective manager, an operations vice president, as a matter of fact, who was well liked and did a great job.   And suddenly, through no fault of anybody, she left.  Doesn’t make any difference why, really, except that it wasn’t adverse. But suddenly, we were left holding the bag, and our staff really felt that.  I’ve got today about 26 people that work for me or with me. It was about the same back then, maybe a few more.  But boy, what a void. And as I began to think about that, wow, as a leader, I really let everybody down… because I really failed to plan for that possibility.  There was really nobody in line to step up and take her position. And it was an awful lot of hard work with those of us who had other duties and responsibilities to really step in.  So, from that point on, we’ve tried not to be unprepared for most potential things that could happen.  And I mean, frankly, we’re all put on this earth for a given period of time. And we could be taken for any reason… automobile accidents, stepping in front of a train. If that happens to a key leader in the world, what do you do?  And beyond that, I think, in Florida, at least, we have lots of other contingencies like hurricanes, and other nasty things that could happen. And if we’re not really prepared for that, you know, it could be a disaster. The irony of it is, we were pretty good at preparing for natural storms and hurricanes.  We were terrible back then at really lining up our leadership.  So I think the failure to plan was really one of the most painful things for me, other than failing to get out of the back gate in 1975!    Robert Mixon:   Well, that’s an excellent point, Doug. You know, “who’s the next you?” is an important question, I think we all need to ask ourselves when we’re in position of leadership. “Who’s the next you?”  And have that ‘next you’ identified, and do something about getting him or her ready to assume the role — before they have to step into it, I think is where you’re going.    Doug Wiles:   Well, exactly. And I think when it comes to personally, you know, that’s probably the hardest thing for most leaders to do. I mean, we’re enjoying ourselves, life is good. No plans for retirement. You know, why do I need to plan that way?  But I’ll tell you, from what I’ve seen, the most effective leaders are those that have a plan after them, a succession plan.  And I think it does more than just give you some level of comfort. It means that you’re really preparing your subordinates, those that work for you for that next opportunity. Those that understand will deeply appreciate that.  And now you’ve got a much more competent, much more educated, much more prepared staff. But, you know, beyond that, it’s the right thing to do. Bottom line. I’m surprised at how many of us really don’t do that.    Robert Mixon:   Excellent point.  Next question I want to ask is we’re talking about the journey here, you know, is how do you identify which managers, and I think by managers, we’re talking about those who steward resources, right? How do you identify managers that could become leaders who could be responsible for others, in addition to allocating and controlling resources?  Because some never make that transition very well. And we, you know, we’ve made the mistake, I certainly have, of putting some managers in leadership positions who weren’t who weren’t ready for that, or didn’t have the ‘DNA’ to do it. What’s your thoughts?    Doug Wiles:   Goodness, I think we’ve all, you know, even in our best guess, or best analysis, have always not found the right person.  You know, it’s an interesting question, especially given what we just talked about.  You know, the irony of that story is that the person who is the vice president of operations for my business today was the person in 2007 that reached out to me that stepped up and said, “Wiles, I know you got a problem. If there’s anything in the world I can do to help with the departure of this manager, I’m here, let me know.”  The other irony of that is that they were one of the most junior members of my staff.  In other words, the folks that I would have expected to jump into the breach and help me with the fire, they were there… I think they did what they thought they could do.  But the person who really made the difference was someone who’d been with us about four months. And so we gave her that chance and gave her that opportunity.  And the rest is history. And today, she’s literally number two in the office.  So, I mean, that goes to show you what anyone can do if they’re ready and are prepared to accept leadership.  But beyond that, I think what you asked is, well, how do you identify those folks? … I don’t think there’s a single set of criteria that we look at. But I’ll tell you a little bit of what I think.  One, it’s looking for people who step up for the tough jobs when nobody else does. I think that shows teamwork. I think it shows commitment.  I believe it shows that you care… not only about what it is you’re doing, but those that you work with. And it could be just something as simple as, you know, “I’ll lock up the office tonight.”  “Or yeah, it’s a mess in the bathroom. I’ll clean that up for everybody else.”  Or, as I find sometimes when somebody is on vacation who has a kitchen duty, we call it, that is: making sure the dishes are clean. Somebody will go in there every night, even though the person responsible happens to be out of the office, and they’ll clean it up for us.  So somebody that steps up.  I think the second thing I like to see and I look for is: somebody that’s got bigger ears than they have a mouth! Somebody that, it’s funny, but the person that stands in the crowd or on the edge of the crowd in the team, and they’re listening and observing, so that they can understand what’s going on.  I think it’s a lot better than the person in the of that crowd who’s beaten on their chest all day long. I think that shows maturity and a sense of reserve that many of us look for in leaders.  I think the third thing is, especially if you’re looking within your own group, you know, who is it that gets the respect of others?  And I think you got to give respect in order to get it. And we want respectful leaders, those that understand, you know, how the buttons are pushed, but also who are caring enough not to ask their subordinates to do something that they wouldn’t do either. And I think I see that in our team, and our work with those who really get a little more attention, a little more respect.  “Oh, give it to Joe. He can handle that.”  And then finally, and I think obvious, I think you need to have somebody that’s smart.  And I don’t mean that necessarily as book smart. I think just smart when it comes to, you know, they’re working with others and understanding, you know, what makes the world go around. And that’s an intuitive sort of smart.  I think more importantly, in being smart is to understand how dumb you are, so that you don’t make the same mistake, and perhaps you’re calling on somebody else to give you a hand.  So, that’s sort of my summary of what we’ve looked for in the past. And, you know, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.  Folks have a tendency of, I won’t say fooling you, but you know, you may misunderstand a few… you have a pretty complete package, you know, if you look at somebody who steps up, who listens, who’s respected, and who’s fairly street smart.    Robert Mixon:   Yeah, good point. I think those are four excellent components of leadership, as far as ingredients of being able to be responsible for others, as opposed to simply stewarding the resource, which could be, you know, finite resources and not necessarily people.  Given that, you know, being able to have someone you identify who steps up, that seems to be an essential ingredient of a healthy culture.  What else do you think is symptomatic, or indicative of having a world-class culture?    Dave Wiles:   Well, you know, that’s hard to, it’s hard to sometimes put that into a nice, neat little package, just as it is to identify.  You know, I’d like to think that we’ve got a pretty good culture in my agency. And I see other places that do pretty well, as well.  I think that… I know in one of your books I recently read, “Doing the right thing, even when nobody is looking”… is a clear indication of a commitment to others that you just don’t find all the time.  I kind of look at people that go out of their way to do the right thing as part of a culture that encourages that… not the culture, but at least the person sometimes.  I think a level of trust among members of the team, fellow employees, knowing that they have your back, if you’re called out of the office or you get busy, or frankly, you raise your hand and you need a little help about something, somebody’s going to step up and say, “yeah, I can give you a hand with that.”  And knowing that it’s going to be done right, or, you know, perhaps when the boss has to leave a little early, intentionally or otherwise, that he can do that, or she can do that, without a whole lot of trouble … or a lot of worry. So trust, I think, is in there.  I think, along with doing the right thing is empowering folks to do the right thing.  In my business, we’re all about trying to provide peace of mind and protection for families and businesses across, you know, North Florida. And that means more than just writing a policy.  It means a lot of other things. And I think we empower, try to empower our folks to do the full job, so that when the customer calls and asks a question, the response is not, “well, that sounds like it’s a pretty good idea. Let me go ask my supervisor.”  Boy, that’s a no-no in my business.  You take responsibility for that accountability. If it’s a reasonable and fair thing to do, we’ll figure out a way to do it in the back office.  And so we really try to encourage people to make good decisions. And by the way, I think that helps them become good leaders, because they have a piece of this action now. They’ve got to sell it to me!   We’ll figure out how to do it. But we’re going to ask the person who made the commitment first, how do we fix, or how do we change, or how do we meet that expectation? I think communication is critical.  Man, and boy, is that tough today. Fortunately, most of our staff is in the office during this Coronavirus pandemic, but we’ve got six people who work outside the office as permanent telecommuters. And so when this thing hit, having Zoom conferences and videos and conference calls were not unusual to us.  And we had the hardware and the technology in order to do that, Robert.  So it turned out well, but it’s more than that. It’s having the right number of meetings, even if it’s only for 10 or 15 minutes, to kind of bring us together.  You know, I’m dressed up today in a tropical shirt, because it’s ‘Tropical Thursday’ at my office. It’s kind of a fun thing to do, which I’m going to tell you about in a minute.  But, in order to make that happen, we gathered together this morning for eight minutes, I think it was, total, so that everybody at home could show off their tropical shirts as well.  And some of them had some pretty interesting combinations there! And that brings me to the last point, I think, and part of a culture is, you know, we got to have fun. I mean, this has got to be a good place to go to.  Somebody’s got to wake up in the morning, get through the morning routine with an expectation that they’re going to enjoy what they do during the day. And as I encourage my folks, ‘hey, if you’re not having fun, let’s figure out how we can fix that… Or maybe there’s another place for you that I can help you be, if you’re really not enjoying yourself here’.  So I think those key elements, to me, seem to have worked pretty good for us and other places that I’ve been. Robert … that is a long answer to a short question, but I hope that helps.    Robert Mixon:   Yeah, it’s very thoughtful, Doug.  You know, the ecosystem that we call a culture has some certain qualities.   As you know, it’s been one of my passions over recent years is to identify what those qualities are.  But I certainly think you’ve given us some great insights in that regard.  What advice would you give aspiring leaders to become learners, to be receptive to the idea that things aren’t going to go well sometimes? You know, we need to learn and grow from it.    Doug Wiles:  Well, I think reading is a pretty important part. You’ve published some great books, by the way. I’ve enjoyed reading each one, and I enjoy your blogs, especially the one today, Robert.  But I think leadership and organization… is not something that you can teach, but I think you can identify some traits within yourself if you just know kind of what to look for.  Most people are just not going to be able to effectively articulate what a good leader is to the average person that works for them. So I think getting a good idea, and there’s a ton of folks out there, including you, that write about leadership and what makes organizations good.  I think overall, that not only makes you a better person, but it also makes you a better team member.  I think the second thing is, if you can, is identify a mentor. Pick somebody that you think is a pretty sharp person and look up to him or her for advice and counsel.  They don’t necessarily need to know that you’re a mentor, although that might not be a bad thing to communicate. But find somebody that you can emulate, that you trust, that you feel does a good job, and that you want to be like. Maybe not all the traits, but most of them.  And watch them!   And I think every business that’s worth its weight in gold has got more than a few of those running around.  And they may not even be leaders.  They may be aspiring leaders, folks that understand what’s happening.  And then what somebody, anybody can always do is watch. Watch what’s going on.  Identify things that maybe aren’t going right, and why. Maybe traits in people that are not good. And why is it not good?  Or things that people do that, ‘hey, I’d like to do that one day.’  And watching people is a clear way of doing that. And if nothing else, just watching folks on the news.  You know, there are leaders that stand out, both good and bad, in every nightly newscast that I’ve seen. And they’re pretty quick to identify whether somebody’s doing it right, or whether they may need a little improvement.  So from a national level, right down to your own office, perhaps in your own family, there are opportunities to watch, to find a mentor.  And then certainly to read about leadership and what it takes are three things that I think folks could use and might, especially younger, might really take advantage of.    Robert Mixon:   Okay, thanks. Thanks, Doug. So if there’s one big idea, and we’ve talked about several here, that you’d recommend to our listeners to take away from the podcast today, what would be that big idea?    Doug Wiles:   Well, if I could say two, Robert… I’ll focus on one. I’ll focus on one.  But I really believe that I’ve gotten more by being a listener than just about anything else I’ve done. And a listener and an observer.  And then, you know, finding both good and bad that you can listen to and observe and then create your own opinion.  So, you know, I think we need more good listeners in the world than we need good speakers. So being a listener is key.  But, you know, even more importantly to that is that when your time comes to be a leader, you’re only as effective as you are prepared.  And, you know, by being prepared, I mean, doing the right things where you are in the sandbox today, so that when that opportunity arises, you’re better prepared, you know, to meet the crisis.  In my office is an example… she kept her head down for two or three months.  That opportunity unexpectedly arose when we lost a manager. And all she did was say, “let me help.” And that was a door that opened a crack, and became much wider as time went along.  And obviously, she had prepared herself to, in her own way, to really take over. And frankly, together, we had a lot of mistakes along the way. I mean, we’re all human.  We’re not going to be the best in the world. But the fact that you intuitively are prepared for that next level, for that next job, for that next duty, for that next leadership opportunity, is what I think separates those who are successful initially — and those who fail.    Robert Mixon:   That’s great insight, Doug. Thanks a lot. I think as we reflect on what you’ve given us today in terms of some nuggets of experience and wisdom here, there’s a lot of takeaways that I think our audience can put in their toolbox, whether it’s self-awareness, self-examination, preparedness, and listening.  I think all of those tools are going to resonate with a lot of the leaders that are out there. And I want to say thanks again, my friend, for taking the time to share your thoughts with us and give us some insights. You know, this is ‘a journey with no summit.’  And we’re privileged to have had people like you come on the podcast. And now we have created and are creating a ‘library’ of information that people can listen to and then go back and refer to. And I think that’s outstanding.  So, appreciate all you are doing and have done for our leaders and create a world-class culture up there at Herbie Wiles Insurance and throughout North Florida and what you’re doing. But it’s great being with you, Doug, and I encourage our listeners to tune in next time for our next podcast in the series as we’ll continue to explore the Big Six principles and how the journeys of people who have been successful, like you, have learned from their mistakes, but still been willing to make mistakes and learn from them, and grow other leaders who have that same belief.    Doug Wiles:  Thank you, Robert. It’s been an honor to be with you, and I mean that sincerely.   Don’t forget! Subscribe to our podcast to get our latest episodes right away, as well as have access to our past episodes. Did you find this podcast beneficial? If so, please consider sharing it with your audience. It’ll just take a second, but could improve someone’s work habits for a long time to come. The post Podcast Episode 10: Becoming A Learning Leader appeared first on Level Five Associates.

Over the past few months, COVID-19 has created historic disruptions and changes to the way we work and live – on a local, regional, national, and even international scale. Our challenge as leaders is to continue to apply the appropriate adaptive leadership skills in order to lead our teams and organizations from the front. Let’s get together and keep figuring this out.   This informative and useful podcast will discuss specific tools you can apply right away to build team cohesion, nurture trust, enhance communication, and get things done — despite the physical separation many of us are still operating in. This podcast was recorded at the end of March 2020, when a lot of this was new to all of us, and I think we all felt a bit stunned. Even though we are getting used to these changes, I think you’ll find that there are still some things that are worth listening (and re-listening) to in here. The Leadership Principles that underlie what’s discussed in the podcast will always apply, regardless of how our circumstances change. Finally, if anyone is struggling with finding ways to keep moving forward, or if you simply want to discuss the adaptive leadership skills discussed in this piece, feel free to get in touch with me. I’d be happy to help you assess your options on how to best lead your team — as we continue to adapt to a situation where ‘remote’ teams will likely remain a significant component of businesses into the future. Here is the podcast:   To download the transcript of this podcast, filled with useful links, click here. To download the worksheet that accompanies this podcast, click here. (This post is based on our previous post of this podcast from April 2020) [image source: pixabay.com] Did you find this information beneficial? If so, please share it with your audience using one of the choices below. That will just take a second, but it could improve someone’s work habits for a long time to come. The post Special Edition Podcast: Adaptive Leadership Skills for the Current World We’re In appeared first on Level Five Associates.

