Unlocking the Secrets of Exceptional Leadership and Employee Engagement with Tom Willis

Are you leading your team to its fullest potential or unknowingly holding it back? Unlock the secrets to fostering a thriving work culture with executive coach Tom Willis, as he joins us to discuss his book, "The Great Engagement," and the transformative role leadership plays in employee engagement. Together, we examine the dichotomy of leaders being both the source of workplace disengagement and its remedy, emphasizing the shift from blame to self-awareness and proactive change. By aligning personal purpose with organizational missions, we unveil how anyone—from CEOs to janitors—can find profound meaning in their work, painting a vivid picture of leadership that goes beyond mere profit and loss statements.

Prepare to refine your listening skills, arguably the most underrated superpower in a leader's toolkit, as we share practical tips and personal anecdotes that reveal the art of truly hearing your team. In this heartfelt exchange, we celebrate those lightbulb moments during group workshops and the ripple effect they have on leadership development and organizational rejuvenation. We also dive into the nuanced journey of aligning personal purpose with the broader goals of an organization, challenging the traditional compliance model and offering a more inspirational, purpose-driven approach for lasting engagement.

In our final reflection, we ascend the mountain of personal and spiritual growth, tackling the dynamics of fear and courage within team settings. Learn how to turn fear-based reactions into love-based responses, transforming everyday 'have to' tasks into 'get to' opportunities for growth. By demystifying the practices of exceptional leaders who cultivate cultures of inspiration, we invite you to reconsider the storytelling power of leadership. Join us as we extend a warm invitation to continue this conversation beyond the podcast, sharing your leadership triumphs and trials as we journey together towards exceptional leadership and engagement.

You are invited to join Leadership Vision Online, free to the next 150 members! This new community allows you to connect with like-valued individuals, network, and learn from others while elevating your leadership skills through exclusive resources, live events, Q&As, workshops, and member-led discussions.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Do you want me to start at the name of the book? Yes, yeah, let's start.

Speaker 3: 0:02

Yeah, let's start with the name. Yeah, that's the part that we like. So, tom, did you write a book?

Speaker 4: 0:06

So Tom, the name is a great engagement, but the word resignation is between that and it's crossed off.

Speaker 1: 0:12

It's no secret that we're not in a great state of the world right now when it comes to engagement, and so this problem continues to linger and it probably will for the next several decades. Frankly, what do we do about that as the key? As leaders, we can blame the world, we can blame the next generation, or we can look in the mirror and get to work and try to create more engaging cultures.

Speaker 4: 0:34

You are listening to the Leadership Vision podcast, our show helping you build positive team culture. Our consulting firm has been doing this for the past 25 years, so the people are mentally engaged and emotionally healthy. Hello everyone, my name is Nathan Freeberg and in this episode of the podcast we're talking about leadership culture and the power of engagement with Tom Willis, executive coach and co-author of the new book the Great Engagement. In this discussion, linda Brian and I talk with Tom about critical challenges and opportunities leaders face in today's disengaged world, emphasizing the role of leadership in fostering a culture of engagement and aspiration. Now, there's a real symbiosis of themes and philosophy between Tom's book and the work that we do at Leadership Vision. He's just a real kindred spirit and it was an absolute delight to chat and exchange ideas here.

Speaker 4: 1:28

Throughout his book and our conversation, tom Willis explores the nuanced dynamics of leadership and its undeniable impact on organizational culture and engagement. The book the Great Engagement invites leaders to confront the ongoing crisis of engagement in the workforce, suggesting that leaders are both the problem and the solution, advocating for a shift from blame to introspection and action. His insights are grounded in years of experience and a methodology that blends centuries of wisdom with cutting-edge brain science. He and his team promise tangible results to clients through their company, phoenix Performance Partners, by fostering direct, compassionate and productive conversations, particularly with those at the helm of organizations. Now, throughout this conversation, tom shares some lovely stories and insights illuminating this alternate approach towards transformative leadership. From a CEO's revelation about personal accountability to the infectious passion of a janitor who sees her work as a mission. Willis's anecdotes exemplify the profound impact of leadership that aligns with a higher purpose and engages individuals on a deep personal level.

Speaker 4: 2:39

Now, as you listen to this today, I want you to pay attention to really three things in particular and reflect on how these things apply to your own leadership or culture. First of all, the significance of confronting and utilizing one's fears as, I guess, stepping stones towards effective leadership. Second, the importance of creating a coaching culture within organizations that emphasizes teamwork, open communication and mutual support. How you doing that? And third and finally, how can you yes, you, dear listener cultivate an environment that inspires and empowers individuals to connect their personal aspirations with the organizational mission?

Speaker 4: 3:20

Now the show notes include some links to the book and other resources, which you can find in the episode description on whatever podcast platform you're listening to this on, or on our website, leadershipvisionconsultingcom. Ok, so here's our conversation with author Tom Willis on the power of engagement. We hope you'll find some valuable insights into becoming a more conscious and engaging leader. Enjoy, tom. I'm wondering if you could, to kind of start this off after somebody reads this, your book. What is your hope of what you want people to get out of it, what you want leaders to take away from it?

Speaker 1: 3:59

Oh, that they are the problem and the solution. How's that for somebody, nathan, that's great.

Speaker 4: 4:03

Say more about that. I'd like that a little bit.