In this episode, I interview Dana Mehnert, president of Communications Systems for L3Harris. We discuss the importance of setting an Azimuth aimed towards success, how to develop potential leaders, what makes for a world-class culture, and more! Don’t miss this episode — it’s a good one jam packed with info and ideas for stellar leading!   Dana Mehnert Interview  Robert Mixon:  So, today’s Level Five ‘Journey With No Summit’ podcast series continues with Mr. Dana Mehnert, the President of Communication Systems for L3Harris Technologies.  Dana, it’s great to have you here today and share your thoughts on leadership with our audience of leaders… leaders who aspire to be better leaders every day.  So, I’ll start with the question from the Big Six principles.  Those are:  Set the Azimuth — the mission, the intent and values and culture of your organization.  Listen.  Trust and empower.  Do the right thing when no one’s looking.  When in charge, take charge.  Balance the personal and professional.   Which would you say has been the most important aspect of those principles that stand out in your mind that you’ve observed, and tried to practice throughout your leadership journey?    Dana Mehnert:   Well, General, thank you for the opportunity to be here, and to be on your program. It really is an honor to be able to speak with you, and have the chance to just talk a little bit about some of the things that we’ve done on this journey with L3Harris. I’ve been part of the company for 36 years now.  You outlined six great leadership principles. They’re all very important. If I had to pick one, though, I’d have to say it’s ‘Setting the Azimuth.’  Really, the fundamental job of any leader is to set the strategic direction for their team and organization — and then ensure that you develop a sound strategic plan — and then execute it.  That’s what I really see as ‘Setting the Azimuth’ — where you’re going to go and then how do you get there.  In our business, we’ve always been very, very fortunate that our ‘Azimuth’ or strategic direction can easily be set around the mission and needs of our customers.  We support the military and first responders throughout the world. The products and systems we provide for secure communications and night vision are used in very, very demanding mission requirements.  Lives literally depend on them, where you’re out on the battlefield, or on the city streets.  That’s been very useful in aligning our mission, around very important customer needs. We do a lot of exciting things at L3Harris, and especially the communication systems business. But I think we’re best known as the world leader in secure radio communications and night vision.  Getting to that point, we had to set the Azimuth, or set the direction that: we wanted to be the leader.  In doing so, we’ve always been focused around the customer and specifically the end user of our products and systems. We strive to be able to put those capabilities in their hands.  Along the way, we had a couple of good, I would say mission statements, vision statements that got us there. When we were primarily in the tactical radio business for the defense forces, we had an expression that was called “no warfighter stands alone — always connected, always aware.” That really, I think, set a good azimuth for us to make sure that what we provided always enabled the warfighter to be connected.  So they were never out there alone, and they were always aware. As we expanded in the public safety market, though, the term warfighter didn’t really fit all of our customers. We got together, thought about what we really wanted to be, and we came up with a new vision/mission statement.  That’s the one we’ve used for a number of years now.  That is: “to be the preferred global provider of trusted communication solutions for those who defend, protect, and serve.”  It gets at having the solutions that they can trust, whether it’s the warfighter folks in the defense side of things… or in service and public safety.  That word ‘preferred,’ doesn’t mean we’re always going to be the largest, certainly doesn’t mean we’re going to be the cheapest, but we’re the preferred solution for people who need communication solutions that they can trust.  So, it’s helped set a good Azimuth for everybody in that direction of wanting to be the preferred company, to be the best at what we were so that our customers would prefer us. I think it was a good Azimuth for us to rally behind as a company.  So, I would come back and say, those are six fantastic principles. We’ll probably talk about some of them later on, when we talk about culture and other things. But I would say the most important for a leader is to set the strategic Azimuth.    Robert Mixon:   Okay. Thanks very much, Dana. On the flip side here, what was your biggest mistake as a leader, when you should have applied this principle and didn’t, or observed someone else where you had the opportunity to apply it and didn’t?  And, what did you learn from that?    Dana Mehnert:   Well, that’s a tough one. We only have an hour, and over 36 years, I’ve made an awful lot of mistakes! I’ve been very fortunate that for the most part, I think I’ve been able to learn from them, and I’ve worked with, and for, some very tolerant people who have given me the opportunity to make mistakes — and then learn from those mistakes, and hopefully correct them.  The biggest mistakes I’ve made, and I’ve made them a couple of times, is really not following through on the plan to get you to that Azimuth point, or get you to that strategic endpoint. We’ve gone down business transactions or put together a plan, and then for whatever reason, you lack the resources, or there’s a change in plan, or perhaps you lack the organizational will, you don’t fully implement that plan. You maybe do it halfway.  Often that is done by not fully understanding your customer, and what their true needs are. Those big mistakes have been when we’ve done it, and I’ve done it halfway — not doing the full execution of the plan, or following through on the original plan to get to the strategic objective.  One that comes to mind, was an acquisition we made a number of years ago in the air traffic communication space.  We got enamored of technology with a company that had a very innovative design. We added that design, and we created a product that I think in many ways, was years ahead of its time.  We also had a plan to go out and do several other acquisitions and developments of complementary technologies that would have addressed the current state of the mission.  As is often the case, you get into things, and nothing ever goes quite according to plan. We fell upon some challenging financial times, and we didn’t follow through on those follow-on developments or those other acquisitions. As a result, we weren’t able to address the near-term requirements.  It took a lot longer for the market to evolve, and the innovative technology was probably ahead of its time and not as relevant to the customers we originally thought it would be.  I think had we followed through on those plans, we’d have been much more successful.  I think in other cases where I’ve looked, where I’ve made major mistakes, it’s been partially implementing a plan, not really going forward with everything you need to do to achieve that strategic goal and make the plan executable.    Robert Mixon:   Okay, well that certainly makes sense to me, Dana. I’ve been guilty of the same mistakes!   In talking about the development of leaders in an organization, how do you identify and develop a potential in your leaders or potential leaders so that they can grow to their capabilities?  I think most of us are very good at assessing performance. But potential is a tougher problem to solve, and I’d be very interested in your views here on how you identify and nurture that potential.    Dana Mehnert:   It’s a great question, General.  I think there’s certain characteristics that we look to identify when people that we think are going to be successful, whether they’re individual contributors or leaders.  Fundamentally, it sort of starts with a positive attitude, a can-do attitude, and then a strong work ethic.  Bill Stoltz was one of the founders of RF Communications, which is the origin of the communications systems business here at L3Harris today. And he had an expression that I always like to quote, it’s sort of: “attitude is everything and hard work is everything else.”  It sounds a little Yogi Berra-ish, but I think there’s a lot to be said for that.  If somebody’s got a can-do attitude, feels they can get things done, and then they’re willing to do the work necessary to make that happen. It’s hard to stop those kind of people, again, whether they’re going to be in a leadership position, or a strong individual contributor. Beyond that, in leaders, we really look for people that have first strong competence in their particular field.  If you’re coming out of engineering, you should be a good engineer. If you’re a finance person, you should be a good finance person.  And then, have the ability to engage with and influence other people, particularly across different groups.  And then, of course, have the drive and tenacity to get things done. There are a lot of different ways that we develop those talents, and we identify those talents. There’s a lot of really good formal training programs and development programs to recognize those capabilities in people.  One of my favorite ways, though, is to present people with problems and see how they handle them.  Give them opportunities to present their ideas or work. And then, most importantly, at the right time, get them in front of customers — and see how they react, see how the customers engage with them, and how they handle those situations.  Preferably, it’s in a situation where they’re out in the field, in a real-world environment, and they can see how the customer is using our capabilities, how they confront certain problems, and then putting them in more complex situations like that over time.  The development comes with… over time, progressively more complex or challenging assignments or programs. A variety of different assignments, particularly if you’re developing people for more general management positions — and looking for the people who take charge and provide value to customers in the organization.  In particular, those that can work well in teams and across teams, and set a vision and then motivate people from different backgrounds and different skill sets and functions to get together, with a common goal of meeting a customer requirement.  So those are a few of the things. We’ve got some great specific programs. We have rotational programs… Those are a few of the ways that I would say we look to identify potential leaders and develop them over time.    Robert Mixon:   That’s great insight, Dana, and I appreciate that. In an organization, I think you all are somewhere on the scale of 48,000 people at this stage in the game. I’m sure it’s complex to find the ‘diamonds in the rough’ and nurture them.  So, I think you’ve given us some great benchmarks to look for in the people in our organizations as well and have those qualities of that attitude and the work ethic involved.  In your view, then, what are the characteristics of a world-class culture?  … I’ve sort of been focused very heavily on culture in this stage of my life, but, as culture is an ecosystem — that you have in the communication systems of L3Harris Technologies, what do you think are the hallmarks of a world-class culture?    Dana Mehnert:   In my view, a world-class culture aligns the mission of a business or an organization with its customer’s mission.  They’ve got a strong set of core values, and then creates an environment and a set of business processes and reward system that enables and encourages its people to work together to complete that mission.  In L3Harris, we’ve got a culture that’s built on a foundation of very strong core values.  There are three of them, integrity, respect, and excellence. If I look at integrity, it’s kind of self-explanatory. It’s very high ethical standards that you never compromise.  It’s honesty. It’s also accountability, accountability to the customer, accountability to your internal and external customers, and for your own performance.  Respect is about having a safe workplace, so that everybody knows that we’re thinking about their safety and that they’re going to come home at night, safe and without injury.  It’s a commitment to the community.  Then it’s about inclusion, and that’s very, very important as we see today.  We all have got a lot of work, I think, across the country to do better on inclusion, and it’s a value that we’re committed to, as respecting all of the employees of L3Harris.  Excellence is about flawless execution.  That’s what you strive for. You can’t always do things flawlessly.  We’re human, and there’s always going to be mistakes, but then it’s about continuous improvement.  How do you address the root cause of those mistakes? How do you get better every day in everything that you do?  Part of that is innovation. As a technology company, innovation is core at what we do. Then building upon those values is a very strong foundation.  I think world-class culture is one that enables people to do their very best and do what they need to do to meet the customer’s mission requirements.  In our case, agility is a big part of it.  We talked about innovation…   We’re all about creating solutions and capabilities that, our customers can rely on in the most demanding of circumstances, where their lives are literally on the line.  They need to have a better solution than the adversary they might find out on the battlefield. So innovation is key to that, as is agility, and being able to get a usable solution in a customer’s hands when they need it.  Oftentimes, one that they haven’t fully conceived a requirement for, but being innovative, understanding their needs, and putting it in their hands in a way they could use it. So those are a few of the elements of what I think a world-class culture is.    Robert Mixon:  That’s terrific, Dana. How do you measure the health of a culture? What are some of the indicators to you as a senior executive, senior leader in a large organization, that your culture is healthy?    Dana Mehnert:   Well, being a customer-centric culture, I have the great fortune of often talking to our customers almost every day.  You get real-world feedback — is what you’re doing usable? Do the customers like it?  Do the soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and first responders out there, get value out of what you’re doing? Is it meeting their mission requirement?   Then there’s obvious business performance and any strong business culture, measures of the business and all of the typical financial metrics.  You got to stay in touch with the people, talking to your folks, whether it’s, out on the factory floor, or salespeople in the field.  We do a lot of different surveys to measure the pulse of our customers. We track retention data. We track attrition data.  It’s a combination of those things.  So, are you doing well with your teams and employees?  Are they engaged? Are your customers valuing what you’re doing?  We do customer surveys, but there’s no substitute, in my opinion, for getting out there in the field and seeing, how the person who’s actually using the product… that you might have thought as an engineer was a wonderful product and did so many great things, and find out they use a tenth of them, but there’s something they want that you’re not providing.  So it’s a series of those things, that I think provide touch points and really being able to synthesize all those different touch points to gauge the health of your organization and whether you’re making progress.    Robert Mixon:  Okay. That certainly makes sense, good sense to me. That’s a very viable set of benchmarks that you’re looking at and listening to, right?  As we talked about the second principle, listening to the organizational pulse.  Who would you say is your hero or heroine as a leader and why?    Dana Mehnert:   Well, I’ve got a lot of heroes. I’m fortunate to have been surrounded by a number of wonderful people and getting to work with them every day. So, I’ve got a bunch of different heroes on a bunch of different levels.  On a personal level, I would say my mom. She raised five of us by herself, put four of us through college, was one of the smartest and hardest working people I ever knew. So on a personal level, there’s nobody quite like mom.  On a macro level, some of the great world leaders. I think about people like Lincoln and Mandela, who overcame tremendous adversity and led their nations to a peaceful outcome in really extraordinary times.  On a professional level, though — our customers are my heroes.  We’re very fortunate that we get to work with so many great people across the world, the young men and women who are out there in the armed forces, and as first responders… really, really heroes.  I’ve had the great fortune over time, to be able to interface with a lot of our leaders in the U.S. military, as well as our allies, and then get to work with many of them, as they come into the business.  One of the great things about our culture is we attract and greatly value people coming in from the military, whether they’re senior general officers that I get to work with in our business development organization, or a lot of the young folks coming right out of the service, that will be working in field service or in product development.  We’ve got almost 500 people stationed worldwide that are field service representatives, and they’re out there every day, often in harm’s way, working directly with our customers stationed at their bases, keeping their systems running, enabling them to meet their mission requirements.  So I’ve got a pretty wide range of heroes, and I’ve been fortunate to be able to work with so many wonderful people that I really do consider heroic over my career.    Robert Mixon:   Well, that’s quite a list, Dana, quite a list. I really like the fact that some of your heroes are the ones who are the boots on the ground, at the point of the spear. I think that’s great, great insight for all of us here to remember that you don’t have to be in a position of great responsibility and authority to be a hero.  So, what advice now would you give an aspiring leader to learn how to grow their skills in a positive, empowering, inclusive way?    Dana Mehnert:   A number of different things… and some of them sound kind of trite, you know. First, is be the best you can be at what you’re doing. Whatever role you’re in, people are going to notice you based on how well you do that.  I think getting to the next role, is really based on how well you do in the current role. So if you’re an engineer, be the best engineer. If you’re a salesperson, be the best salesperson.  Be good at what you do.  Be inquisitive. Learn from the experiences of others.  One of the challenging things, particularly early in my career, I thought I had all the answers. I was a smart person coming in, I knew it all, and I wish in retrospect I would have taken more time to learn from some of the people who were trying to help me.  A lot of times you look, and you think people are trying to tell you what to do, as often as not, they’re offering you friendly advice based on some of the hard-fought lessons that they’ve learned.  So listening to people, being inquisitive, reaching out to do new things.   Challenge yourself, if you’re given an opportunity to go do something different, go for it.  Getting out and getting a breadth of experience, particularly early in your career, so you can learn what it’s like for other functions, learn how to get a variety of things done, build that network, make those connections.  You absolutely have to have integrity and commitment and accountability in what you do.  People will always remember if you don’t meet a commitment. You have to have that core foundation of trust.  Probably one of the biggest is just tenacity. Don’t ever, ever, ever give up.  I can look in many, many instances in our business where we lost procurements, we were counted out, we didn’t win the first time, and either through stubbornness or tenacity, we just didn’t give up. We kept fighting, and that got us to be the position we’re in today as number one in our core markets in tactical radio communications and night vision.    Dana Mehnert:   Well, that sounds really positive, too… because I think that part of what I hear you say — and that’s a little ‘back briefing’ for you today — is that, you’re looking for leaders, and you want to help grow leaders, and you encourage leaders to get out there and get after it, to be tenacious, to be aggressive, and yet still be willing to learn and willing to take some risks to make a mistake. I think we call that ‘failing forward.’  How do you typically see your leaders handling or dealing with mistakes?    Dana Mehnert:   Well, you might get different views depending on who you talk to. I think we handle them pretty well because, as I mentioned, we’ve failed a number of times. We, I think, pride ourselves — even though we’re the world leader now — we always sort of have a bit of an underdog mentality, highly agile, and you got to try things.  I think we’re pretty tolerant of mistakes, not repeated mistakes. You look for people to learn from what they’ve done or frivolous mistakes, but you value people taking chances. You can’t be innovative without taking chances.  Failing early and without a lot of cost, is a good thing because you try ideas. So, I think we’re pretty tolerant of those kind of things.  We’re not tolerant of letting customers down.  You can’t make mistakes when it comes to your integrity in dealing with your customers or the stakeholders, but clearly going out and trying new things, new technologies, new markets, new areas. I think you’ve got to be tolerant and willing to take some mistakes and understand you’re going to fail in a lot of instances before you succeed.    Robert Mixon:   Okay. Thanks, Dan. What, in the last three months that have changed our world, what’s one big idea you think sticks in your mind that you’re taking forward in your leadership journey ahead?    Dana Mehnert:   One of the things I’ve learned for the last three months is just how tremendously resilient and committed our people are. If you had told me three months ago that we’re going to have half of the people out of the workplace for three months and we’d keep the wheels on the business and not miss any customer commitments, I would have thought it was completely crazy.  I’ve been tremendously impressed by our people who do still need to come to work… and the production floor and a number of instances, and then I mentioned those 500 people that are out there every day with the customer.  They’re willing to do what’s needed to do to meet those mission requirements of the customer and to help the company keep its commitment.  So, the resilience of an organization is really the big idea, and listening to people, listening to what’s working, what’s not working, and adapting quickly. We worked really hard to put protection measures in place very quickly, work pretty hard to enable work from home, adapt to the right things.  We’ve been very fortunate, I think, in this state and in this county, in this area, that our governmental leaders have been great and have been consistent, provided sound advice and support. We’ve worked with them, but, the big idea I take away from the last three months is just, staying close to your customers, staying close to your people, and the resiliency.  I can’t thank our customers enough either, because they have been very good at working with us where we’ve had some issues.  We provide the next generation state-of-the-art night vision goggle system that is urgently needed in the field by the customers. When COVID came along, the inspectors from DCMA were no longer allowed to travel, so they couldn’t come into the factory. Well, our team used a series of cameras and computer programs and things, and they enabled them to come up with a fixture… they could actually look through the night vision goggles and do the tests and measurements they needed remotely over the computer without going to the facility.  So, that innovation and that resilience of people to come up with ideas and find solutions to problems.  Again, being willing to listen to your people and act on their ideas and solutions quickly.    Robert Mixon:   Okay. That’s terrific. That idea of resiliency, I think, is a key takeaway, David.  Is there any other topic you’d like to share with the audience here about your leadership journey, and advice you’d give to them?    Dana Mehnert:   No, probably not a lot on my leadership journey.  If anything, it would just be the statement around … we have a fantastic business here.  The origins of our business, as I mentioned, started in 1960 in Rochester, with the four local entrepreneurs that created RF Communications.  We’ve been blessed at that local level over a period of time, of great leaders who have passed strong values down to us.  We’re standing on the shoulders of great people. As part of that journey, RF Communications was acquired by Harris, and then we merged this past year with L3.  Today we’ve got a fantastic global company, 50,000 employees, $17 billion.  But we’ve got these strong local roots that go right back to those four founders.  I think that gives us, the moral and ethical compass, the global orientation, the agility and the entrepreneurship that we’re applying to what’s now a very large $5 billion communication systems business within L3 Harris.  It’s an honor to be part of that. We’ve got the best employees in the business, completely committed to our customers.  We’ve got wonderful customers, and it’s just an honor to be part of that and look forward to being a member of the community, and L3 Harris and the communication systems business continuing to be successful and part of the business area here in Rochester for many years to come.    Robert Mixon:   Well, Dana, it’s been wonderful to talk with you today and share some of your insights with our leadership audience.  I want to encourage all the folks out there in the Level 5 podcast family to continue to stay with us as we go forward in our ‘Journey With No Summit.’  We’ve had the privilege of conducting a number of interviews such as this one, Dana, with distinguished leaders who have been there and done that, and I think we’re all on a journey of learning as leaders.  So, Dana, thanks again for joining us today and for being part of this conversation and contributing to the growth of others.    Dana Mehnert:   Thank you for the opportunity, General, and thank you for your service to our country.   Don’t forget! Subscribe to our podcast to get our latest episodes right away, as well as have access to our past episodes. Did you find this podcast beneficial? If so, please consider sharing it with your audience. It’ll just take a second, but could improve someone’s work habits for a long time to come. The post Podcast Episode 9: An Interview With Dana Mehnert of L3Harris appeared first on Level Five Associates.

In this episode, Robert interviews Ray Isaac, who, along with his brothers, is a 3rd generation owner and leader of a company they’ve grown into a successful, multi-award-winning employer. Known as one of the premier employers in New York State, Isaac Heating and Air has been selected as a Rochester Top 100 Company seven times in the past 10 years, is a two-time recipient of the Better Business Bureau Torch Award, is a Rochester Business Ethics honoree, and was selected as the Residential Contractor of The Year by Contracting Business Magazine. Both Ray and his father Jim are 2019 selections to the Rochester Business Hall of Fame. Isaac believes in investing in others to help people grow true careers (vs. jobs), and has created Isaac Tec, a 4-year accredited training and education program, the only such program held by a Contractor. Through Isaac Tec, conducted at the wholly-owned Isaac Technical and Education Center, Isaac is transforming the future of education in the skilled trades. Join Robert as he and Ray discuss topics such as becoming a leader by staying true to your authentic self, developing a passion for one’s own place in business, and how to spot a leader in the making.   Podcast Episode 8: An Interview with Ray Isaac of Isaac Heating and Air Conditioning   Robert Mixon:   Welcome everyone, to the Level Five podcast series: “The Leadership Journey with No Summit.”  We’re privileged today to have Mr. Ray Isaac as our executive guest to talk about his leadership journey.  You know, Ray’s career is a distinguished one here in Rochester, in the Western New York community — and across the country really.  As the president of Isaac Heating and Air, he’s a third-generation member of this great company and he leads a force that is very diverse and very successful in even the most challenging environments, like the one we’re in.  They’ve been one of the best companies to work for in Rochester and recognized in the Business Hall of Fame in this community, he and his father Jim, and 30 years of experience.  I know that Ray Isaac has been there and done that… In a lot of the challenges that we as leaders face every day and along this journey… I really feel fortunate that he’s here with us and is going to share some of his insights along that journey, that hopefully all of us can take and use in our next steps along the way.  So thanks Ray, it’s great to have you here.    Ray Isaac:   Thanks for having me, Robert.    Robert Mixon:   I wanted to ask you a few questions about your journey, and then Ray of course you know take it where you want to … but of course the Big Six principles that I’ve been talking about with different audiences, they all have some meaning to everyone, I hope, and I’d like to ask you first, is there a most important aspect of one of those principles, or your own leadership principle that has been sort of your guiding light over the journey that you’ve been on?    Ray Isaac:   Yeah I guess it’s one that has developed, it’s something that you really don’t know is so important… and is so apparent to you when you when you first start your journey… and obviously we’re talking on a normal journey, it feels like the current journey we’re on, ‘I’m on a boat and I just got thrown into the water.’  I think that’s what everybody is experiencing.    Robert Mixon:  Very true.    Ray Isaac:   …but actually all of these principles do come into play in this in this process, especially doing crisis management and crisis leadership.  I said to somebody the other day, I said “this is an exercise in crisis management and crisis leadership, who knows if it’s going to be a case study — one way or the other.”  It could be a success or it could be a failure.  But really, the one I think the one important principle that I’ve always tried to be comfortable with is really: a self-awareness and a comfort in your own skin.  That’s something I didn’t realize so early on… is that you know there’s so much pressure and as we grow up and as we develop… in school and in everything we do to you know preserve the core, protect yourself, look out for number one… never let anybody know that you don’t know the answer, never show vulnerability, never show a ignorance on something … and it is so liberating… it was liberating for me when I was able to really admit, that I don’t know anything … and that I’m at the mercy of a lot of things that happen.. but really being okay with not being an expert on everything… and being comfortable with who you are, and an understanding of who you are, and what your strengths and your weaknesses, your tendencies… all those things that they do analyses for and it was really that’s been the best thing that it’s ever happened to me.    Robert Mixon:   Okay, I certainly can appreciate that Ray, that self-awareness is hard in the sense of vulnerability… because I think early on, in the career for most of us we didn’t want to be vulnerable.  You wanted to be strong, and above it all … when in reality, that I think our vulnerability gives us authenticity — which is a powerful factor in the leaders I’ve most respected.  Let me ask you this follow-up here: what was your biggest mistake as a leader when you should have applied this self-awareness principle that you’re talking about, or observe someone who should have and didn’t do it … and what were the what did you learn from that experience?    Ray Isaac:   Yeah that’s a great question.  I think the biggest mistake was created by a number of different things… the first one was really being an SOB, and that’s not only the what the SOB everybody thinks of, but it’s also the ‘son of the boss’ … and what I talk about when I do discussions on leadership, is what I call the ‘legacy trap.’  Here you are, the third generation of a business coming in with the last name of the business and … expected to do all these great things and then sometimes expecting to be your father either by yourself, or by other people.  In my case, my father was probably one of the most influential and still is one of the most influential people that I’ve had the pleasure of molding me.  Of all the books I’ve read and the speeches I’ve heard and the lectures I’ve listened to, the person I still quote the most is my father. Really he was giving us lessons back then, and he had like some hardcore principles that we were supposed to abide by — that I really never really paid attention to, until I understood them.  The first one is your last name is a responsibility, it’s never a privilege. I thought that meant “hey I just had to work harder than everybody else and they’re just gonna do what I tell them to do” and his teaching was that “look, nobody cares what your last name is… they’re all here to do their work and to do the best job they can, and if they don’t agree with you they’re not going to follow you” … especially if they’re not trusting you, and that’s obviously the first dysfunction of a team is the absence of trust.  Just because my last name was the same name in the side of the business, didn’t mean that people trusted me or wanted to follow me, or even cared what I had to say … so really it was it was something that was created on, and it took time to realize that… it took some beatings.  We went through some battles with organizations over the years, whether they be unions or other companies, or you know opposing companies and competition… and that builds up anxiety… it builds up pressure, it builds up competitiveness, and all that stuff then all of a sudden creates this ‘preserve the core’… when I go back to ‘number one’ … not being comfortable in your own skin you almost go into survival mode… so there’s a lot of things that build into that… but really not being okay with who you are, and also thinking that you had to know everything… in starting off with that I mean what are you taught in school what are you taught in college is “hey you got your degree now go out and take on the world”… I remember going to my dad once and said, “dad I want to go get my MBA”, he said “that’s nice we’ll teach you the rest.”  It was probably the best advice I ever got.    Robert Mixon:   I guess, makes a lot of sense, right.  You know, I think. in a family-owned business… particularly with the name you know — ‘Isaac’ — the name of the company… you make a really a really powerful point, here is that you know, you can’t assume that that that makes you a leader … and I think your father Jim gave you some great advice and the fact that you’ve got to earn it, right?    Ray Isaac:  You’re right, and the other thing is — and I often say that this was most liberating moment in my life as a leader — was realizing that I did not have to be passionate about heating and air-conditioning. I thought for many years I did.  When you look at the ‘three circles of the hedgehog concept’… ‘what can you be best in the world at,’ and I was pretty good at what I did… ‘what can you make money at,’ I was making some good money… and ‘what are you passionate about,’ you’re not in the middle… the middle of that Venn diagram if you have all three of those… and I had two of them.  I was not passionate about heating and air conditioning… I languished. I actually had my resume out there, looking for another job.  Here I was, the president of the company, last name on the business. one of the third-generation owners… and I was looking for a job.  I was describing to a good friend of mine who was looking to place me … he says “you know what Ray I can give you anything, or get you anything you want, I can get you stock options, I can get you a nice leadership role in a company but I just have one question for you.  “What’s that?”  He says, “all these things you’re describing you want to do at this other company…”  I said “yeah…”  He says, “why can’t you do those at Isaac?”  It was something I never even thought of before.  I thought I had to be passionate about heating and air conditioning.  My brother David is. He’s one of our service technicians, he’s an equal owner with me. He loves heating and air conditioning. Me, I love it, but it’s not the passion… that’s not what I come in to work for every single day.  It took me some time to really find my passion. In writing a vision for the company and deciding: that’s the vision I’m gonna get behind. Really, it became improving the quality of life.  That was right around 2002, 2003… when that kind of an epiphany happened. It goes back again, being comfortable in your own skin. I knew I wasn’t comfortable. I knew I didn’t want to be in the company for the reasons that everybody thought I was gonna be there for. I had to find that… and I’m lucky I did. I mean… it was it was kind of fortunate… otherwise I’d I could be working for some public company right now … and doing different things … and not having the opportunity I’ve had at the company.    Robert Mixon:   That’s a great story, Ray … a great story of discovery… and so finding your passion was in 2002 – 2003 timeframe?    Ray Isaac:  Right around there. It took us some time, that led to us really re-engineering the whole company in 2005.   We went through a whole process of really finding our core values, and setting priorities in the organization of what we wanted to focus on first, second, third, and fourth… and we ended up coming up with those. Then, really creating a vision statement for the company.  I was meeting with a good friend of mine — who we still work with 15 years later — we’re working through this process of re-engineering, he says “what’s your vision for the company?”  I sat back and I’m looking through my desk drawers … he says, “what are you doing?”  I said, “I’m looking for our vision…” and he just started… “you stop and think about what you just said.”  He said “if that’s the case you’re blind”…  I said “well … you know I have some ideas, but let me talk to our team” and he stopped me there again. He says “if this is gonna be your vision it has to be your vision… it’s gonna be something that you’re gonna talk about and drive in the company… it has to be something that you’re behind a hundred percent”…  From that, I was able to craft a vision statement for the organization that really painted the picture of what we wanted to see.    Robert Mixon:  Great. You know, I talk about “Setting the Azimuth”… and you know the Azimuth has come from my experience the military … but really, that’s the cardinal direction of your organization. What’s your true north… mission, intent, values and culture… and I think the vision that you’re talking about captures all those all those elements but it’s got to be a drumbeat and not a one-off … you know, let me look in the desk drawer and see if I can find it.    Ray Isaac:   Right, yeah. I tell you, talk about those wake-up moments in your life. Yeah… they really didn’t make any sense, did it.  We had a vision, and it was one of those typical ones of “being the premier heating and air conditioning contractor in Rochester New York and the upstate region, and blah blah blah blah blah”… nothing that anybody could get behind with any passion. It’s like, ‘yeah okay that’s nice, what else you got for me’… yeah it was a great process, but it took some soul-searching to get through.     Robert Mixon:  So, investing in people is what I understand really is your passion at this stage, is that fair?     Ray Isaac:  Yeah, I would sum it up as that.    Robert Mixon:  Is the ‘’training academy concept that you developed… which I think is really innovative … was that part of that passion for the investment in your team?    Ray Isaac:  I would love to say that was altruistic in the very beginning, and that’s what the reason we did it… really the basic reason we started our whole ‘university’ concept was: we couldn’t find qualified people.  So we figured we’d do it ourselves. From that, has grown … I mean you know the mother of invention is necessity. So we had a necessity and we’ve ended up inventing a program that we’ve been doing for 22 years.  It’s recently received some recognition and notoriety because, of a little bit of the outreach that we’re doing. Creating what we call ‘building careers for people, not just jobs’ but giving them the opportunity to develop a career, and be in a in a career that they’re happy with, and they’re passionate about.  That has transformed, and we’re really at a point now, where we’ve created our own school. It’s a separate entity. It’s in a 30,000 square foot facility just down the street from us here. It’s got a 20,000 square foot lab with every single trade. So what everybody else in the country is discontinuing, we’re starting.  They’re getting rid of the trade schools, they’re getting rid of the shop classes, they’re getting rid of these vocational education programs… and we started with just having a new facility for our heating and air conditioning, and that has now grown to be a multi-trades training and education program. That is something that we’re I think we’re very proud of.  It’s more than just Isaac now … it started with that… obviously you know some good things start with selfish intentions …but it has grown into something much more than just a program for us. Really, what we want to do is give people an opportunity to have a fulfilling career. Something that they may never even knew was out there, or that they had a skill level for. Maybe we find that ‘hedgehog’ for individuals.     Robert Mixon:  That’s terrific. I really admire that focus that you have on people investing in a career, versus a job. I never really liked the term ‘job’ anyway… I always wanted to think of it as ‘a career path’… and hopefully other people in the companies that I’m privileged to be in would want to have that ‘career path’ and not just be a ‘job,’ which was more of a temporal concept…     Ray Isaac:  Yeah.    Robert Mixon:  How do you identify potential in your team members and managers to become leaders? Because performance is usually the default mechanism… I think most leaders I’ve been exposed to use you know the “well, he performs well so let’s promote him”…  How do you identify potential?    Ray Isaac:   Well it comes down to the personality. They have to have a ‘likability factor,’ I think.  If nothing else… if you don’t like somebody … at least you go back to that first ‘dysfunction of a team’… or at least in this case… the first function of a highly operating team, is that element of trust.  You have to trust us. I’m just one of those people… if I don’t trust you, game over.  I love “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Lencioni … because it really paints that picture… if you have a trust in somebody you can have a great argument with them. Believe it.  I mean, that’s where everything good happens, is through those arguments and that struggle, a little bit of conflict.  So I have to trust them, and if I have that trust then… I like to see what their self-awareness is. How do they have a difficult conversation with somebody.  We use a testing process through the organization to bring people in, but then they have to be vetted through the organization. Pretty much all of our leaders except for a small handful have grown through the organization — they’ve really risen to the top. Not that they’re any better of a person than somebody else, but they have that skill set that allows them to have a difficult conversation.  I have three brothers that are equal owners with me in the company. I report to them at our board meetings. Each one of them walks in my office.  Man… I do not want their job — because they’re doing what they like to do!  So… there’s a lot of great jobs out there … there’s a lot of great people, a lot of great careers … but they all shouldn’t be working together… so, I like to have somebody that is in a good place that they have that self-awareness…  …that they have what I call, and what I’ve referred to as: ‘the three elements of a team player’ and I what I’d call …  I duplicated this from somebody else, most of what I talk about I’ve gotten from somebody else…  …it’s like it’s like songs nowadays — nobody ever comes up with a original song… it’s a re-do of a Supertramp song or something like that… or Elton John…  …but I like people that are humble, hungry, and smart.    Robert Mixon:  Yeah.  I see Lencioni’s model in the “ideal team player” as well, right?    Ray Isaac:   Yeah, the ideal team player.  I mean they ought to be humble. I don’t want to have egos. Here we deal with enough of those. We don’t have to have them on our team.  I want them to have a hunger level for something. As I said, it doesn’t have to be heating and air-conditioning. I tell that to our new individuals in our boot camp program that are getting trained and educated for a career in heating and air-conditioning.  I go in in the second week, and tell them, “look, if you’re not passionate about heating and air conditioning at this point… I’m perfectly okay with that — as long as you have a passion for something… and maybe this is a means to an end… where this is either part of your journey … or each and every day you love coming in and doing what you’re doing, but your passion is bass fishing… and this allows you to get out early, and hit the water early, and buy a nice boat, and spend time with your family and your buddies… I’m okay with that.”  I mean we don’t have to be the be all and end all. I tell this to people when I do a keynote speech on “it’s only heating and air-conditioning… I mean we’re not creating world peace here.”  We need to be okay with that — and again that goes back to being comfortable in your own skin. I mean I’m the president of a heating and air-conditioning business. My dad always said, ‘don’t take yourself too seriously, nobody else does.’  So… I like to have people that have that hunger… that have the intelligence level … and have that trust factor — that they trust their people, so their people then will trust them. That’s from another book that I love — ‘Trust and Betrayal in the Workplace.’ I mean trust begets trust… and trust begins with you. I like to make sure that they have that trust factor in them.    Robert Mixon:   Yeah… I think Stephen Covey calls it that “trust is the glue of life”… and I agree with that. I think it sounds like you do too.    Ray Isaac:   Absolutely.    Robert Mixon:   So, what do you think are the characteristics of a world-class culture… that ecosystem that you help to create in your organization?     Ray Isaac:   It’s kind of ironic … when I read that the question on the documents … I mean it’s ironic because we actually changed our vision statement — from what I wrote in ‘05 … to a new vision statement, “delivering a world-class experience.”  That was our new vision.  I was in an interview one day with an individual, and I am talking about the company — and I always I try to do every final interview in the organization… so that’s another way of trying to get the top, or people that you can trust in your organization… you be the person that interviews them — and I’m talking about a vision that was our original vision… and he looked me… says, “that’s your vision?”… I’m like, “well yeah.”  He says, “well, that’s not what’s written on the wall, out in the lobby” … I said “well, that that’s actually the vision we changed it to.. but I still talk about this one…”  It’s funny … that ‘from the mouth of babes’ — or new hires…  He looks at me and says, “then then why do you have it?”  It’s obvious that, you know what, you’re right. Within a week we change back.  Really my thought of a world-class culture comes from that vision of and it’s really to sum it up is — “to create an enjoyable experience met with anticipation”…   That’s the first sentence of our vision statement.  Someplace where it’s fun, it’s energetic, it’s competitive, it’s results-driven.  It’s a place where there’s no self-preservation. I mean when you join a pickup basketball game or flag football game, or something like that with your buddies … just fun and you look forward to it … and you’re not doing it for money you’re doing it because you just love it.   That’s what I want in a world-class culture.   Yeah we’re results-driven, we want to win, we’re competitive as an organization. Our mission statement is ‘lead at all levels’ … we need leaders at all levels, and we want to be a leader in whatever we do. But a world-class culture is one where the predominant thoughts and actions, discussions and emotions, in the organization revolve around people enjoying each other’s company… here for a shared cause.  Realizing that we’re not creating world peace, that we’re here for a small part of maybe making the world better… but they’re here for the right reasons. There’s no false pretense.   That has to start with me. As I said this the culture stunk because I didn’t want to be here myself. That was kind of a turning point when the leader of the organization doesn’t want to be here… how do you expect the culture to be?  I actually do a I do a keynote called “never work a day in your life”… and I present that to groups around the country.  I start that off with two qualifying questions — “first of all have any of you ever been reincarnated?” The last time I did it was down in Fort Worth Texas… there’s about 350 people in the room … I’m doing the closing keynote. I asked that question. Nobody raises their hand.  I said “All right. Let me ask you another question. Who in here is a leader in your organization?” Pretty much everybody raised their hand.  I said “All right… close your eyes… and I want you to answer this question by raising your hand. How many of you in here absolutely, positively, love going to work every single day no matter what day it is… two o’clock in the morning on a Thursday, or two o’clock in the afternoon on a Sunday… how many of you love going to work every single day?”  My hand was one of the ten hands that went up.   “Okay open your eyes and look around you.”  Heard a hush coming over the room… I said, “You know what, that’s pathetic.” I said, “how many of you in here want this for your employees?”… and I show a slide of employees jumping up and down, high-fiving, just having a blast… and every single person raised their hand.  I said, “well if any one of you is raising your hand now that wasn’t raising it before… there’s another word for it… it’s called ‘hypocrite’…”  You have to demonstrate and practice what you preach in your organization and if you don’t love going in every day … believe me your employees are pretty smart, they’ll see right through that. They’re pretty intelligent people and you can’t pull the wool over their eyes.   They know if you want to be there or not.    Robert Mixon:  That’s great.  As far as advice for young leaders … what would be the one big idea you would impart to young leaders, regardless of their profession, if they’re going to achieve their potential… what would that be?    Ray Isaac:   There’s a lot of great tactics and things like that … but I’d go right back to the answer to the first one — create a better sense of self-awareness. Understand who they are. That may be through counseling.  It may be through testing. We do a lot of analyses in our organization. We do what’s called a predictive index which gives us a profile of the individual. We also do a profile of all of our individuals who go through leadership training and education in the organization.  We do a temperament study, which is a survey and we use that mix of those three together … that recipe… to really help them understand themselves better.  We actually have in our office here, right on the door of all of our people in the company, that have offices here… they have their predictive index profile right on the door. Mine’s a ‘controller.’ I like to drive. I like options. I like to know the facts, and then I’m gonna make the decision.  So when people go up to somebody’s door they can look right at their PI and say, ‘okay I know how to work with this person.’  … I think I might have taken a Myers-Briggs but I think that was after I graduated from college…. learning the rest of it from my dad…  … I really don’t think they do a good service to people coming out of school, whatever school it is… They ought to do this in high school, just to create that self-awareness based on some sort of scientific analytics to know, ‘hey this is what I like to do, and this is how I like to do it.’     Robert Mixon:   … and what kind of person, what kind of inclinations, do I have.  I agree, that would be very useful.  I think these types of personality surveys that you’re talking about — when they’re employed with a number of other factors that you’ve talked about, then they give you a more comprehensive view of — ‘who am I, what do I represent… and who is she, and what does she represent… and how do we communicate?’     Ray Isaac:   Yeah… before you can deal with somebody else, you’ve got to know how to deal with yourself.  What are the conversations you have yourself… what are you telling yourself. The psychoanalysis part is something that.. I really don’t think it gets enough service. I don’t think they do a good job in any of the college programs in that I see… they get into some of it in the MBA-type programs on leadership, but you shouldn’t have to go to a course on leadership to understand who yourself you are.    Robert Mixon:  Fair enough! I agree.  Is there any other big idea you want to pass on to the audience?     Ray Isaac:  Ah! I probably could talk for hours.  I like your question because it really does hone down to that that core of really leadership. As we’re talking and going through a crisis right now … and how we’re dealing with that. As I said… you’re making now day-to-day decisions, you’re making hourly decisions… and one thing that you know I think a lot of leaders maybe don’t appreciate when they’re starting out is that no decision exists in a vacuum. It really doesn’t.  I find that when I’m watching the news reports… that you have the health professionals say, ‘hey everybody just stay home’… okay… I have employees saying ‘I want to come to work because I have to pay my mortgage, and I have to pay my bills, and I have to stay active’… you have the people on the financial side saying ‘get out and spend money’… I love ‘Good to Great’… I refer to it a lot… I love in there the exercise on “the beauty of the ‘and’ and the tyranny of the ‘or’ in leadership”…   I don’t think the ‘or’ is the easiest decision you can make.  I told my employees the other day — I do a nightly communication to all of them in a little email, just to know what’s going on — and I say, “you know the easiest thing we could do is just shut the company down…”  That’s the ‘or’ — we can either operate a business, or shut it down — and we’ll focus on one or the other.  I said, “the real work comes in when you focus on an ‘and’…”  …when you’re focusing on the ‘and’ of a decision… have this – and – have that… and we do this every single day when we run 24-hour service.  We have people that don’t necessarily want to get up at 2 o’clock in the morning to run a service call when it’s a blizzard out. The easy thing… the ‘or’ would be ‘we don’t run 24-hour service’… the ‘and’ is ‘we can run 24-hour service, but also structure a program around having people that want to do that…’  So, no decision that you make is gonna exist in a vacuum. There’s always 26 other factors that might come into play, and people that you affect in that process. As you grow throughout an organization, then you’re in charge of more and more people.  If you think about it… if you’re in charge of 20 people… take that times 4.3… because the average size of a family in the United States is 4.3 people.   That’s one thing my dad drilled into my head … he said, “you’re not just affecting yourself, the owners, or the employees, you’re affecting that times 4.3…”  So, it’s kind of like ‘the 4.3 rule’ … whatever you do you’re affecting 4.3 times that many people.    Robert Mixon:  Great insights, Ray.  I really appreciate the opportunity to learn from you today, and I know everybody in the Level Five audience is going to value the discussion that we’ve had, and the insights you passed on.  So, thanks again for spending some time sharing your knowledge and insights, and I certainly wish you well — not only the current crisis but in your journey ahead, and the people that you’re leading so well.  Thanks, Ray.    Ray Isaac:  Well, thank you, Robert, I appreciate it.     Robert Mixon:  We very much enjoyed the journey with Ray Isaac today, and look forward to more of our podcast series on “The Journey With No Summit,” as we will explore the expertise of other executives… as well as some lessons that we’ve learned, and I’ve learned in my journey, to help you in yours.   Don’t forget! Subscribe to our podcast to get our latest episodes right away, as well as have access to our past episodes. Did you find this podcast beneficial? If so, please consider sharing it with your audience. It’ll just take a second, but could improve someone’s work habits for a long time to come. The post Podcast Episode 8: An Interview with Ray Isaac of Isaac Heating and Air Conditioning appeared first on Level Five Associates.

In the latest episode of our podcast, we interview Lauren Dixon of Dixon Schwabl Advertising. The theme of our conversation is one of our Big Six Leadership Principles® — “When In Charge, Take Charge.” Along with that concept, we discuss making team members feel valued, personal accountability, when managers can become leaders, the importance of values, and more! You can listen below:   Podcast Episode 7: Taking Charge – An Interview With Lauren Dixon of Dixon Schwabl Advertising  Robert Mixon:   Okay, well, welcome everyone to the Level Five podcast series … the leadership “Journey With No Summit.”  Today, we’re very privileged and fortunate to have our guest, Lauren Dixon, the CEO of Dixon Schwabl, one of the leading public affairs and promotional companies for messaging for organizations and companies here in Western New York.  And I’ve been fortunate to be following her thought leadership on the topic here in the local area and asked her if she would be willing to have an interview session today.  And Lauren, welcome. Glad to have you.    Lauren Dixon:   Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.    Robert Mixon:   We wanted to start today’s conversation in the theme of the fifth principle, “when in charge, take charge.”  But really, we want to talk about your journey. And I’d like to ask you, what’s the most important aspect of being ‘in charge’ that you have observed throughout your journey of 30 years?    Lauren Dixon:   Well, I wish I could say there is one thing, but I think it’s kind of the whole package. It starts with being a great listener. I think that is one of the most important aspects, but also respecting all perspectives and opinions within your organization. Making certain that all of my team members feel valued and appreciated.  If someone has a big idea and a great idea, they’ll march themselves into my office and my promise back to them is: I’ll either make a decision on the spot, or I’ll make a decision within 48 hours. I think that’s incredibly important because it encourages people to bring in new thinking.  And as a leader, one has to be open, and not always think that they have all the big ideas.  When I was a ‘baby’ manager, I used to think that I had to have all the big ideas because I had the title and I had the salary and that was my responsibility. Since 25 years ago, or 30 years ago, I learned that that’s not what it takes to be a good leader at all.  It needs to be encouraging other big ideas to come to the table, and then making decisions and letting those with big ideas take the baton and go with them.  Because at the end of the day, I want my team members to love their jobs, and feel like their ideas matter and count. And the biggest litmus test for me, is when they go home at night to make certain that they feel like they’ve made huge contributions.    Robert Mixon:  That’s a great point. You know, the idea of being in charge, but allowing them, enabling them to bring in their ideas and see them come to life. That’s part of being in charge.    Lauren Dixon:   Absolutely. When I drive to work in the morning, I think, how the heck am I going to make Dixon Schwabl irresistibly attractive to all of my team members? And I think long and hard about it.  And then at the end of the day, I say to myself, and I score myself — on a scale of 1 to 10, was I a 9 … or was I a 2? And why was I a 2, when I really wanted to be a 9 or a 10? It holds me accountable each and every day.  And I think that really matters.    Robert Mixon:  You know, that personal accountability. So you do a daily audit of yourself as a leader.    Lauren Dixon:   Absolutely.    Robert Mixon:   That’s a great tool. Great tool. I think most folks in the audience here, we could all benefit from doing that daily audit versus just moving on and figuring, okay, well, “tomorrow will happen.”     Lauren Dixon:  “Will be a better day,” right? [Laughs]     Robert Mixon:  “It’ll be a better day. It’ll get better.” In your journey, what was your biggest mistake as a leader — when you should have taken charge, or you observe someone else who should have taken charge, and didn’t do so?  What did you learn from that?    Lauren Dixon:   Well, that’s a good question. There was a situation that my husband, Mike, who is the president of the organization, he had a gut instinct about an employee who, at the end of the day, after 10 years, was stealing from our company. And he would say to me, “Lauren, something just doesn’t feel right.”   His instinct was such that… he just knew.  And it was me who did not act upon it, did not dig down deep, did not do the necessary due diligence. And I should have.  And I learned a very important lesson that when someone does have a gut instinct to follow through, what’s the worst that can happen? You know, you prove that person wrong. But what’s the best thing that could have happened that his instinct was indeed correct?  But I, you know, I think I learned something every single day, Robert, which is, I think, the fun of leading, too. But that probably was the most significant thing for me as a leader to learn, but also for our company, because it had an incredible impact on our company financially.    Robert Mixon:   So it was a painful lesson.    Lauren Dixon:   It was a very painful lesson. And the proof was right in our own computer system. And if we had done a simple audit, we would have found it.    Robert Mixon:   Yeah. What did George Carlin say, the concept of “vuja de”..?     Lauren Dixon:  Yeah… [Laughs]     Robert Mixon:   You know, where some of the most obvious things are right in front of us, and we don’t see them? I know he made a whole comedy routine out of that.    Lauren Dixon:  … But that’s where, you know, trust, you know, we’re a trusting organization. And there’s a fine line between trust and really digging down deep and understanding what is really, really going on. And our whole organization is built on trust, trusting every single team member.  And for me, not to trust a managing partner violated everything that I believe in.    Robert Mixon:   Right.    Lauren Dixon:  So this particular situation was really tough. And I don’t know if I’ve ever been so betrayed in my life. I’ve never felt that feeling.  And it truly was a devastating time for us personally.    Robert Mixon:   Well, thanks for sharing that story, because I think a lot of us have been through painful experiences. But the hard part is to share it … and, you know, come out and say, OK, this is what happened. You know, this is what I learned.  You recently wrote an article in the Rochester Business Journal. And of course, you’re a regular contributor there. And I’m a fan.  But anyway, you talked about turning managers into leaders. And I’d like to ask you, Lauren, how do you identify which managers can be leaders? Because as we know, some will never be successful in making that transition.    Lauren Mixon:   No. And they don’t all have to be leaders either.  Understanding one’s gift as a manager is wonderful.  And sometimes it starts and stops there. And then other times, when you identify the things for us anyway, we have five, we have six core values, excuse me, they are:  … respect, integrity, teamwork, community, fun and innovation.  And so and so for us, all of our leaders have to have all of those things and then have the ability to demonstrate and show up every single day as a servant leader.  So, my favorite expression that my chief creative officer uses all of the time, he says, “my number one job is to remove all of the obstacles for my team members, so they can do their best work,” which is perfect, right?  And that’s what it’s all about. And I’m really thinking about people, not only our team, but our team’s families, because that’s part of who they are, too.  If a family is struggling, how do we as leaders jump in and help? How do we do that? And we have to think about that every single day, because if we don’t, it’s going to affect every single team member.  And if there are struggles there, it will affect the work. So it’s a holistic kind of leadership philosophy, if you will.  One of my favorite examples, excuse me, is my CFO called me late one Friday afternoon and said, “oh, my goodness, Lauren, I messed up.”  I love it when people do that.  I love it when that’s how they start out their conversation, because I jump into problem-solving mode.  I’m like, “not a problem. Tell me what’s going on.”   And he said, “I called the merry maids to try to get them in tomorrow, Saturday, to do all of the cleaning at the agency, because our maintenance director, his birthday is tomorrow.”  Well, we give everybody’s birthdays off.  And so here we have a maintenance guy who has a birthday, and now we have no one to clean the office. And David said, “can’t get anybody… I’m coming in at seven.”  I said, “okay, Mike and I will come in at seven, too. We’ll kind of divide and conquer, and it will be great.”   So we divided up all of the responsibilities. My responsibility was tackling the bathrooms.  And so, you know, I have my little plastic gloves, and I’m cleaning the toilets.  And you know when you know someone’s looking at you, you know, you have that feeling?  And I turned around, and sure enough, it was one of our brand new employees with his little girl. And he was a vice president of our research department.  And he looked at me like, oh, my goodness, don’t they have enough money for janitorial services? What is the CEO doing cleaning toilets?  And so I jumped up, and I said, “well, it’s our maintenance director’s birthday, and we all came in and dove in, and we’re going to be out of here in two hours.”   Well, the reason he came in, he wanted to allow his four-year-old daughter to take the slide. We have a slide in our lobby. And so that’s a big deal, right?  And so he stumbled upon his new CEO cleaning toilets...! But I think the reason I’m sharing that is because we just dig in. We don’t think about our titles.  We first and foremost think about the team. And so, no, we couldn’t get somebody to come in and clean the building, but that’s not a problem. Everybody just dives in and does the work.    Robert Mixon:   So you’re looking for managers to become leaders who are willing to ‘get their fingernails dirty,’ so to speak, right?    Lauren Dixon:   Absolutely, absolutely. No job is beneath any one of us. We feel strongly about that.    Robert Mixon:   That’s a great lesson, you know, because, again, you know, leadership is an art.    Lauren Dixon:  Absolutely.    Robert Mixon:   And some people may be effective managers, but they don’t have that ‘special sauce’, if you will.    Lauren Dixon:   Absolutely.    Robert Mixon:   To lead.    Lauren Dixon:   Yeah.    Robert Mixon:   Okay. Well, thanks a lot.  … In your view, what are the characteristics of a world-class culture?   You know, I’m sort of passionate about this culture deal. I know you are too.    Lauren Dixon:   Yes, I am. You know, I think my dad probably believed in this as much as you and I do. And he said when I was starting the company,…  “All you have to do is two things, Lauren. Motivate and inspire people to want to come to work every single day. And then number two, hire people smarter than you.”  That was the easy part, Robert. [Laughs]     Robert Mixon:   Me too.  Yeah, that’s the part I can figure out real quick.    Lauren Dixon:   But I do think that a world-class culture begins with a leadership, with every decision that you make… whether you’re hiring people, to make certain that they share your core values, and also the companies you choose to do business with, right?  Clients, do they share your core values as well? And what about the vendors you select?  It could be a really easy day if all of those people have the same core values, or it could be miserable if you’re butting heads all the time. So, it’s so much easier to do business and operate in, that kind of situation when everybody shares core values. So I think that’s job number one.    Robert Mixon:   And every day your culture is alive.    Lauren Dizon:   Yeah, and you know, we’ve been identified as an organization that is ‘a great place to work’ by the Great Place to Work Institute in San Francisco, California. And you know, some folks believe that once you’ve got a great culture, it’s always a great culture, and that’s not the case.  You have to constantly re-energize it, reinvigorate it.  It’s a work in progress, and it’s work.  If it was that easy, everybody would be a great place to work, right? But it’s not.  But it starts by interviewing and identifying team members who have core values like yours. Because if you don’t, it’ll show up three weeks, three months, a year down the road. It will.  We’ve been there before.    Robert Mixon:   Yeah, there’s nothing like a bad hire for making an imprint on you in terms of, well, “I was in a hurry. I needed someone. You know, I didn’t do the diligence or check references two levels down,” that kind of thing.  So great advice, Laura.  Who’s your hero or heroine and why?    Lauren Dixon:   Oh boy, I have a lot of them. But I just mentioned my dad, and by a huge measure, he has been hands down the guy who has been there… with all of the smart, street smart advice.   He didn’t go to college.  He owned a trucking business for 40 plus years. And he just was a guy who had so much common sense. And, you know, he drove trucks every day.  He came home… We did not have dinner at 5:01 or 5:02 or 4:49. We had dinner at 5 p.m. every single night… what I love so much about his style was he was punctual. You could count on him. He had dinner with his family every single night.  But he was the dad who you could count on to do the kickball games, to take us to the lake every day after dinner in the back of his truck. And I remember him pulling out the card table every single night doing his bills. And I was his kind of wing person.  And I licked the envelopes and put the stamps on. And we did this day in and day out. And I learned discipline from him.  And I will never… he’s no longer with us… I could never repay him for the lessons that I learned from that guy.  But there are others too.  I drive by the Ontario County Courthouse every single morning. And I don’t know if there’s a day that goes by that I don’t think about Susan B., you know, and her tenacity and ability to drive things and make things happen. Her birthday is next year.  She’ll be 200. It’ll also be the year where women got to vote 100th anniversary of that. It’s kind of cool.  So that doesn’t get lost on me either. So I have a whole slew of folks I love and admire and have learned so many great lessons from.    Robert Mixon:   And so tenacity, in her case, you think was one of her great skills?    Lauren Dixon:   There was no more, no more of a tenacious woman than that woman — for sure.  Yeah, I really admire and respect all of what she did and how she did it. You know, she was kind of a tough cookie, no doubt about it.    Robert Mixon:   But I think this mental, physical, emotional toughness that really describes a leader like Susan B Anthony … is more a sense of presence from my amateur perspective here. Lauren, you agree with that?    Lauren Dixon:   I do agree with that 110%. All of the things that you read about her, her determination and her toughness and her ‘take no prisoners’ kind of attitude, I love.  But then there’s something that I loved about what my father represented, which was his positivity.  It’s so funny because, you know, when it would rain in the morning, I’d be, “oh, darn, it’s raining.” My father would be so excited.  And he’d say, “Lauren, we need the rain. How are the crops going to grow if it doesn’t rain?”  So he saw every bit of positivity in what could have been a negative situation. And I loved that about that man.  He could talk to anybody. And my mom used to say all the time, oh, my goodness, I’m going to have to send your father to Wegmans. It’s going to be another two and a half hours before we get X, Y, Z.  Because he was a guy who would talk to anyone and everyone, and just brighten everybody’s day. So leaders need to have that attribute as well, I think.    Robert Mixon:   Yes, I’m with you. I think positivity is a great strength. And you can combine tenacity, presence, positivity…   I think you’ve got a lot of key ingredients that people want to respect and admire.    Robert Mixon:  And follow, right?    Lauren Dixon:  And follow. Absolutely.    Robert Mixon: That’s wonderful.  Thanks.  So, Lauren, what advice would you give aspiring leaders to learn how to ‘take charge,’ in this positive, empowering way? How do you get there?    Lauren Dixon:   Yeah. Never believing that you have to have the big idea. Always engage others and understand what they think.  And press the pause button and don’t be afraid to take somebody else’s big idea for fear that it’s not yours, you know? And I think I alluded to it earlier. As a ‘baby’ manager, that’s what I did.  That’s what I did. And I think it was one of the mistakes that I made early on. But if you can take a step back, great things will happen.  Bigger ideas will transpire and your team members will feel better at the end of the day and feel like they accomplished a whole lot more.    Robert Mixon:   But do you think young leaders sometimes struggle with wanting to be the one who has the big idea?    Lauren Dixon:   Absolutely. They do. And they like the gratification that — they own that.  But, it’s a manager going into a leader that has the courage and the ability to say, doesn’t have to be about me. Has to be about everybody else.  Because that’s when you’re going to get the best from all of your team members.  So it doesn’t have to be about them. That’s hard to do as a ‘baby’ manager.    Robert Mixon:   Yeah, I agree. I think the tendency as a young manager is to want to control and want to have the idea and be the one that has a solution. You go in, as you were talking earlier, the problem solving mode.  As a young leader, I think if I didn’t have a problem to solve, I’d make one up. Go find something, a problem to solve. Yeah.    Lauren Dixon:   But I also think that as a young leader, it’s incumbent upon them not to feel that they have to have all of the answers. Yeah, they immediately gravitate to reading leadership books. That’s a good thing.  That’s a wonderful thing.  But… I guess I would encourage people to reach out into the community and meet and understand what other leaders believe, kind of like this conversation. What was your journey?  What did you learn?  And my favorite question is, what are the three best things you’ve ever done as a leader? And what were the three biggest faux pas?  And from that, the three faux pas are the things that I think I learned the most from every single day, because I don’t want to replicate that.    Robert Mixon:   Yes, absolutely. The biggest things you’ve messed up, right? Okay.  Well, and if I asked you for one big idea, Lauren, you know, for this particular podcast opportunity we have to talk together, what would that big idea be, that our leaders can take away?    Lauren Dixon:   I think if they thought about the accountability piece each and every day.  You know, I shared that I go through this exercise every day of driving to work and saying to myself, “how am I going to make Dixon Schwabl irresistibly attractive to all of my team members?”  And then come up with real tangible things that I’m going to try to affect that day.  And then on my way home, score myself. And I think that has been really important for me to keep me on track. And more importantly, keep me accountable for doing something every single day, doing something, to try to advance the company and our people.    Robert Mixon:   Okay. So that would be personal accountability.    Lauren Dixon:   Yes, absolutely.    Robert Mixon:   Well, that certainly is a great takeaway, Lauren. I’ll tell you. So what else would you like to share with our readers, our audience while we have a few minutes?    Lauren Dixon:  Oh my goodness. I think leadership is probably the most exciting and challenging and rewarding thing a person can do.  You always learn every single day.  And I think the biggest mistake a leader could make is thinking that they know it all, or can’t learn something each and every day.  And podcasts like this are amazing, and so fun and so exciting. And who knew 25 years ago that this opportunity would be available.  And the information available about this topic or a myriad of others is just a click away. And so shame on any manager and or leader who is not listening to a podcast or two or three every single day.    Robert Mixon:  Wonderful. Yeah. The Level Five podcast… I highly recommend, right? [Laughs]    Lauren Dixon:  Yes, absolutely! [Laughs]    Robert Mixon:   Well, thanks so much, Lauren. It really was wonderful to have the opportunity to talk with you for a few minutes today and learn from you about your leadership journey. I think you’re an inspiration to a lot of young leaders in this community. I certainly hear your name mentioned in many circles as someone that they admire and respect.  And as you know, and made it clear today, you know, you’ve got to earn it and you’ve got to bring it every day. You can’t ever take it for granted.  And our young leaders out there, you know, the message would be, don’t ever take it for granted. Go out there every day and bring it.  Well, I look forward to another opportunity in our podcast series on the leadership “Journey With No Summit.”  But thanks again, Lauren, for being part of our experience and really enjoyed it.    Lauren Dixon:   Thank you. My pleasure.    Robert Mixon:   All right. Take care.    Don’t forget! Subscribe to our podcast to get our latest episodes right away, as well as have access to our past episodes. Did you find this podcast beneficial? If so, please consider sharing it with your audience. It’ll just take a second, but could improve someone’s work habits for a long time to come.   The post Podcast Episode 7: Taking Charge – An Interview With Lauren Dixon of Dixon Schwabl Advertising appeared first on Level Five Associates.

In this episode, Robert Mixon interviews Bill Higgs of Mustang Engineering. Bill shares his experiences in growing a business, and the “growing pains” that can come with that. Robert and Bill discuss how having a strong organizational culture, where “doing the right thing” is the norm, can get you through those tough times. Bill’s stories are both entertaining and very insightful — have a listen!   Podcast Episode 6: A Culture of “Right” — An Interview with Bill Higgs of Mustang Engineering   Robert Mixon:  Welcome everyone to our Level 5 podcast series, “The Journey with No Summit,” and today we are privileged to have as our guest Mr. Bill Higgs, the founder of a company, Mustang Engineering, that went from zero to one billion dollars in revenue based on a market-differentiated culture. Bill’s also a classmate from West Point, class of 1974. He is a Forbes author, picked as a Forbes authority on culture going into 2020, but he didn’t get here in a linear progression.  He faced some challenges, both physically, emotionally, economically, in rising to the level of excellence that he’s achieved in his career, and I’ve been privileged to know Bill now for over four decades, and Bill, I just want to thank you for being here today and joining us with our Level 5 listeners on the “Journey With No Summit.”    Bill Higgs:   Thanks a lot, Robert. I really look forward to talking with you today because we’re talking about my favorite subject, culture.    Robert Mixon:   Yeah, culture, yeah, cool, cool, as a ‘culture code champion.’ So today, Bill, I’d like to focus on a couple of key questions and start out first by asking you, you know, what’s the most important aspect of doing the right thing that you have observed throughout your leadership journey and your cultural journey associated with it?    Bill Higgs:   That’s an interesting question. When we started Mustang Engineering, we were in the middle of a huge downturn in Houston, Texas. We’d had a boom time in the late 70s.  In ‘82, the oil price went from $35 down to $5, and oil companies started laying everybody off, and that just trickled down the food chain, and it got to the point where if you finished a job, you were laid off.  So you can imagine there’s now no loyalty between people and companies, between engineering companies and oil companies, or between suppliers. Everything was pretty well destroyed.  So when we started Mustang, our goal was to be 35 people, the best 35-person engineering firm in Houston, and we lost control of it somewhere in there when it took off to 6,500. But getting people to ‘do the right thing when nobody’s looking’ was a big challenge when you’re in an environment where if you finished a job, you were laid off, because people were having a tendency to milk projects and keep them going, instead of doing the right thing. So it was a big challenge for us.  And I think one of the key things that we did on that, Robert, was to win the hearts and the minds of our people to where they wanted to take the chance, they wanted to get it right.  And I give an example. Okay, so I was in engineering of offshore oil platforms.  And when we were 50 people, so we exceeded our goal of 35, we were 50 people, we won the largest deck design in the world. So it’s going to be a huge offshore deck fabrication. And we were designing on PCs for the first time.  PCs had gotten powerful enough to do complicated structural design. Well, the design came out and the engineers believed it was a good design and our drafters drafted it and it went to the fab yard and the fab yard was building it.  And at the engineering part of that fab yard, they did a test lift for offshore, you lift it up with a big crane to install it.  And when they did the test lift, all of the girders cratered, on the computer. And it turned out, since this was the newest, biggest deck in the world, that the engineers, the drafters, the construction people, all thought that the girders didn’t look right.  But they figured, well, it’s a, it’s the biggest thing ever, maybe you just design it differently.  And so nobody spoke up and said, “hey, this doesn’t look right, we need to double check this or figure it out.”  Think of the egg on our face at a 50 person company, where now this deck that’s in construction, isn’t going to work. So we had to quickly come up with a fix for it, which we did, but it showed me that you need to get people to where if they look and they see something doesn’t seem right, they need to feel confident enough to challenge like the powers that be.  So that’s one aspect.  The other aspect I think of getting people to do what’s right when nobody’s looking is that you got to have what I call a sense of bonding, and a sense of team… to where they’re going to excel, not as individuals, but excel as a team, and that they’ve built that trust within it.  I use projects as examples, because we lived them and died by them.  Well, we were doing our first ever project for Exxon. And it was going to be the largest floating production facility in the world.  It’s going to be at 7,000 foot of water, like a floating city out there. And we had to design this thing in downtown Houston, so we can only put a cadre of people down there and we had to hire the rest.  And we got to the point where we were going to have to issue our first set of drawings to go into construction.  They’re going to be issued on a Friday. So I’m down there two weeks prior, one week prior, talking to everybody. “Yeah, those drawings are coming out.”  On that Friday, no drawings came out.    Robert Mixon:  Oh, boy.    Bill Higgs:   It was horrible. On Monday, the head of Exxon called my partner and I into a meeting with his project manager.   They had taken a risk to go with a Mustang instead of like a large name, like a Bechtel or a Brown and Root.  And so the head of Exxon essentially stiff-armed us a little bit and said, they got to fix this.  And then he walked out of the room. And so we knew that we were in big trouble.  The project manager then said, “hey, how do we solve this?”  You know, what’s your process for issuing drawings? We went through the process with him.  He says, well, “can you skip some of the steps in your process? We’re willing to accept drawings that aren’t 100% correct in order to get construction going.”  Which to us, that’s the kiss of death if you do that.  My partner and I did is we went back to 20 other projects that we had. And we went in and pulled one or two top people out of every project. And we just overloaded that Exxon project in three weeks, yanked it out and got it on course.  But the problem that I saw is, that we had a bunch of people who hadn’t been in our culture and we’re just sort of going along. And they didn’t understand that sense of team, that bonding and that, hey, we trust each other to do what they’re going to, what they say they’re going to do.  And so I think that’s another aspect of having those people get it right, is that they’ve got to feel that they win as a team.    Robert Mixon:   Okay. That’s great, Bill. Great story.  Powerful. You know, I think you’re talking about creating and nurturing a culture of doing right is the way people act, even when no one’s looking.  How do your seven ‘Culture Code’ steps enable that culture to come to life?    Bill Higgs:   I think a big part of it is what I call “opening up the communication.”  So one of the things we tried to do was bust silos.  So in a normal offshore engineering firm, all of the structural design people are in one hallway, and all of the equipment people are in another hallway.  The purchasing people are on a different floor.  And I like to say, the electrical engineers… are out in the parking lot because nobody can talk to electrical engineers!  But essentially, you have silos — where the structural people are trying to deliver that structural design and the equipment people are trying to deliver that.  But there wasn’t a good cross fertilization.   So structural would optimize their design. And to save steel, it would have a lot of diagonals in it.  Well, the diagonals made it to where you couldn’t put the equipment in. So when they would give the design to the equipment engineers, they would come back and say, “hey, redesign these parts.” So it created a lot of ‘rework.’   The equipment engineers would send things out for bid that didn’t exist in the world. And the purchasing people would come back and say, “hey, you need to rework this.” What I found was happening with that silo type engineering organization, which we came from, is it between concept to startup, we would design that production facility seven times.  So one of the first things we did when we started is we busted those silos. We put everything, everybody together that was on a project. So the structural, the equipment, the purchasing, the construction people all in one place to get that communication.  And what I felt was if I could lower it from redoing things seven times to two and a half, I would be ‘the better mousetrap’ in the industry. And that’s what happened by busting those silos and open up that communication.  But one of the key ways to do that is we did a lot of outside parties and activities and charity things.  And that’s what I call “free space.” So that’s where people could just bounce off of other people. They could meet the HR people or meet a manager they didn’t know.  And we get that cross fertilization, that cross connection. But that’s where you start building that team and that bonding, I think.    Robert Mixon:   Okay. You also talked about establishing a repeatable process, right?    Bill Higgs:  Yeah.    Robert Mixon:   In the organization, which gives people a foundation to work from, right?    Bill Higgs:   The key thing there is, we started every project off and everything people do in business or organization, it’s a project, it has a beginning, a middle and an evaluation. So everything you do is a project.  We had a kickoff meeting for every project religiously.  And what we would do before the kickoff meeting, we would try to figure out what “go-bys” do we have to use. And a “go-by” is prior work. Here’s prior work we have that’s applicable to this new project or whatever initiative that we’re working on.  So what I wanted to do in a kickoff meeting, I wanted to be at the 30% point in the kickoff meeting. And if you think about that, you can’t do that. You can’t do that.  But we did it all the time. And the clients, it didn’t bother them. They might be an ARCO client, and I’m pulling a Texaco thing and a Conoco thing and a Oxy thing to get that kickoff meeting going.  They didn’t care as long as I was going to be able to produce that final product.  And so that was creating a repeatable process. But then what we had to do, and I use the term, I don’t know if you have a term for it, I call it “boxing in the artsy part of a company.”  So our artsy part was our engineers. So they didn’t want to use a “go-by.” They want to start with a blank sheet of paper and do the latest, greatest thing they could conceive of.  We had to “box them in” and say…  “no, you’re not going to touch this stuff. You’re just going to reuse it. Here’s the thing that’s new here. You can do your talented thing on this part right here.”  But the rest of it’s blocking and tackling. So it’s very repeatable.  And what we were able to do was start doing our engineering for 30 percent less than our competitors.  But if you think about the artsy part in companies and people just have to think about if you’re a lawyer, are you starting with a “go-by”? There’s an artsy part in every company.  We not only reduced our cost, but our total installed cost of a facility. So say it’s a two billion dollar facility. Our total installed costs and schedule, were both 30 percent less than industry benchmarks.  So then that repeatable process is bringing in what we call repeat work. That client gets locked in and just keeps coming back.    Robert Mixon:  Mm hmm. That makes a lot of sense. Why do you think, Bill, that that leaders fail to establish the ecosystem of right behavior, of doing the right thing?    Bill Higgs:  Well, I think part of it is that they get thick skinned.  So we saw 50 other engineering firms start in the boom times, and we saw them go out of business in the bad times. And they would all start, all of the companies would start where the people really wanted to take care of their employees and build a good organization.  But then across a year to a year and a half, they’d get thick skinned because somebody they’d invested in left to go somewhere else. And they just start to think that, “man, I just can’t invest myself too much in these people because I’m going to get let down.” And I think what they needed to do instead is, no, invest more in those people, do it authentically and don’t get thick skinned.  Stay open. Know that some people aren’t going to stay. It’s just the way it’s going to be.  But you’re going to end up having those ‘rock’ individuals that will stay long term. So I think it’s a little bit of the leadership just getting tired, getting beat up.    Robert Mixon:   Yeah. And that persistence we talked about in moving the needle in your culture, you know, it’s understandable sometimes to see why people lose their momentum, because they feel like they’re getting beat up or they’ve had people that they’ve invested in who haven’t performed to the level they expected them to or behave the way they expected them to. Right?    Bill Higgs:  Correct.    Robert Mixon:   So who’s your hero, Bill, and why?    Bill Higgs:   I think my hero is Paul Redmond, who was my partner when I started, Paul Redmond and Felix Covington. But I really like Paul Redmond because he really exhibited Judeo-Christian values as his ‘Azimuth’ in how he treated people as a servant leader. And when he started, the three of us, he only wanted to be 35 people.  He wanted to know each person individually, want to know their families, know their kids. And so I just tried to never have more than 35 people in the same room with him so he wouldn’t notice as we grew to 6,500 people.    Robert Mixon:  [Laughs]    Bill Higgs:   But, with that ‘Azimuth’, he had a great capacity to be able to grow and move with the organization.  And I would always go out.  I was like the hunter killer. I’m out there chasing.  And I used to say that Paul Redmond and his leadership team were in the cabin.  I’d go out and poke the bear in the eye. I’d get it chasing me.  I’d run in the front door of the cabin, run out the back door and slam it and hope that they could skin that bear that was following me. But he always figured out a way to do it. So he’s definitely my hero, which is pretty cool considering that we first met in 1980.  I was at an engineering firm as a equipment engineer. He was a ‘water walker’ structural engineer coming back from an overseas assignment. And we ended up in the same conference room sharing an office in a startup company.  And so it turned out we were both really good and ended up starting a company seven years later.    Robert Mixon:  Yeah, I’ll tell you, “Mustang, The Story,” your book… really is a powerful account of your journey and being with people that you admired and respected. He certainly was high on the scale. It was obvious from reading your book.  What advice, Bill, would you give aspiring leaders to avoid the pitfalls of choosing the easier wrong?  As we remember from the cadet prayer at West Point, remember, “help me to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.”  So what would you give aspiring leaders some advice there?    Bill Higgs:   I think one of the key things is one of your six leadership principles, and that’s to know your ‘Azimuth,’ which is to know your values and where you want to go.  And I give an example. We had worked for in a lot of cases to work internationally.  We would work as a sub to a construction company that was willing to take the risk of doing an international job. So we were bidding a large project, and we had worked with a French company before, and we worked with a Korean company before. Both of them came to us and asked us to bid with them because they knew that we knew the oil company real well.  So we would give them a leg up to win.  Well, partway into the bid process, the Korean firm came to us and said, “hey, Mustang, we would like to pay for all of your bid costs if you’ll go sole source with us.” And we go, “hey, they’re going to pay my bid cost. I’ll go sole source.”  And there was a good chance that the Korean firm was going to win it because they’re very competitive in construction.  So we sent a letter to two other bidders, one of them the French firm, saying, “hey, we’re going sole source, pull our name out of your bid effort.”  Unbeknownst to us, the French firm and the Korean firm both put in their bids, both put them in with Mustang as their engineer.  And it wasn’t until bid evaluation had gone down quite a ways to boil down from eight bidders down to two… it got down to those two bidders. And at that point, the French company came clean with us and said, “oh, by the way, we put you in as our engineering firm despite that letter that you had sent to us.”   Well, the Korean firm, now that it’s down to two bidders, found out that they had Mustang as their bidder. So the Korean firm calls us up, all upset.  Our ‘Azimuth’ is to do what we’re going to, what we say we’re going to do.  And in the international bidding process, it’s a very tough thing to do. There’s lots of weird things that happen there. But we said, “no, we have to stay true to our beliefs and what we said we’re going to do.”   So we sent a letter to the French company, a letter to the client and a letter to the Korean outfit saying, “our bid is only good with the Korean outfit.” Well, it went down, it got awarded to the French outfit.  And I’m on a bus to some international airport and I get a call from the project manager at the French outfit.  And they said, “hey, we just won the project.”  It was a huge amount of money for us. It would have moved the needle in our company and we needed the work.  And he says, “I want to offer it to you. We can totally give it to you now. The Korean firm is out of it. So you no longer have a commitment to them. Will you take the project?”  And I knew what my answer was. “Absolutely not.”  But, I also knew that my leadership team had needed the work really bad or we were going to be letting some people go. So I said, “let me check back with the leadership team,” called them, got them all in a room.  I told them what had gone on, where we were. And to a person, they all said, “absolutely turn it down. We’ll go find something else to do.”   And I think that spoke volumes for the type of company we were.  But, to a Korean firm that does some nasty thing in bid and a French firm that does some nasty things in bids, I think going forward, they knew that they could trust our word on whatever we said that we were going to do.  And that’s, I think you have to know that, ‘Azimuth,’ and as a leader, make your decisions within the framework of it, even though it can set you back in the short term.    Robert Mixon:   Yeah, that took a lot of courage, Bill, I think for you and your leadership team to make that decision in the face of the challenges you had, you know, financially at that point in time.  And so, I was going to ask you, Bill, in the terms of the ‘culture code champion’ that you are, and again, I congratulate you as being a Forbes ‘culture code champion.’  What’s the one big idea that you would like the listeners in our Level 5 audience today to take away from today’s discussion and their way ahead?    Bill Higgs:   Well, I think one of the key things to understand is that leaders inspire and motivate people. And they need to know and understand that people want that. That’s something that people in organizations and companies, they’re wanting somebody who’s going to lead and inspire them.  Because they’re going to start to feel that positive energy, and they’re going to feel respect. And I think a lot of people just want to feel trusted and respected. And then they’re going to respond positively as you’re building a culture that’s going to differentiate you within your marketplace, in our case, across the world.  And you’re going to outperform. So, I think as a leader, know that that’s part of your job, is to inspire and motivate, and authentically show people that you trust them and respect them.    Robert Mixon:  And then by modeling the behavior of ‘doing the right thing when no one’s looking,’ others will want to be like you.    Bill Higgs:   Right… they’re going to see that. And we always made sure when those actions happen by somebody in the company or in the leadership team, we made sure that people heard about it.  So, you’ve got to advertise a little bit that you’re living those values.    Robert Mixon:   And seek to recognize the people who are doing right, whether it’s individual recognition in face to face, or a handwritten note… or an announcement to the rest of the team that, hey, Bill just did this and chose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.    Bill Higgs:   And celebrate the small wins as well as the big wins, because that celebration makes the memory, makes people understand, hey, this is what we want.    Robert Mixon:   Well, that’s great stuff, Bill. And I’m really excited about having the chance to talk with you today. It’s been a lot of fun.  And I know that I’ve learned a lot from the stories of your journey and what you’re doing now going forward. Yeah, I just wanted to thank you for your leadership, and your time, and coming on the podcast today to help our Level 5 leaders learn some from your journey.    Bill Higgs:   Well, thanks. I like what you’re doing. You’re getting a little bit deeper into some companies and deeper with some individuals, on how to move them through the Level 5 leadership and understand those, you know, the six leadership principles that you’re working.  Your culture, world class, building a culture. I think building a culture is what you and I are both trying to get people to understand. It doesn’t just happen.  You can’t do it in 30 days. It takes a lot of habits, a lot of gumption. But the benefit is you’re going to change lives positively.  People are going to be happy when they come to work. They’ll be happy when they go home. Their families are going to be better, and the communities are going to benefit from it.  So thank you for what you’re doing. I appreciate it.    Robert Mixon:   OK, Bill. Well, on our next episode, we’ll continue our series of interviews with executive leaders from different industries to identify some of the lessons they have learned in their journeys and how it applies to our ‘journey with no summit’ with the ‘Big Six’ principles. So we look forward to seeing you then.  Thanks very much!    Don’t forget! Subscribe to our podcast to get our latest episodes right away, as well as have access to our past episodes. Did you find this podcast beneficial? If so, please consider sharing it with your audience. It’ll just take a second, but could improve someone’s work habits for a long time to come. The post Podcast Episode 6: A Culture of “Right” — An Interview with Bill Higgs of Mustang Engineering appeared first on Level Five Associates.

In this episode, Robert Mixon interviews David Pinder, President at Cardinal IG, about the key values that instill trust into an organization. They discuss how trust can be applied in day-to-day operations, the old axiom “Trust But Verify,” how to handle giving bad news, four steps on how to build trust into the heart of an organization, and more! Don’t miss this inspiring episode!   Podcast Episode 5: A Culture of Trust – An Interview With David Pinder of Cardinal Glass Industries   Robert Mixon:  Well, welcome everyone to the Level Five podcast series. Today’s episode of “The Journey With No Summit” is focusing on the concept of trust. And we are privileged today to have Mr. Dave Pinder, the president of Cardinal Insulating Glass as our guest. And we want to get his thoughts on how he has learned and developed a culture of trust and taken, I think, a good company to a great company. And I’ve been privileged to consult with Cardinal IG now for three or four years with Dave and his leaders. And it’s been an honor and a privilege.  Dave, your career, a distinguished career involves both military and corporate service, a graduate of West Point and a leader who’s been through tough situations in hard times and been very successful in doing that. So, Dave, welcome to the show. Glad to have you.    Dave Pinder:  Thank you, Robert. It’s a privilege to be on with you today.     Robert Mixon:  OK, I’d ask you first, Dave… First question is, what’s your most memorable experience where you felt trusted and how did that affect you?    Dave Pinder:   Yeah, if I could tell a quick story to preface my answer here, I think it was 1973.  Roger O’Shaughnessy is the CEO of our company … he had been the president for six years and he asked himself a few questions. One, the first one, what was the best company in the world?  He was looking for a company to model our company after. And General Motors… considered the best company in the world in 1973. He asked why: it was because they ran independent divisions.  And for the six years that he ran Cardinal, he had the privilege of being able to operate it independently.  The next question he asked was, how do I attract and retain intelligent, hardworking people?  And his answer was independence.  And so from our very beginning, he’s believed that in order in order to be successful, he’s got to give leaders the ability to run their businesses. And so when I was hired in 1986, by two people, Roger O’Shaughnessy and Renato Lizardo, they gave me the freedom to run my plant in Fargo, North Dakota.  They basically said, “Dave, build it, design it, build it, hire the people, run it, take care of your people, call me if you have any questions.”  And so, they put great trust and responsibility in me to manage not only that project, but that business. And I would work 24 hours a day, seven days a week to never let those people down.  And so, again, early on in my career, 22, almost 22 years ago, I was given that great responsibility to manage a business for this organization.    Robert Mixon:   It’s a wonderful story, Dave, thanks. How do you translate trust into empowerment? And yet still, in the words of President Reagan, “trust, but verify.”    Dave Pinder:  Yeah. The way I look at that, Robert, is you’ve got to have trust both up, down, and to the ‘sides’ as well. And what I mean by that is, I have to believe that the people that that are working in are for me are good, honest, effective, worthy of trust.  Basically, they have the competence and character to have earned it. And I have to have those same characteristics. But also, the folks that work for me have to believe that I love them and care for them.  And then to the sides, we all have to be able to trust each other. Their peers need to be able to trust them. My peers need to be able to trust me.  I think when you when you have that effect, one person, this management theorist, Chester Barnard, once called it a ‘zone of indifference,’ evolves. And what happens is people trust each other. They don’t question orders.  They don’t question each other because that trust exists. And then you have this enduring cooperation. And I think once you have that, at least in my organization, I’m able to verify, you know, my people, the folks that that work for me, my plant managers know that I care for them.  They trust me. They know that I must keep my hand on the pulse.  And I just want to know what’s going on because I want to be involved in the business because I care.  And I found that once all of that exists, it’s easy to do.  You know, a leader of mine once told me, “you have to feed the elephant a peanut every once in a while and you won’t get stepped on.” And although that sounds extreme, it’s just kind of a metaphor that says, ‘keep me informed.’  And everybody understands that. And it works both ways.  They keep me informed.  I keep them informed.  And the system works.    Robert Mixon:   Yeah, I love it. I think the peanut theory is a great way to go. Next question for you, Dave, is, you know, what’s the biggest mistake you’ve made where you either trusted too much or not enough — and what did you learn from it?    Dave Pinder:   Early on, I took over as president of Cardinal IG company in at the end of 2011. I had a few very experienced leaders. And I think what I did, Robert, was I trusted too much.  I didn’t trust but verify.  I think sometimes, a failure occurs in an organization when they’re given, leaders are given the freedom to run their businesses … and the ego takes over.  There was a doctor named Stephen Berglas at Harvard Medical School, I think back in the 80s, and he did a study of very successful people over the course of 10 years.  And what he found was that highly successful people slowly fall apart when they achieve certain levels of success. And they basically have a lack of character to handle the stressors of success.  And so, I take responsibility for the failure of those leaders.  And the lesson that I learned… really, was that everybody must communicate.  I must keep the pulse of the organization. I have to know what’s going on.  And we have to talk about moral and ethical issues at every opportunity. So it stays right in the front of our minds. And so, again, ‘trust but verify’ is a very important part of being a leader.    Robert Mixon:   So in your initial engagement with a new leader coming on your team, how do you define that ‘trust but verify’ framework that you’re planning to operate in?    Dave Pinder:   I think what I’ve done is… I get it right out on the table. They understand that I’m going to trust them, and I have a great team right now. I have total trust in all the leaders in our organization.  But they understand. They know that’s their responsibility. Their responsibility is to keep me informed.  My responsibility is to keep my leader informed.  And I have no problem whatsoever. I have nothing to hide if Roger O’Shaughnessy, my leader, asks me questions about my organization.  And my leaders, I believe, have no problem at all, with any questions that I have about their organizations. Now, it goes back to that mutual trust. If you don’t have it, and your folks truly don’t believe that you trust them and vice versa, it’s not going to work.  And so, again, once you have it, it works beautifully.    Robert Mixon:   You know, there’s an old saying that I’ve learned over and over, or relearned, that “bad news never gets better with time.” But I think part of that trust model you’re talking about is the ability to handle bad news. Is that true?    Dave Pinder:   Absolutely.  Bad news doesn’t get better with time. And yeah, I think my folks… I’ll give you an example.  Every time an employee has an OSHA recordable injury, my plant managers are required to call me no matter what time it is, day or night.  And why is that? It’s not because I don’t trust them. It’s because I care.  And the analogy is, if I’m out to dinner, and I have a babysitter over at my house, and one of my children get hurt, I would expect them to call me and keep me informed and let me know that somebody got hurt. And not simply tell me once I got back from where we were and, “oh, by the way, your son fell and got stitches. I didn’t want to bother you.”  And it’s the same thing. I love all of my employees. I just want to know when they get injured.  And so that’s an example of sometimes my plant managers will call me, and they’ll preface the phone call with, nobody got hurt. And I’d say, “oh, great.”  But I think they feel very comfortable.  Well, nobody likes to deliver bad news, but I think they feel comfortable in doing that because they know I trust them, and they’re doing the right thing.    Robert Mixon:   Yeah. And how you react to the bad news is an important part of that trust model too, right?    Dave Pinder: Absolutely. Absolutely.     Robert Mixon:   We’ve all been around men and women who just went ballistic whenever anything bad was transmitted. And it goes back to another lesson…   “If you don’t want to hear any bad news, you won’t.”  And I’ve been around people who didn’t want to hear any bad news, and I’m sure you have too, right?    Dave Pinder:   Believe me, I’ve had to deliver a lot of bad news, both in my military and civilian career. And you’re absolutely right. And I’ve been very fortunate to have outstanding leaders who reacted in a very respectful and kind way.  So, I learned from them.    Robert Mixon.  You mentioned Roger, and of course, I think for those who don’t know… Roger O’Shaughnessy… he certainly is one of the most respected leaders, I’ve ever heard of or known of in my career and his role at Cardinal.  Do you have other role models who have typified trusting leaders?  And if so, who are they and why do you respect them?    Dave Pinder:   Too many to mention. But one of the others is Renato Lizardo. Renato came to the United States back in 1971 from the Philippines, and he actually is the one that hired me in 1998.  Roger gave Renato the responsibility to build a factory in Fargo, North Dakota, to service one of our largest customers — and to find a plant manager to run that operation. And so, Renato was the one who actually found me, and hired me. And he learned from Roger, how to lead, and in a trusting environment.  And he led me in a terrific way, exactly the same way as Roger O’Shaughnessy has led this organization. And then probably three years into that job, I then began to report to Roger, but both of those guys are right at the top of the role models that I want to emulate, and have emulated over the years. But I also had a couple in the Army.  I had a battalion commander named Jack Carter, who was a great role model, trusted his subordinate company commanders to do their jobs. And he was a wonderful leader that, again, I learned a tremendous amount from.    Robert Mixon:   Okay, thanks. Thanks, Dave. What advice would you give aspiring executive leaders in creating a culture of trust in their teams and organizations?    Dave Pinder:   Sure. I kind of wrote down four easy steps.  First, you have to hire the right people, you know, those that you can trust, who have the propensity to internalize your core values.  Of course, they’re not going to have them all, but if they have the propensity to internalize, to learn them, internalize them, those are the people that we’re looking for. So, first and foremost, we got to hire the right people. Not necessarily the best people, as Herb Brooks would say, but the right people.  Second, we’ve got to, as leaders, provide the guidance to them, in the form of the company’s vision, the company’s mission, leader’s intent, values, culture.  So, I’ve got the right people, I’m giving them the guidance, now I’m empowering them to run their business. I give them that entrepreneurial freedom to do it.  And then step four would be, I’ve got to communicate. I’ve got to keep my hand on the pulse, always.  Why? Because I care. Because we, as leaders, care. It’s not that we don’t trust, it’s because we care.   And if our subordinate leaders understand that we’re keeping our hand on the pulse, we’re verifying because we truly care about them, about their success, and about the success of the organization, then it works.     Robert Mixon:   So, for aspiring leaders who want to be like Dave Pinder someday, that empowering leadership, would you say that that takes a lot of diligence on your part … to know what you need to know, and yet still give them the freedom of action that you think they deserve?    Dave Pinder:   I think once you have it established, Robert, it’s easy. It’s not like I have to work on it continually. Once you have that trust established, and people understand the expectations, it just works.  It’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful system that works so well.  But again, you’ve got to have the right people.  They’ve got to understand what the expectations are. You have to give them the guidance, empower them, and then you keep your hand on the pulse, and it works.    Robert Mixon:   Well, you certainly have a great organization, Dave. I’ve had the privilege of going out to all your plants and meeting with the leadership teams out there, the plant managers, and the leaders throughout the ranks. And you’ve instituted a wonderful program called ‘Bedrock’ for the frontline leaders to help them understand ‘what right looks like’ across the organization.  In a company the size of Cardinal IG, there’s more than 3,000 employees out there every day working hard and trying to do the right thing.  I think your investment in their understanding of ‘what right looks like’ as leaders has been really one of the most remarkable opportunities I’ve had in my career. So, I want to say that and congratulate you on having done so much wonderful work to, you know, create a culture where people do, I think, feel trusted.  And, you know, it has to permeate throughout the ranks. It’s hard when you’re at 30,000 feet sometimes to know that it’s permeated throughout the organization. But I think you’ve got some mechanisms in place that do that.  And it’s important, I think, for a leader, no matter how large your organization is, to maintain, as you said, an idea of feeling for the pulse of the organization and the health of the leadership team as they learn and grow. Because I don’t think, in my experience, any of us, you know, that have ever been to the summit, we’re always on a journey as leaders.  Do you agree with that?    Dave Pinder:   I totally agree, Robert.  And, you know, I’ve got to thank you.  It’s interesting how things happen in your life. For those that don’t know, you were a military art professor of mine back in 1984.    Robert Mixon:  [Laughs]     Dave Pinder:   And we served together after Desert Storm with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment when you were the 2nd Squadron Commander there.  And we went to the National Training Center. And then, really, that was probably about 1991.  And then we didn’t reconnect until 2014 or 15.    Robert Mixon:  Something like that, yeah.    Dave Pinder:  But it happened for a reason. And as I look at our leadership journey as a company, if I was writing the history of it, I would say that that reconnection of us and Level Five, has been instrumental in taking us to the next level of leadership and, really, next level of trust within the organization.    Robert Mixon:  Well, thanks, Dave.    Dave Pinder:  I truly appreciate it, Robert.    Robert Mixon:   Thank you. Do you have anything else you’d like to share with our audience here, Dave, about your leadership journey, advice to others, thoughts in general?    Dave Pinder:   Yeah… I think, as you said, it’s a never-ending journey. And we could always learn.  And we have to learn from those mistakes. And I’ve made a lot… ensure that we do all that we can not to have those repeat themselves.  But, again, it’s a fantastic feeling to work with a group of people that trust each other and work so well together.  And when you can truly enjoy what you do every day, it’s really not a job anymore. It’s just a pleasure doing what I do. So, thank you for having me today.  It was a pleasure participating in this.    Robert Mixon:   Well, thanks for sharing your thoughts with us, Dave. And I wish you continued success in leading, again, what I consider to be a great company in Cardinal IG. And as we go forward in our journey, we’ve got several more senior leaders of different type companies and organizations that will be interviewing on our Level Five podcast series. So, please join us, each time. I think these leaders will have and do have the ability to share some of their thoughts and experiences, that will help us all grow on our journey.  And I wish you all well, and enjoy your journey!   Don’t forget! Subscribe to our podcast to get our latest episodes right away, as well as have access to our past episodes. Did you find this podcast beneficial? If so, please consider sharing it with your audience. It’ll just take a second, but could improve someone’s work habits for a long time to come. The post Podcast Episode 5: A Culture of Trust – An Interview With David Pinder of Cardinal Glass Industries appeared first on Level Five Associates.

In this episode, I interview Sankar Sewnauth, the President and CEO of CDS Life Transitions. Serving throughout the Western New York region, CDS Life Transitions is a mission-driven, diverse family of companies focused on helping individuals with physical and intellectual challenges realize their dreams and lead successful lives. We discuss how to overcome the difficulties of leading a complex organization through uncharted waters, how to recognize and nurture the success of team members, and how to balance both the strategic AND operational leadership in a company operating in a highly competitive environment. Sankar’s story is not one you want to miss!   Podcast Episode 4: Leadership Strategies – An Interview with Sankar Sewnauth of CDS Life Transitions   Robert Mixon:   Hello everyone, and welcome to the continuing series of Level 5 Associates podcasts!  Today’s topic we’re going to focus with another distinguished leader here in the community on strategic leadership … and that individual is Mr. Sankar Siwanath, who is the president and CEO of CDS Life Transitions, a family of companies here headquartered in Webster, New York but reaches all across Western New York to help people fulfill their dreams who have some intellectual challenges.  Sankar, I’ve had the privilege of knowing you now for about 10 years and working with you.  I’ve really been impressed by your ability to lead a complex organization through some difficult times and I know the times were even more difficult before you and I met in terms of growing this company and your personal journey, where you came to America are basically fulfilling an American dream and came from the very basic level of responsibility in this organization to become its senior executive and thanks so much for being here and joining me today.    Sankar Sewnauth:   Well thank you Robert, I really appreciate the opportunity, the feeling is mutual. I’ve worked closely with you for the last 10 years, and you’re a man of a lot of talent and integrity and I really enjoyed our association with you and your wife as well.    Robert Mixon:  Thanks.    Sankar Sewnauth:   So, thank you.     Robert Mixon:  Thanks Sankar.  Today with our audience I’d like to basically pick your brain, about the concept of ‘strategic leadership’ and how that translates into the operational and tactical parts of leadership so that you can guide the enterprise, but still be very much in touch with everyone on the team.  So the first question I’d like to ask is, how do you separate strategic thinking from the operational and tactical thinking as CEO?    Sankar Sewnauth:   That’s a great question. Every organization that’s effective and accomplishes its goals usually has a strategic plan.  It has to engage in strategy, looking out on the horizon so where it desires to be whether it’s a three-year period or five-year period and even longer term 10-year period.  We at CDS we tend to look at the three-year cycle, for because in our business, because we depend on federal government, and state government for our funding … we have to look out about three years, and so when we look at strategy we try to predict what the next three years are going to look like looking at internally where we are as an organization which you need the benchmark … where you are, and then looking at all the opportunities that are coming forward.  So when you ask about ‘strategic thinking’ relative to ‘operational thinking,’ they’re really intertwined, because the strategic direction usually drives where your operations are … and you never separate it because if you do, you could become disaligned or unaligned at some point where you are going in one direction and you’ve lost sight of what your strategy is or you may have challenges going on in your organization that cause you to take a step aside … and so always on a daily basis I keep as a CEO, I keep the strategy in place… “what is our end goal.”  So for example, we are moving into the managed care space for people with intellectual disabilities.  We started up a managed care organization for people who are non-disabled. We used it as an incubator four years ago. We’ve now established a plan, it’s serving about 4,000 people in upstate New York in 22 counties. So we said to ourselves, where do we want to be in the next three to five years … and so making an assumption for people with intellectual disabilities how many of them will come into the marketplace, we have to do some things now.  So operationally, we’re aligning the organization by putting some infrastructure in place… personnel, information technology, building relationships with customers, providers, getting the necessary licenses for the state of New York. We’ve put those on a project plan with deliverables with target dates — and our people every day they know what they need to do.   So you always want to remind them — and you don’t do that every day — but you remind them “here’s our end goal, guys” and “here’s how we’re performing against the end goal.”    Robert Mixon:  Okay.    Sankar Sewnauth:   Does that make sense?    Robert Mixon:  It does! You know, that connectivity I think is important.    Sankar Sewnauth:  Absolutely.    Robert Mixon:  You’ve got to keep them distinct but they have to be connected. Is that right?  Okay, well thanks.  Who were your senior executive role models as you moved through your career? What qualities did they have that you admired?    Sankar Sewnauth:   It’s such a great question, and you really think about the people that have really influenced you. One of the people that really impacted my career, is a gentleman by the name of Sylvester Zielinski. He used to be the director of the local office of the state of New York that directed the services for people with intellectual disabilities. I got to know him. We actually in a way we reported that office locally for the people with intellectual disabilities and when things were really bad at CDS he stood by me and he said “Sankar, I’ll work with you together and we’ll get the organization out of the mess it’s in”… and he stayed true to his word. When he retired, I said “what are you gonna do in retirement?” and he said “I don’t know.” I said, “well, how about joining our team at CDS?” and he came here.  The thing that impressed me about Sy, is that he wasn’t just a good leader he had all of the things to back him up.  He went to school, he was a really trained leader, he had a good way about him, he listened first, listened to you really thoroughly, you know integrated what you were saying into his thinking … and then whenever he spoke you always listened, because he had something really good to say and he wouldn’t say it in just two sentences you will break down what he’s trying to tell you in its different parts so you had a complete understanding.  He just had an approach that really taught me that you know … you don’t have to shoot from the hip. You really should really take time to listen to people and provide good advice. Give good feedback when people talk to you … and as a leader you want to be in that position of explaining things to your people — constantly because they may not realize what you’re thinking and you’re making assumptions.  If you make assumptions often and then you’re in a different plane than your staff … and so, talk it through with them and you learn as they learn and you grow together. You grow together as a team.  Sy was one of those.  If you ask me as I look back, the one person I always go back to who influenced me is one of the founding fathers of the United States of America and that’s George Washington. A man who was running his farm and had some skills… and they tapped him to build the army to fight with the British and without any regard for himself he put the country first and he came forward, didn’t look for enumeration, he just wanted him to do what was right for the country and for his fellow citizens. When I look at what he sacrificed, and I compare to what we talk about these things now… I think our modern-day leaders don’t even have a clue what it takes to lead.  He truly sacrificed… like put himself in danger on a daily basis and when things were really hard to keep that militia that turned into an army together… just took you know just a groundswell of energy and talent and conviction that he had… and he stayed true to it.  I don’t know that there’s any other leader that I’ve come across that could measure up.  We all strive to be like George Washington.    Robert Mixon:  Well, I think what I understand, the more we know about him, the more remarkable he becomes in terms of who he was and what he represented.    Sankar Sewnauth:  You know I recall, there was a fellow journalist, I think was a British journalist that came in when they were in Valley Forge, when they had nothing to eat, and the men didn’t have any shoes or clothing … and he said “I came into the camp and I went to where the general was and his clothes were worn, but they were clean” and he sat there and he was so regal in his presence he said “I had goosebumps because here I was in the middle of this somewhat chaotic time and here was this man who believed in himself and believed in the cause and believed in his men and he sat there so resolute that I could I couldn’t shake it.”  That’s those are the kinds of things you think about. You know do you have that. That’s why you’re trying to aspire to be better than yourself, where you are in spite of your limitations or inadequacies.    Robert Mixon:  Thanks, that’s a pretty elegant description.  What about in your career, some mistakes you made … what are some of the strategic or operational mistakes that you made in your career, and what did you learn from them?    Sankar Sewnauth:  Another great question Robert. You came prepared with all the great questions!  You know, sometimes they say that you’re defined by your failures… and any leader that has had much success, really on the other side you’ve had equally that amount of failures.  For me if I look back in my career, when CDS was in crisis, I brought in people into the organization, and invariably some of them had to leave. When I look back, when I look at myself as a leader, you always question yourself about your ability. When people leave, why did they leave? Is it because I didn’t provide something to them? Did we provide a good opportunity for them? You always come back to at times… ‘maybe I could have done that differently’…  When you’re impacting people’s lives, your employees lives, you take that seriously… and when I go back, when I look back at it, I say to myself, “you know in a few of those situations I could have done differently, I could have kept somebody here” … but because of the situation, the way it was, I made some decisions, and for that you always live with some regret. You know, maybe I could have done it differently.  Business wise, we got into business with the US military. We entered into a contract with a vendor that supplied the US military with food products. We were very diligent about it, but the financial model wasn’t that great. It did provide some jobs to our people. At the same time, we were going through some changes at CDS… we were embracing the managed care system. We were making some some redesigns to our current system.  We were doing business in Europe and they had different requirements, and in spite of our best efforts we were still not meeting the mark. There was a lot of stress in the organization.  After a year, I talked to the team, I consulted with the board, and I looked at the financials, everything… and you know me Robert, when I get into something I’m fully committed… I hate to give up on something.  I had to make the decision. So we gave up that contract.  If you asked me today about that decision, I will tell you that it went against my core. I believe in business, that once you get into a commitment — stick with it.  I listened to my staff, and the people around me, and we made a decision for the greater good… but, in some ways I will never lose that sense that we made a mistake… that we could have we could have kept that business. Because what it’s done by giving that up, we pretty much have taken ourselves out of any major opportunity in that area for the foreseeable future.  So when you look at that you could always go back and say, “boy, we could have done it differently” … but relative to the growth of the organization, no question we’re in a better place as an organization.  So yes, it’s one of those things I could have done, but I don’t lose sleep over it… because in the greater scheme of things, the organization has morphed to this $230 million organization.    Robert Mixon:   Yeah, pretty remarkable… yeah pretty remarkable, Sankar. But, I think, from the standpoint of learning… yes, it’s tough to learn from your failures, because it’s hard to admit them in the first place, and then when you have to confront them, you realize that the problem is probably in the mirror, you know…    Sankar Sewnauth:  Yeah, exactly. And then six months later, you say to them “what do you think, because this has been gnawing at me” … and they go “you know Sankar, you’re probably right, we should have stuck it out” … Okay, no worries, we learned from it, next time we’re gonna do better.    Robert Mixon:  To me, that’s much healthier than finding someone to blame, or beating yourself up every day… you know I think we just have to move on, right?    Sankar Sewnauth:  At the end of the day, if you’re gonna blame somebody, you’re gonna blame yourself…     Robert Mixon:  That’s right!    Sankar Sewnauth:  …because the buck stops with the CEO, and once you get the input from your staff, and you pull the trigger… it’s your call.   It’s not your staff’s call.    Robert Mixon:  Yep, it’s as one of my old bosses used to say, “you can delegate authority, but not responsibility”… right?  Okay, well thanks Sankar.   Are you a subscriber to the Ronald Reagan approach of ‘trust but verify’ as an executive leader?    Sankar Sewnauth:  Yes. He said it pretty simply, you know, ‘trust but verify.’  I look at it this way… you really have to trust the people that work for you. If you don’t trust them, they shouldn’t be in your organization. At the same time, when you give them responsibility, you have to hold them accountable.  So there’s an accountability process that you have, where you can say, “yes,, okay I trust you.” People sometimes they don’t understand. The word empowerment is used so loosely… “I want to feel empowered.”  I asked some staff, when they say “I don’t feel empowered,” I said “please talk to me about that…what do you mean?”  “Well, I can’t make decisions…”  “What kind of decisions do you want to make? What is your job?”  Then they get flustered… I say “let’s peel the onion here…”   The way a person feels empowered… is that you’re hired for the right job, you’ve been trained, you’ve been observed, you have demonstrated initiative, responsibility, and you deliver outcomes.  Once you do that, then your organization can say “okay, you are now empowered to make decisions that we used to make before for you.”   That’s when that happens. So it’s that ‘trust but verify,’ but also you’re moving your person along to say, “look we trust you, but you have some growth to do, you have some learning to do… you do those things well, and at some point you’re gonna be empowered, and you can take responsibility… at the end of the day, though, we’re gonna hold you accountable for your job.”   And there’s a way for us to hold you responsible.    Robert Mixon:  So that empowerment is a graduated process for you, right? Trust is there, but the empowerment… have to earn it, right?    Sankar Sewnauth:   The mistake that people have is that you have leaders that will say “I hired you, now I delegate you to do all these things”… and without any regard for the fact that the person’s a new employee. They have to understand your culture, they have to understand their responsibilities, they need the training, they need for you to support them… through time… coach, mentor… and then make that decision about empowerment later.  The biggest disservice we do to our employees is when we tell them, “look I’ve hired you and now I’m empowering you to go to your job”… there’s no such thing.    Robert Mixon:   Do you think sometimes we promote people before they’re prepared for that next level of responsibility?    Sankar Sewnauth:   Yes, and then something that’s another example is promoting people when they are at their capacity… For example, we have several layers of leadership in the organization, so you have a frontline leader who’s doing his or her job and they do it so well, we make an assumption that that person wants leadership.  Then we put that person in a leadership role, person fails, person exits the organization.  So we’ve learned from that in the past. It has to be up to the employee what they would like in their career and in their life.  So you can be in a job, but should demonstrate to us that you want more, and then we’ll work with you and have you succeed.    Robert Mixon:   And prepare them for success.    Sankar Sewnauth:   Exactly. That’s right.    Robert Mixon:   Yeah, I think that’s one of the hallmarks that I noted about the CDS Life Transitions culture was that… you’re focused so heavily on preparing leaders before they’re in a position… and they have to do it, they need to learn about it first.    Sankar Sewnauth:  You know people think it’s a science, but it’s really a mix of science and art. You’re dealing with people. A person might tell you that “I’m ready,” and they may show all the signs of being successful, and they get into the job, they’re overrun by it. That’s why you really need to stay close to that person, to give them that soft landing if it doesn’t work.  It’s to say, “look, you gave it a shot, it didn’t work.” You don’t want to get too far down the road where the person is having to exit the organization.  I think that, personally, when my people who I’ve given promotional opportunities don’t succeed, and we have to ask them to leave… I’ve said to my team, “shame on us for taking good people who have worked so well for us, promote them, and then have them struggle, and then have to leave. Why did that happen?”  So, we learn from our mistakes in this organization.   We have one of the lowest turnover rates in our industry, because of that.  I say to the staff, “you have to really demonstrate to me that this was this person’s fault, in spite of all the things you did to support them, and if you can’t do that, then we won’t let that person go, and you have to live with it, and you’re gonna have to go back and work with that individual.”    Robert Mixon.  It makes a lot of sense.  So, Sankar, what advice would you give aspiring leaders who dream of becoming executive leaders — to help them prepare for that day?     Sankar Sewnauth:  Again it’s another great question. We all face in the organization, is that invariably when I walk around the organization, and I have conversations with the staff, every once in a while you have a staffer who will say, “sir, I would like your job one day” … and then I’ll say to them, “so, how are we gonna get there?” and they’ll say, “well…I’d like to do some things” and I said, “what things? Let’s talk about it”…  I said, “if you ask me, what I’d like to have you do… is number one, be the best employee that you can right now. Do the best at it. What I mean by that is perform your duties well, take initiative, demonstrate that you can work with your peers, collaborate with each other, and drive your outcomes — for your current job. If you tell us that you want a leadership role in the organization, to move to the next level… there’s so much opportunity here, we will put you on the path, and you tell us where you want to go, but at every level we’re gonna evaluate your capacity. You’re gonna have to show us that you can do this.  Because it’s not just a dream, right? It’s how you build a dream. It’s taking a step every day. I always tell the staff, “don’t talk to me about the job that’s three layers up, talk to me about how you’re doing today.”  If I ask you how you stay how your supervisor feels about you, what do you say? If you can pick on your fingertips your accomplishments for the last year, what are they… right?  What deliverables do you have for the organization? How have you grown as a person and as a professional?  You need to be able to articulate that every step of the way, and when you do that, you will find yourself moving through the organization and be given all kinds of opportunities.  You do your job well, and you won’t have to find us — we’ll find you, because people will talk about you.    Robert Mixon:  You’ll be noticed, right?    Sankar Sewnauth:  You’ll be noticed in the organization.    Robert Mixon:  Word gets around.    Sankar Sewnauth:   That’s right. We will prepare you. We will invest in you. We’re one of the few organizations here, that not only give you incentives for being safe in the organization, being healthy, but for going to school… You want to go to school, we’ll help you with your tuition.  For example, Robert, the leadership development program you help us with on a regular basis, we tell staff, “you go to that class, and in six months we’re gonna find your promotional opportunity…” if we don’t, we’re gonna give you a 5% increase to your salary anyway, to show good faith to the employees.  That’s what’s made the organization what it is today, because we know who our biggest resource is, it’s our employees.    Robert Mixon:   Well, that’s an excellent point. The development of people is a priority. Obviously it seems for you as an executive leader, and you know it every day when you when you come in in my experience with you you’ve always been somebody who was thinking about people and developing people even though…     Sankar Sewnauth:  You know me, sometimes it’s a tough meeting! It’s done with the perspective that I want you to learn and grow. I want you to ask those questions that you could that are gonna make you uncomfortable, but it’s gonna make you a better person in the end.     Robert Mixon:  Yeah, it’s a journey of maturity too, isn’t it, don’t you think, as a leader?     Sankar Sewnauth:   Absolutely. You know, the staff too they take it so personally when I challenge them.  They make the mistake of taking it so personally did that it hurts them. I have had to remember as the executive leader to go back to that staffer, circle back, and say, “you know I challenged you in that meeting, how do you feel?”  “I was feeling like you really had me on the mat.”  “Please don’t take that personally, it was there to help you. If I didn’t think you were doing a good job you wouldn’t be in this organization, right? So when I give you feedback, it’s to make you a better person. So let’s keep that simple.”     Robert Mixon:   Great points.  What thoughts do you have about your journey and what it’s meant to you to be a part of a vibrant organization, now that CDS Life Transitions represents… from a point in time where really the organization was on the brink of failure?    Sankar Sewnauth:  Well you know Robert, the word I use frequently nowadays that there’s humility is necessary, right?  You don’t take things for granted. You were given these opportunities in your life.  Who would have thought that a young man from a third world country would come over here… and the force of his energy and his focus would build a life for himself without much around him to support him. And then to come into CDS and be in the organization for 10 years and see a leadership that was just floundering and lost.., and then to be able to give get the opportunity to run it… I felt so inadequate but just again by the force of just… just my being somebody who wants to succeed and who appreciates being given the opportunity…   I’ve always said I am NOT the brightest guy in the room, but I know how to get things done. I know how to get people to believe in the mission, to attach themselves to it and help me. That’s been the success, because I’ve looked for other people to help me. The organization has grown and the credit to all the people around me because I’m just a messenger. I’m just the messenger.    Robert Mixon: Well, thanks very much Sankar for sharing your thoughts on leadership today and on strategic leadership, but also on the framework of building a world-class culture, because I think that’s what we’ve been talking about today.  I’ve certainly learned a lot, and I would say to to our audience that you know the opportunities to learn from people like Sankar should never take them for granted because many of us have been fortunate to be around people who have this level of character, and I thank you for that and I will say that as we go forward in our journey Sankar, I look forward to more opportunities to learn from you.  We’ll certainly have some other executives on the Level 5 podcast to share their experiences because I think to our audience of leaders who are seeking to grow, those shared experiences are tremendously valuable… so thanks again Sankar, and I wish you all the best.    Sankar Sewnauth:  Thank you Robert, and thank you for doing this because, I think it’s so needed in the business community … to constantly be giving our leaders things to think about — and this is just a great way to do it.    Robert Mixon:   Okay Sankar, thanks very much.   Don’t forget! Subscribe to our podcast to get our latest episodes right away, as well as have access to our past episodes. Did you find this podcast beneficial? If so, please consider sharing it with your audience. It’ll just take a second, but could improve someone’s work habits for a long time to come. The post Podcast Episode 4: Leadership Strategies – An Interview with Sankar Sewnauth of CDS Life Transitions appeared first on Level Five Associates.

In this episode, Robert Mixon interviews Bill Carpenter, CEO of the Rochester Genessee Regional Transportation Authority, on one of the most important Big Six® principles — Listening. In an environment where listening is subordinated to talking, initiative is stifled. The best leaders and teams know how to listen and to understand, more than just to be understood. Bill and Robert discuss different techniques that will turn you into a better listener.   Podcast Episode 3: How a Leader Should Listen – Interview with Bill Carpenter, CEO of the Rochester Genessee Regional Transportation Authority  Robert Mixon: Well, hi, everyone, and welcome to the third in our series of “The Journey With No Summit,” the Level Five podcast series. And today we’re going to focus on the Big Six principle ‘Listen.’   To help us in that journey, we’re privileged to have with today, Mr. Bill Carpenter, who is the CEO of the Rochester Genesee Regional Transportation Authority. And welcome, Bill.    Bill Carpenter: Hey, Robert, thanks very much for the invitation. Glad to be here.    Robert Mixon:  Well, you know, Bill, obviously, as a leader, you’ve been on a journey, your organization here in western New York, you oversee the public transportation for an eight-county area of 1.2 million people and more than 18 million customers annually. And I think your workforce is about a thousand. Is that correct?    Bill Carpenter:   Just over 900 employees serving mobility throughout the eight-county region. That’s right.    Robert Mixon:  Well, you’ve certainly been in the midst of transformation, as well as transportation. Is that fair?    Bill Carpenter:   That’s fair. We’re reimagining our system here in Monroe County, which is where Rochester, New York is the county seat. We’ve got a system that 40 years ago worked well.  And what we’ve done is made minor changes to it over the last 40 years. But in the last two years, we’ve gone out to the community, listened to what they want, what they need, what we’re capable of doing. And we’ve now got a design that we’ll implement about a year from now to change how public transportation and mobility is delivered in our community.    Robert Mixon:  Terrific. Terrific. And I’ve been privileged to know you now for almost two years and watch some of this journey unfold as a senior leader guiding an organization, complex organization, with years of history, which is a good news and a bad news story sometimes, right?    Bill Carpenter:   That’s right. The work of making sure that we know exactly what we’re trying to do and getting clarity around that, getting a singular focus around that end state, and then to aligning our executive team and our leadership team around that azimuth that I heard about in your last podcast and we heard about in the training. Really helped align the organization.  I think that’s really supported us with ending up with a great recommendation that our board just recently unanimously approved.    Robert Mixon:  Congratulations, Bill. Just a heck of an accomplishment that you and your team have put together. But looking back on your personal leadership journey, Bill, where do you think your strengths and weaknesses are as a listening leader?    Bill Carpenter:  You know, very early in my career, I had someone explain to me that I was mediocre when it came to listening skills. And I said, “but I’m a great listener. I hear what people have to say.”  And the person said, “unless the person who’s speaking knows that you’ve heard them, then you haven’t listened well.” And so, what I’ve found over time is by nature, I’m collaborative. I really want to hear what the other person has to say.  I can be compassionate, sympathetic, empathetic, unless I get distracted, unless the urgent and the important is pressed down. And I love distractions.    Robert Mixon:  So you think your strengths now are increasing in terms of that empathetic listening?    Bill Carpenter:   That there’s a number of habits I’ve developed to make sure I’ve got the focus during the time that we’re together and just really appreciating the energy that it takes to be an empathetic listener. And when someone asks for time with me to look at my calendar, not just that we’ve got time to talk, but I’ve got the energy to really engage in the conversation. Those things have really improved my game.    Robert Mixon:  It’s hard sometimes, though, isn’t it, to focus?     Bill Carpenter:   As a CEO, there are hundreds of things that can have your focus. But the most important thing, when there’s someone sitting across from you, whether it’s a direct report in a one-on-one setting, a customer, a stakeholder in the community, they need to know you’ve given them your full focus.  When you can do that and then back that up with a backbrief so that they know not only did they feel as though I was paying attention, but it’s confirmed that I’ve heard what they’ve had to say, really get high points from the speaker that, okay, you’ve got it. And we had over 150 meetings with the community as part of this project we’ve just done. And I think the end result, the unanimous support, shows we really did listen well throughout the process.    Robert Mixon:   So, what do you think your biggest challenge is in creating a listening culture, not only in Bill Carpenter, but in the team that you lead, your executive team, your organizational team, your constituency, right? You’ve got stakeholders across the community and the political environment. How do you nurture a listening culture in that diverse audience?    Bill Carpenter:   Well, we’ve got an organization. I’ve been CEO over seven years, and I inherited a high-performing organization based on a command and control culture. The team of leaders had lots of experience with what I learned to be critical listening, where as people talked about the problem, it was, hey, has a goal been met or not been met?  If there’s a gap, why didn’t you meet it? Not listening, to… do you have the resources you need? Am I understanding the problem correctly?  It was more, hey, if you didn’t hit it, what went wrong?  In moving to empathetic listening, the team needs to know the desired end state. For us, our mission statement reads, we partner with the communities we serve to provide safe and sustainable mobility, offering better access, frequency, and reliability.  And we break that down into different elements for the different departments. So, the conversation is often about the necessary resources to achieve that end state. It’s not, did you hit the goal or not?  But I know what the end state is, and I’m not able to achieve it with the resources I have. The listening style is proactive and affirming. Empathetic is compared to being critical.  The team members need to feel, to know that it’s safe to discuss gaps in progress. It takes time and it takes skill development. It takes modeling that type of empathetic listening.  Was talking recently about another transit agency that had asked what we had done in our project to be so successful. And we talked about having over 150 meetings with the community. And as I left, I said, it’s not enough to have the meetings.  The people need to know that they’ve been heard.  And then your plan has to reflect the problems that they identify.  You need to address those.  It’s not just enough to go out and talk. You have to go out and listen and then do a handshake, whether again, it’s one-on-one with a direct report up here or 50 or 75 people in a town hall meeting. They need to know they’ve been heard and that you repeat back what they’re saying.  And then you adjust off of what you’ve heard. You adjust your plans to collaborate and come up with a better outcome than what you had when everyone walked in the room.    Robert Mixon:  What about with your senior executives? How have you been working with them to improve their listening skills?    Bill Carpenter:  Particularly with the senior executives, I’d say there’s two things, a skill development that I mentioned. And we have worked with Level Five Associates and some specific skill development that you and your team have brought to our table. But in my one-on-ones, it’s I’m modeling successful listening skills — or not.  And I’ve asked them, hold me accountable. As part of my personal leadership philosophy, I tell them my goal is to be a good listener. And my expectation is if I’m falling short, if I’ve got the computer on, if I’m calling my assistant during the meeting, call me out.  And I’m okay with calling them out if they don’t call me out. Hey, we’re trying to achieve a high standard here. We’re trying to be as productive as possible.  So you need to hold me accountable. I need to model the right behavior. So let’s achieve the goal we’re all working towards.    Robert Mixon:  So how do you measure their progress?    Bill Carpenter:   That’s a great question. As far as a listener goes, they have one member of the executive team who I would say is quieter than the rest.  And I think my executive team would know who I’m talking about. But if he doesn’t backbrief with me, I’ll ask him to backbrief. And it’s astounding the clarity with which he’s understood our conversation.  And yet, without that backbrief, I’m not sure he’s heard at all. And again, the backbrief with some others, the conversation has been heard, but people have begun to think, ‘okay, so if that’s a problem, here’s a solution I’m going to begin to work on.’ I said, well, ‘I just want to make sure we understand the problem together.’  And as they do their backbrief, they’re already describing the solution rather than what’s been discussed. So it’s an iterative process, constant working with each other and watching really the whole team improve as a result.    Robert Mixon:  Okay. So that one-on-one focus for you has been powerful.     Bill Carpenter:   Very powerful.    Robert Mixon:   And the preparation going into the one-on-ones, right?    Bill Carpenter:   I think to be a good listener, you’ve got to have some set questions you want to ask. It’s very easy to have your day be interrupted, the pattern, a wonderful calendar, say, well, I’m prepared for this meeting and to find there’s a fire to be put out, someone to be congratulated, a celebration to attend. And you walk in, if you’ve not got your notes ahead of time, if you don’t have your format ahead of time, it’s easy to be ineffective in that initial period of time.  Whereas if you can have the outline, be asking, hey, what’s your biggest problem that you want to focus on this week? Some follow-up questions from the prior meeting that you’ve highlighted. So you already have those notes when you get together.  That really makes the time more productive. And people look forward to knowing this is going to be a productive time as opposed to ineffective time.    Robert Mixon:  Good, Bill. Thanks. Can you give us an example of someone that you admire and respect as a listener and why?    Bill Carpenter:   You know, there was a former county executive, Maggie Brooks, who I had the good privilege to work for. She had been in broadcasting, then got into politics and was the first woman elected county executive. And after three terms, she was term limited.  I worked for her during her first term, the first four years. She always gave her full attention. And I don’t know if it was her reporter background, just natural skills, but she listened to tone, to body language.  You felt like she captured all of you as she was listening to you. And at the end of the time, you always had a commitment from her as to what she was able to do. And at times that meant, “Bill, do I understand this to be what you’re looking for? There isn’t anything I can do about that.” Or, “thanks so much for bringing that to my attention. We’re going to find a way to work together on that.”   And when she retired, I had the good fortune of her being able to work at the Rochester Genesee Regional Transportation Authority for the last several years until her recent retirement. And she modeled great listening skills in our regular staff meetings with her team, and then certainly out in the community where anyone that she met with, felt that our organization had given that stakeholder our full attention with a commitment. If there was something we could do to solve their problem, it would be done.  She’s just a world-class, high-water mark listener.  It was easy for her to come to mind.     Robert Mixon:   And you think that her listening skills enabled a higher degree of respect?    Bill Carpenter:   You know, someone said at one time, you know, I think the greatest skill that she brought to our organization was that anyone in town would take her phone call. And what I take that to mean is any conversation that she had had through her time as county executive, as a reporter, she had earned the respect of everyone that she spoke to. And so there’s a lot of ongoing behavior in how people responded to her … and how people right now miss her in the organization, because she really was perceptive in what the problems were that needed to be addressed, in the collaborative way in which they could be solved.    Robert Mixon:  Thanks. Thanks, Bill. I mean, I had the privilege of knowing Maggie too, not as well as you, but I certainly would echo some of your comments about her ability to focus, to be in the moment, and to make you feel like you were the only person in the room.  I just think it’s a wonderful skill of leadership.  What advice would you give other executives in developing a corp of leaders who actively work at listening to understand versus listening to reply?    Bill Carpenter:   You know, I mentioned earlier, there’s some simple things that you can do. You know, one of them, put your phone in the drawer, turn the computer monitor off, tell the assistant you’re not to be disturbed. Some of the easy distractions, and we all see it, whether it’s at the store, the traffic light, people walking down the street, everyone wants to maximize a moment.  And when there’s a pregnant pause in the conversation, it’s very easy if your phone is there, lights up when you get an email to have your eyes dart to the phone. And what you’re saying to the person you’re supposed to be listening to is that you don’t have my full attention.  So we put those things away.  And then we ask clarifying questions. You know, “you’re talking about a shortage of resources… tell me more about that.”  “Is it because the time constraint is too tight? Or even with more time, you wouldn’t be able to achieve it. But what do you think is the fundamental issue?”   And then for me, one of my guiding principles is: I can’t begin to talk about a solution until the backbrief is done. So before I say, well, you know, here’s what we’re going to do, I need to say, if I’ve understood you correctly, “is this what your experience is? Is this what your observation is?”  “Is this what you want me to know?”   And to get that backbrief done before we talk about solutions. So the outcome of the initial conversation is all about making sure the other person has been understood.  That keeps it empathetic. It keeps it focused on understanding. And one of the things I learned, you know, eight or 10 years ago, is how much of the brain gets engaged when you describe a problem.  And all of us have had this experience. We walk into our boss’s office with a problem. And in describing the problem, an answer becomes readily apparent.  And so if you’ve done a good job just getting the person to clarify the question, often the solution becomes self-evident to the individual. So again, focus on making sure they’ve been understood, that you’ve heard their body language, that you’ve heard their tone of voice. Are they getting frustrated with this?  Are they excited?  Share that, not just the words that you’ve heard, but the tone and body language that you’ve picked up as well. You’ll find them to be fully engaged and be looking forward to the next time they get together with you.    Robert Mixon:   Okay. Well, thanks, Bill. What else would you like to share with the audience about your leadership style?  What’s been most effective in your journey, in your career?    Bill Carpenter:   One of my observations about my leadership style is, throughout my career, is people get to know me. They trust me. They want to do business with me. That they have the sense that I have their best interests.  And I think the foundation for that is the top value in my personal leadership philosophy is integrity. I want to do the right thing. I want to do the right thing when nobody’s looking.  I want to do the right thing when no one will care. And I think people pick up on that.  And they’re willing to begin to attach themselves to someone that has integrity as a core value, that if I put my lot in with this person, do I need to worry about counting fingers after a handshake, or my wallet after a transaction?  But the next step is, my personal mission statement is: “to help improve the people and systems I care about so that individuals and the communities around me achieve more.”  And as you work with me, I think my team knows that my win is when the team wins, and it’s when the community is well served. And so, putting together a team that’s looking to improve the community collectively, being led by someone whose core mission is to improve the individuals in the community as best as I can, really has put together a team that I would say is second to none in public transit, really would not be where I am in public transit without the folks that have come together and said, ‘let’s go on that journey together with you, Bill.’     Robert Mixon:   Okay. Well, thanks very much, Bill. What else would you like to talk about today as we’re having this conversation?  Are there other tools that you think executives can put in their toolbox to continue to create this culture of caring?     Bill Carpenter:  I think one of the elements about leadership, somewhere along the way, each leader needs to understand someone else’s behavior is just someone else’s behavior. Too often as a leader, you see someone and they say, why are they doing that to me? And to the extent that as a leader, you can begin to just understand each person comes from their own life experiences, that they have their way of solving problems.  And when you can allow them the freedom to be their best selves, that not everything is a challenge to the leader, that they just have a different way of achieving that end state and providing a clear end state so everyone knows what success looks like. Allows others to be their best selves. And when you can allow them to do that, another leader I admire said, well, ‘the stars begin to align.’   And as you get the stars to align, well, then bigger goals are possible. People feel ‘I don’t have to do it Bill’s way. I can do it my way.’   And as I allow them to be the best leader they can be, their teams are led by great leaders.  And then it’s a matter of ‘leaders leading leaders, who are creating other leaders’ instead of a leader managing people to accomplish some tasks. And when you make that fundamental change of everyone leading their own area to get to a desired end state that they all understand, amazing, amazing things can be accomplished.    Robert Mixon:   That’s great Bill. I appreciate your insights very much. And I think the audience will echo some of that appreciation because the concept of servant leadership that I think you’re describing is about us.  One of my favorite colleagues or people I admire is General Stan McChrystal, United States Army retired. He’s written some great books. So, “Team of Teams” is one of my favorites.  And there he talks about executive leadership being more of a gardener than a chess master.  And I think when you’re talking about creating a listening culture, you’re talking about becoming a gardener more than a chess master, then more than moving the pieces on the board, you’re nurturing the seeds of leadership growth.    Bill Carpenter:   Really allowing everyone whatever their seed is to flourish as best they can. Make sure you get the weeds out of the way, but allow each to flourish in their own fields. Celebrate their accomplishments.  I like what he had to say very much.    Robert Mixon:   Great Bill. Well, it’s great having you all here today as part of the podcast program. I’ve certainly learned a lot and I hope the folks in our audience have learned a lot.  You know, we’re going to continue our journey together with the podcast series.  I’m pleased to announce that we’ve got several other senior executives who graciously agreed to come on the podcast and talk about each of the Big Six principles and some of their lessons learned. Next time, we’ll be talking about ‘trust and empower,’ another of the Big Six principles.  But I think Bill, you’ve contributed tremendously to all of our learning journey progress today.  And I want to thank everyone for joining us and look forward to the next podcast.  And Bill, certainly wish you and the Rochester-Genesee Regional Transportation Authority all the best in your reimagined efforts, which I think will serve all of us in the community more effectively in a caring and listening way in getting them the support they need to enrich their lives.  Thanks, Bill.     Bill Carpenter:   Thank you, Robert.  Don’t forget! Subscribe to our podcast to get our latest episodes right away, as well as have access to our past episodes. Did you find this podcast beneficial? If so, please consider sharing it with your audience. It’ll just take a second, but could improve someone’s work habits for a long time to come. The post Podcast Episode 3: How a Leader Should Listen – Interview with Bill Carpenter, CEO of the Rochester Genessee Regional Transportation Authority appeared first on Level Five Associates.

Where is your azimuth? Have you set one for your company or organization? In Episode 2 of Robert’s leadership podcast, he dives into the importance of defining your azimuth. After all, an effective leader must define the direction for his or her organization.   Podcast Episode 2: Set Your Azimuth   Robert Mixon:   Welcome to today’s podcast in the Level 5 series. Today’s topic is ‘setting the azimuth.’  You know, of the Big Six, ‘setting the azimuth’ is the first.  The second is ‘listen.’  Third is ‘trust and empower.’  Fourth is: ‘do the right thing when no one’s looking.’  Fifth is ‘when in charge, take charge.’  And sixth is ‘balance the personal and professional.’  All of them fit together, but today I want to focus on ‘setting the azimuth’ — because it is first for a reason.   Briefly, I think I’ll just discuss at this point in time what an azimuth is because a lot of people ask me that.  Technically, the azimuth is the cardinal direction that you have, your organization has… such as a compass bearing, for those of you that have a scouting background.  I learned the term from my military career, and I thought it would have great utility in leadership.  And so I’ve been working over several years to translate it in that regard. Plus, it’s a cool word.  You know, a lot of people just don’t know it. They ask me about it. And so I like it from that context.  Just by way of departure here, you know, that there are organizations and leaders that don’t have much of an azimuth, if any.  One of my favorite stories, being a deep intellectual, is Alice in Wonderland. And, you know, Alice goes to the Cheshire cat and asks him, well, “which road do I take?” And he basically asks her, well, you know, “where do you want to go?”  She says, well, “I’m not sure.” And then the cat says, well, “then any road will get you there.”  And the importance of the azimuth is just that.  I don’t think any organization that’s going to be successful in the information age of today and that of tomorrow … can afford not to have an azimuth.  And so today I’ll talk about what the components are, in a leadership context… of how do you set your ‘compass bearing’… and then give you some ideas about how you can bring it to life in your organization.  I think it’s the first among our Big Six because it may well be the most important one in getting you where you want to go.  So what’s our Level Five ‘azimuth’ consist of? Well, it’s got four key components.  The first is the mission. Who are you? What do you do? And why do you do it?  The second component is the leader’s intent. What’s your end state? What are the key tasks that you have to perform to get to that end state? And what’s the purpose? What’s the why for each of those?  The third component of the azimuth is your values. What do you believe in as a team or an organization? You know, what does your heart tell you … as well as your head?  The fourth component of the azimuth is culture. What are the behaviors that you’re going to represent and expect everyone else in your team to represent … to bring those values into action?  So of the four components of the azimuth, you’ve got to build all four of them, put them together, and then stay with it. Be persistent … and don’t just set your azimuth and go on to something else.  It’s got to be part of your daily life.  Now let’s talk about what it takes to build it.  First of all, I think you’ve got to have a team effort to do this.  Don’t just sit down and say, “okay, I’m now going to write our company’s azimuth” because then you’re going to be the only one who owns it.  You’ve got to do it as a team and I think you’ve got to build it and put it in writing. Sitting around the table and talking about it is not going to make it so.  I think you’ve got to put it in writing, all four components, and make sure that your leaders do it as a team and then having done it, they go out and message it as a team.  The next component here is they’ve got to review it often. There’s a saying that if you want someone to receive a message and process it effectively, you’ve got to tell him or them seven times.  I think in my experience it’s more like 70 times. You’ve got to have the consistency of the message to really have it sink in. And so once you build and set your azimuth, you’ve got to carry it forward.  It’s got to be part of the way you behave, think, operate as an organization, not just today or tomorrow, but next week, next month, next year.  Now we’ll talk about each of these components individually.  First, the mission.  I’d rather you take your leadership team and you start with a blank sheet of paper in developing your mission. Get them all prior to coming together as a team to sit down and write out what they think our mission is in terms of who are we, what do we do, and why do we do it. I would schedule a specific meeting for this purpose.  In fact, I would make it into an entire day if I could with your leadership team to talk about setting your azimuth. It’s that important and we’ll go back to that a little bit later.  Have them all bring in their mission statements that they’ve written out, one or two sentences, come together as a team, and then put those different mission statements up on the wall.  First of all, I think you’ll find that they are not aligned as clearly as you think they would be.  Let me give you an example of an outcome of this brainstorming session in developing your mission statement of who you are, what you do, and why you do it.  You’ll end up with one or two sentences that everybody at some point, there’s consensus that this is, okay, indeed our mission statement.  And I’ll use mine as an example of Level 5 Associates. So here’s the Level 5 mission statement… “Level 5 Associates provides those we serve with values-based leadership development, coaching, and strategic planning to build and sustain world-class cultures.”  So one sentence for us.  Let’s think about it and dissect it a little bit.  Who are we? We’re Level 5 Associates.  What do we do? We provide those we serve with values-based leadership development, coaching, and strategic planning.  Why do we do it? We do it to build and sustain world-class cultures.  So if you can think about those three components in the Level 5 mission statement, I think that’ll help you and your team as you develop your own.  But again, have them do it individually prior to this ‘Azimuth’ meeting… then come in with those different versions, put them up on the wall, and see how you can ‘brainstorm’ bringing them together into that concise one or two mission capture of who are we, what do we do, and why do we do it.  Be prepared to do several attempts of this.  I’ve seen organizations where they had an initial Azimuth meeting on a mission statement. They came in, having brought their own individual, drafts in, talked about it, and then said, okay, ‘let’s sleep on it and come back in tomorrow and revisit.’  That’s a good technique too.  So consider that as a way of ‘getting at it.’  Maybe you have an initial meeting that’s a little smaller and shorter in duration, and then you have a follow-on meeting after people think about the different versions that they’ve had a chance to look at.  The next component of the Azimuth is the leader’s intent.  This is another tool I learned in my military career as a way of taking the mission statement and expanding it to identify the discrete components of the mission statement.  Those components are: the end state, the key tasks we must do to get there, and the purpose (the ‘why’).  Here’s an example of an end state in a leader’s intent… “By December 2022, we will be the leading provider of financial services in our four-state region.”  And I’ll say that again, an ‘end state’ of an organization.  “By December 2022, we will be the leading provider of financial services in our four-state region.” Note there’s a date here, a time frame associated with the end state. And I’ll explain a little bit more why this is important a little bit later.  With the end state established, you and your team can now identify the key tasks associated with that end state. The key tasks are ‘must-do’s.’ They’re not ‘nice-to-do’s.’   So these are the muscle moves that must be in place at that time frame of end state. And again, going back to a time frame, that gives you a specific goal.  If you simply say “we’ll be the leading provider of financial services in our four-state region,” you don’t have that ‘time factor’ to drive the organization to achieve that end state.  And the other part of it is it’s going to be much harder to have measurables to track your progress. And as we all know, in the world of any type of organization, ‘that which is measured gets done.’  So let me give you an example of some of the things that I’ve seen organizations develop as ‘key tasks’, just as benchmarks for you to think about.  One, “we have a bias for action.” Two, “we promote two-thirds of our leaders internally.” Three, “our turnover rate is less than 10%.” Four, “we have a fully functional internal communication system.”  Now, each of those four are just examples, just as the end state was an example. But I think you can see from the way they are captured here that they are discrete.  And in each one, you’re going to have management plans that reside inside those key tasks, which typically will have a 12-month time horizon. But you’ll be able to measure achievement progress against the success of those key tasks because those key tasks must be in place by December of 2022, or whatever date you decide.   Typically, two to four years is the time frame that I’ve seen in most companies when they’ve been setting their azimuth for that end state.  How many key tasks should you have? Well, in my experience, four to eight is about the right number, depending on how you define your end state.  But again, these are must-dos.  They’re not nice-to-dos.  So, the condition setting for that end state are what drives the key tasks that you and your team come up with.  Remember to include the purpose in the leader’s intent as well, the ‘why.’  Explain the reason these key tasks are key tasks.  So, let’s say if you have a bias for action as one of your key tasks, why is it essential? Well, one why would be the bias for action enables us to move more quickly than our competition to adapt.  And I think when people understand the why, they’re going to be more prone to ‘go after it’ because they can buy in.  The third component of setting your azimuth is establishing your values. Values are the organization’s DNA, what you believe in.  Some leaders believe that you can assume that ‘everyone knows what our values are.’ I’ll tell you that’s a poor assumption. We have to define our values to explain not only what they are, but what they mean.  Here are some I’ve helped leaders of different organizations develop with their leadership teams.  Again, like the key tasks and other examples of the azimuth, these are just examples.  Values:   One, integrity. Doing the right thing, our word is our bond.  Two, family. We value each other as more than just co-workers.  Three, trust. You can count on me — and us.  Four, respect. We hold each other and those we serve with dignity and appreciation.   Remember to develop these as a team because they will drive your culture.  And again, there’s no specific number.  I gave you these four examples that I have observed in leadership teams as they have developed their values as an organization, their beliefs in what underpins their behaviors.  So these values now will drive your culture.  The final component of setting your azimuth is establishing your culture.  As I describe it in my book, “We’re All In,” … the culture is your ecosystem. These are the behaviors you expect that everyone on your team represents.  Culture brings values to life.  Let’s look at a representative list of cultures I’ve seen captured in organizations as part of their azimuth.  One, we do things on time. And that ties to the value of respect.  Two, we do what we say we will do. That ties to the value of trust.  Three, we celebrate our successes… and learn from them, as well as from our failures. That ties to the values of integrity and family that I just mentioned earlier.  And then fourth, we communicate and create understanding. And that ties back to family, trust, and respect.  So, what we’re talking about in culture is identifying the behaviors that we expect everyone to represent every day.  And each person across the organization can tie his or her behaviors to the values. And if their personal values nest with the organizational values, then you got a real chance of success with that person being a long-term member of your team.  So these components we’ll review again.  One: Mission. Who are we? What do we do? Why do we do it? Keep it to one or two sentences.  Two, what’s our intent?  What’s our end state with a time frame associated with that? As I mentioned earlier, normally two to four years would be your horizon.  What are the key tasks that we must perform to achieve that end state? You know, what do we look like in terms of those key tasks, those parameters at our end state?  And what’s the purpose? Why are we doing them?  Third : what are our values? What do we believe in as an organization? What’s our organizational DNA? And fourth, our culture. How do we behave in order to bring values to life?  I’d recommend you devote at least a half day, if not a whole day, to setting the azimuth with your leadership team. And you may want to go at it with a mission broken into two components, do day one ‘mission,’ day two ‘mission.’ Then when you reach consensus there, go into the other three components of the azimuth.  But it’s going to take some time to do this. And I don’t think you can do it electronically. I think you’ve got to do it face-to-face where you can share the body language and understanding as you have the conversations … and agree to disagree sometimes too.  We can help you do this in terms of a workshop framework to set your azimuth. You can contact me.  But if you think you’re too busy for setting your azimuth, I’d encourage you to reconsider that.  Think about the benefits of setting your azimuth. Here are just a few of them that I’ve seen and experienced.  Setting your azimuth creates a stronger sense of alignment, which is a big challenge for most of us.  Next, it improves your level of buy-in. When people participate in setting the azimuth, they have a much stronger sense of ownership of the cardinal direction of the organization… ‘Where are we going? Where will we be in two to four years? What does it take to get there? … What’s my role in leading and putting my shoulders to the wheels so that this end state comes to life?’   Third, setting your azimuth helps develop clarity. That’s one of the biggest questions I get when I go into different organizations is “How do I develop clarity? … How do I develop a more common level of understanding of what are we doing and why are we doing it?”  Next, I think setting the azimuth creates a sense of belonging. When people know where we’re going, they can more easily determine where they fit.  One of the great exercises that I would encourage you to take and put as a tool for your toolbox is ask the people in your organization what they do every day that contributes to the success of your mission. A lot of people don’t know, but if you ask them, they start thinking about it. But of course, if you don’t have the mission, intent, values, and culture, that question becomes much more difficult to ask.  So, as you build your azimuth, think about how you can engage the whole organization in belonging and being part of that azimuth.  Next, you can set the conditions for a strong and viable strategic plan. A strategic plan is a more comprehensive framework for the organization.  I think setting the azimuth is an initial step, but building that plan and then having that plan come to life because you measure benchmarks of those management plans I talked about earlier that are bringing that end state to life, now you’ve really got a very specific focus for the organization.  And the next, I think, value add, you know, ‘what’s in it for us’ is you begin to grow leaders who ‘get it.’ You know, when you have conditions like a bias for action, people are going to do the right thing when no one’s looking and they know what right is.  They know it and they’re going to do it because they own it.  And having that sense of purpose, having that azimuth helps you grow leaders who say:  “Okay, that’s what right looks like. I want to make sure that in my team, my members understand they belong.  They understand where we’re going, what it takes to get there. And I’m going to help enable them to do it. I’m going to recognize them when they do it well.  And we’re going to learn from the times when we don’t do it so well.”  So, there’s this ecosystem that we’re talking about developing really that becomes a culture of engagement, what I like to call a culture of commitment.  I’ve seen organizations where they had a culture of compliance, where you were expected to do things because you were told to do them.  I think in creating a culture of commitment, we have a clear sense of purpose, our azimuth is set. We all know where we fit. We have a role and we’re proud of it.  And we know we’re going to be recognized for doing well. And we know we’re going to learn from the times, not only when we do well, but when we don’t do so well as a learning organization. I’d say saddle up with your leadership team sooner than later.  If this isn’t a top priority for you… maybe it should be. Set your azimuth and then sustain it through persistence and leadership.  That’s where the great organizations emerge from those who are really good.  And I’ll be glad to help too. Enjoy the journey!  Don’t forget! Subscribe to our podcast to get our latest episodes right away, as well as have access to our past episodes. Did you find this podcast beneficial? If so, please consider sharing it with your audience. It’ll just take a second, but could improve someone’s work habits for a long time to come. The post Podcast Episode 2: Set Your Azimuth appeared first on Level Five Associates.

Is your dream to attain a position, or is it to leave a lasting legacy?  In Robert’s debut podcast, he gives an overview of The Big Six Leadership Principles® and what it means to be a ‘Level Five’ leader.   Podcast Episode 1: The Leadership Journey is Not a Destination   Robert Mixon:   Hello, I’m Robert Mixon and welcome to the Level 5 Associates podcast with today’s topic being, ‘The Leadership Journey is Not a Destination.’  You know, it’s kind of interesting to consider what we want to be in our journey, what we want to be when we grow up as leaders.  I’ve asked a lot of leaders throughout the course of my experiences:  “What’s your dream? What do you want to be when you grow up?”  “Are you looking to achieve a position or a legacy?”  And I find that a lot of leaders I’ve dealt with really haven’t been asked that question or they haven’t thought about it — or both.  And when they do think about it, they tend to think more in the construct of a position than a legacy. And yet, I think if you look at the leaders you admire the most, there are qualities about those leaders that you respect, right? So, in reality, the opportunity to achieve a legacy is probably far more enduring.  And the leaders that I know you and I probably admire the most were ones who left a legacy — regardless of their position.  So, then I’d ask you to consider: what’s the legacy you’d like to have? And how can a set of principles, such as the Big Six principles, help guide your actions to bring your leadership dreams to life?  Let’s talk about the Big Six just as an overview.  The first of the Big Six is called ‘Set the Azimuth.’ And I know for many of you an azimuth is kind of a strange term. I took it from the military, but we’ll talk about it some more and I think give it some clarity as we go on in our journey.  The second principle is ‘Listen.’  The third, ‘Trust and Empower.’  The fourth, ‘Do the Right Thing When No One is Looking.’  The fifth, ‘When in Charge, Take Charge.’  And the sixth is ‘Balance the Personal and Professional.’  So these six principles are enablers. And through our work together, we’ll talk about how the journey, your leadership journey, can be part of a process where you take the Big Six enablers and you bring them to life.   Second, we’ll talk about what does it take to be a servant leader? And why is the concept of servant leadership so important in the employment of these Big Six principles? In achieving the legacy that I think most of us really want.  John C. Maxwell and other authors that I respect very much have really defined five levels of leadership. And in our journey, I think we should consider where we are in those five levels, and perhaps where we can go.  The level one leader he talks about is a ‘positional’ leader. People follow you as a level one leader because they have to, because the name tag says so.  The level two leader, in Maxwell’s view, is a ‘permissional’ leader. People follow you because they want to.  The third level in Maxwell’s model is a ‘production’ leader. People follow you because of what you’ve done for the organization.  Level four is ‘people development’ leader. And here he says people follow you because of what you’ve done for them.  And then the ultimate level, level five, he uses the term ‘personhood,’ which I like very much. At this level, Maxwell says people follow you because of who you are and what you represent.  So for us, I think as leaders, we need to consider, do we want to have a legacy? What should that legacy be? What’s our dream? Can we use the Big Six principles as enablers to help us in that journey?  Can we adopt and employ the concept of being a servant leader?  And then — of the five levels of leader, where are we now? Where would we like to be?  I think we’d all like to be level five leaders. But as Maxwell says in his book on level five leadership, very few of us ever get there.  And again, it’s a journey, not a destination.  He uses coach John Wooten of UCLA as his example of a level five leader. Having that personhood.  I had the privilege of being around General Colin Powell for a period of time when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  And I think he was and is a level five leader who embodied that ‘personhood.’  You know, Coach Wooten and General Powell are people that we followed because of who they are and what they represent.  So as you establish your dreams of who you want to be as a leader, if you’re willing to accept the fact of that legacy, what you leave behind you, if you will — then you have an opportunity in the course of your journey to achieve far more than you would if you simply sought a position.  With the Big Six, a servant leader mentality, and the five levels of leadership, how do you embark on your journey? How are you going to do this?  I think first and foremost, you’ve got to set your own leadership azimuth.  Here we go again, back to that term. So what is an azimuth?  Well, azimuth has four components in our leadership conversation.  The first element of the azimuth is the mission. And I’d ask you to consider: what is your mission? One or two sentences.  Some of the most elegant mission statements I have seen are: “I want to enable leaders that work with and for me to become better leaders than I am, to create an environment where the organizations that we serve are more successful, and that I’m able to help enrich people’s lives in the process.” I think that’s a pretty good mission statement. But the key is to develop your own.  Think about it. It’s not something you just sit down and write. You’ve got to do it a few times.  The second element of your leadership azimuth is what’s my intent? Intent is another term I took from the military because I thought it was useful. And it has some key components in it.  For example, what’s my end state in my leadership career?  Second is, what are the key tasks I have to perform to get to that end state?  Starting from the end state and coming back to now. You know, it’s easy to go from here to there. But I think that’s an incremental approach. And you tend to achieve more if you go from starting with the end in mind and coming back to now.  But those two components, the end state and the key tasks that you have to achieve to get there, are what capture the intent. And the intent really is sort of a foundational element of the mission.  When you write that mission statement out, then you can see what the intent is inside that mission.  The third component of azimuth is, what are my values? What are my personal beliefs? What do I believe in?  And then the fourth element of the azimuth is, what’s my code of conduct? I call it your personal culture. How am I going to behave to bring the beliefs that I have into practice?  So setting your leadership azimuth is the first element, I think, in establishing your journey of achieving that legacy.  Next, I’d say get an assessment of your current leadership level from Maxwell’s levels of one to five.  Why are people following you now? There’s several ways to do this. Start with asking your direct reports where they would place you in those five levels. Do it anonymously. Then ask your peers and colleagues.  We at Level Five Associates can help if you need us to.  I would start keeping this very simple, very simple direct question. And the best way to ask the question, like I said, is anonymously. And then have them submit the feedback so that you can read it that way, and they’re not in a group dynamic session. You’re going to get a lot more, I think, honest feedback of where are you in those levels of one to five from ‘positional’ up to ‘personhood.’ And then think about that.  When you get that input from your direct reports and your colleagues, think about it and say, “okay, is this reasonable?” And if it’s reasonable, then I would say, you know, be honest, confront the facts, and say, “all right, where do I go from here? What do I need to do next?”  And that’s where I think developing a personal leadership philosophy really takes hold. Most leaders I’ve had the privilege of being with in my journey have not been familiar with the personal leadership philosophy idea, which is really writing out a statement of who am I and what do I represent? Sort of codifying your personal azimuth, if you will.  But once you sit down, write out this personal leadership philosophy, share it with some people that you trust… I think in the course of three to four iterations, you’ll end up with a one-page document that really does capture, okay, who am I? And what do I represent?  Now, some of it can be practical as to who you are today. Some of it can be aspirational as who you want to be.  But when you write it out as a personal leadership philosophy and you sign it and date it, you have now made a commitment to everyone that this is the person, the leader, that I am going to behave as… Who I believe I am and how I’m going to behave.  And then there’s some expectations I would capture in this personal leadership philosophy. What do I expect of myself? And what do I expect of you? And what can you expect of me then?  So there’s some several formats out there for doing a personal leadership philosophy.  I like the one where you state this is their mission statement up front. These are my values. These are my expectations and behaviors and what you can expect of me.  Sign it and date it. And after some careful consideration, I think you’ll find that it has real meaning for you. And it will evolve over time.  But what you’re doing is you’re starting your journey with a renewed enthusiasm for being all you could be, to use the famous Army term or PR phrase they used in the Army, which I really think was cool. Once you’ve written the personal leadership philosophy, the next stage in your journey will be to develop a personal action plan. To bring that personal leadership philosophy to reality in measured ways.  And that’s going to be another, I think, diligent effort on your part. But you can see here that persistence will pay. As you identify, what do I want my legacy to be?  What are the steps I should take within the Big Six principles to get there? And then capturing your personal leadership philosophy, who you are and what you represent, then your action plan can be the vehicle that takes you forward.  I don’t think it’s easy to become even a level three or four leader for most of us.  It’s much easier for us to default back to the ‘positional’ style.  I grew up in a world where a lot of the leadership was directive in nature. You know, “do this.” The ‘why’ conversation really didn’t take place. We didn’t talk about intent very often, or at least not as often as we needed to in terms of the ‘why.’  I think it’s important now, as leaders in our journey, to establish who we are and what we represent, to be the best we can be, to establish the ‘why’ when we’re communicating with people.  I don’t think we can be directive leaders in the way ahead. I think we have to create more of a culture of commitment in our organizations where we strive to achieve the level of ‘personhood’ that John C. Maxwell talks about.  And we work very diligently to serve others as leaders and enable them to grow, to become better leaders than we are.  But it’s a very deliberate effort. This is not something you can do for a day or a week or a month.  It’s a journey. And it’s without a destination because I don’t think we’ll ever get to the ‘summit’ of leadership. We’ll never be the ultimate leader.  But I think we can be a heck of a lot better leaders than we would be if we just kind of rolled with it, if we stayed in the day-to-day, if we just did as we were told and told other people to do and didn’t help develop them and nurture them as leaders. Because, first of all, we weren’t really leading ourselves very well. So how can we lead them?  And what we’ve been talking about so far today is leading yourself, seeing yourself as others see you and in a realistic way, how you think you are in your five levels of leadership where you are now, level two, level three, why you’re there, what you aspire to be in terms of writing your mission statement and your personal leadership philosophy and then translating that into a personal action plan as a leader where you’re going to stay with it. You’re going to have the persistence to grow. You’re going to be sometimes when you take your lumps.  And this is not a linear progression, by the way. You’re simply not just going to go from level one to two to three to four to five. There’ll be times that you change positions or your environment changes, personal or professional, where you may move up to level three and then come back to level two for a while.  You can’t expect that everything will be a cause and effect journey that goes linearly.  It’s more like actual mountain climbers do where they sometimes go sideways for a while, sometimes come back down and then, you know, incrementally and through learning, find their way closer to the summit. In our leadership journey, as I said, I don’t think we’ll ever get there.  So as you look at yourself and what you want to be when you grow up in your legacy, you know, today is the first day of the rest of your life. So take advantage of the opportunity. Sit down and think about what do I want to be?  What is my mission statement? How am I going to bring the Big Six to life to help enable me in my journey? (And I’m going to use it to enable others. But we’ll get to that in further conversations.)  But going back to review them, think about what those big six principles are. First, set the azimuth.  Second, listen. Third, trust and empower. Four, do the right thing when no one’s looking.  Five, when in charge, take charge.  And six, balance the personal and professional.  As we go forward in our discussions, we’re going to work and hone in on each of those six principles to dive deeper into what they mean and what practical tools you can bring to bear to use them yourself in your own journey and, perhaps more importantly, bring them to life in others so that they become truly better than you because they are master practitioners of those big six principles and those enablers.  And they understand inside all of it, at the core of the big six, are the values that we hold dear. Having the right values. It’s a privilege to lead, not a right.  And those of us that have been privileged to lead should never take it for granted. We should always seek to develop others in the course of our journey so that they truly do grow. And in that context, I think we will grow too.  Growth is a wonderful feeling. And when you see it in others and feel it in yourself, it’s probably one of the most rewarding emotions I think we can have as leaders.  So what happens next for us?   Well, I say in our Level 5 podcast, you’re going to see that we’ll home in on one of the Big Six on a regular basis to give you some tools for your toolbox.  We will have some interviews with prominent business leaders in various communities to ask them about their journey, how they have employed some of the Big Six tools to enable them to grow and particularly to grow others. I think that’ll be helpful to you as you build your leadership toolkit.  I’d encourage you to start today on developing your mission statement. The initial elements of your personal leadership philosophy. Share those with some others and then start that assessment process of asking others where they think you are in those five levels that I mentioned from John C. Maxwell. Not only those are direct reports, but some of your colleagues.  Remember that the five levels are positional, permissional, production, people development, and personhood.  On our website, we publish a blog every other week where I talk about some of these topics, usually in a one-page or two-minute video format.  But I’d encourage you as you build your leadership library and you start this personal journey in a more intensified way… do some research and think about some of the principles and techniques we’ve talked about thus far today and see how you can bring them to life in yourself and in your organization.   We’ll continue going in the future so that you’ll have a chance to reflect, to implement some of the tools as you build out your toolbox. And I think you’ll find that there’s a real opportunity here, as I mentioned, to bring to your leadership team a new level of energy and opportunity as you grow and they grow. And I certainly look forward to our work together.  Thanks very much. Enjoy the journey!    Don’t forget! Subscribe to our podcast to get our latest episodes right away, as well as have access to our past episodes. Did you find this podcast beneficial? If so, please consider sharing it with your audience. It’ll just take a second, but could improve someone’s work habits for a long time to come. The post Podcast Episode 1: The Leadership Journey is Not a Destination appeared first on Level Five Associates.