Speaker 1: 4:06

They've met the enemy, and the enemy is them. Yeah, it's really rooted in having done this work. I've been doing it for eight years now. My business partner's been doing it for 33 years. Before him, there was people doing this work, and so one of the things we really pride ourselves on is that this is not an academic, theoretical model. It's a model that we've been using for years and improving and adjusting and adding the latest in brain science. We actually look at it like 2,000 years of wisdom with the latest brain science, and so that's really what makes it work, and we actually promise results to our clients, which is pretty unusual in this world. So that resonates with folks, and the reason that we're able to do that is because we don't avoid the conversations that need to be had, and that almost always means very direct, very loving, very helpful conversations with the CEO or with the school superintendent, because they are likely causing 80% of the frustrations that they're facing. Oh, interesting.

Speaker 2: 5:07

OK, there's like six things I want to ask about that.

Speaker 3: 5:10

Pick one, pick one.

Speaker 2: 5:11

Is there a story that you want to share, something that really highlights the process? The people Like just that statement that you just shared.

Speaker 1: 5:20

Yeah, there's another story of a CEO, brilliant guy. He had about 1,000 employees and everyone knew him and he knew everyone. First time we met him, in fact, before he even came to say hi to us, at the front entrance he was talking to one of the janitors and it was this immediate like oh wow, this guy is something special. And he's got multiple locations all over the state Fast forward, frustrated that they weren't getting results. And by result I don't mean financial performance, although that was part of it, I mean health care outcomes, quality and culture, survey results, those sorts of things. And about halfway through we do a pretty intense two and a half day retreat towards the beginning of our work with clients. And he had this epiphany of oh my gosh, people aren't doing what they say they're going to do because I'm not doing what I say I'm going to do. And it was really that simple but that profound for him that it woke him up in the middle of the night because he was unconscious to his behavior. He was unconscious to that. Well, he was the CEO, he was busy, it was OK to say yes to things and not always deliver. So he got Uber, focused on letting his yes be yes and his no be no. So he actually started saying no to more things, but when he did say yes to, he would deliver every single time and within a few months, literally it just started to cascade down and throughout the organization.

Speaker 1: 6:51

And so the essence of that story is really that we are unconscious beings.

Speaker 1: 6:58

You know, there's a great book called the Social Animal by David Brooks, and he talks about this research that's done at the University of Virginia about how we are unconscious beings, that we can process 11 million pieces of information at any given moment, which is unbelievable and a miracle and amazing. And it makes sense when you think about it, because we don't have to think about walking and having our heart beat and talking and all these things at the same time. It's we can do so much and we're only conscious of about 40 of those, so 40 things out of 11 million. So we just aren't as conscious or as rational as we think we are, and so the work is we think. And why most of this work doesn't work, why billions of dollars are spent every year and it's wasted on culture improvement, is because we miss that fundamental point that we are unconscious beings. And then, if we're going to improve our culture. It starts with us as the leaders. We've got to become much more conscious so that we can then steer towards a different future.

Speaker 2: 7:56

So when you started with, 80% of the problem is with the CEO or the executive leader, the great story of this leader having an epiphany, and then you talked about the cascading impact of that around, some of the self-reflection and self-awareness that the leader had. Is part of your approach to really get the attention and the like that, that conscious awareness of the CEO? First, is there something with the team work they that you're doing to promote that, or is there some unique Combination between the two?

Speaker 1: 8:29

yeah, we, we always do our work in teams. We don't really do any one-on-one coaching. What we've learned is that you, you can't impact their culture unless it's a team-based experience, and so we always start at the top. We always start the CEO or the school superintendent and their executive team, so that's usually four or five, six, seven people, and we create an experience over typically about a five-month engagement that really creates those insights for all of them, has them create what we call a coaching culture where they're all able to just coach each Other and help each other, rooted in the idea that coaching is only coaching if it's asked for, which is really important, and we we often miss that point and that you know, we've got this shared sense of purpose, we've got this shared sense of mission and that we're not going to manage each other, we're going to manage agreements. And so really, at the root of it is the team leadership, management and coaching and kind of coming at those from different angles, we think all three are equally valuable.

Speaker 1: 9:29

Even though there's lots of articles out there, you know, leadership is all about leadership. It's all about coaching and management instead. We think that's not helpful and not true. You need all three that you just need to apply them in different situations and at different Sort of degrees. And too often we go to managing our people, which is why you'll appreciate this gallop data that 23% of our people are engaged. 51% of people are looking to leave their jobs. They're actively looking. It's it's. It's a bit scary when you look at the overall Levels of disengagement.

Speaker 3: 10:40

So when you say that you are, you know, guaranteeing results, is it an engagement measure, or or what kind of measures do you put in place for that guarantee?

Speaker 1: 10:50

Yeah, great question, linda. It really boils down to what are they trying to accomplish. So we'll spend probably three to four to five hours with the CEO before we even get to a proposal. So we really understand what they're up against and what we think we can do, because we have a methodology. But every one of our engagements is customized based on what we're trying to accomplish and it's rare, but sometimes we'll be like, you know, I don't know if we can help you. So we really want to make sure there's a fit and then we can actually do deliver on that promise.

Speaker 1: 11:18

So a few examples that could be on the soft end of the spectrum. You know, I just want my team to stop coming to me for answers and Stop. I don't feel like a babysitter anymore. Or it could be as sort of hard, if you will. As you know, we're hemorrhaging cash and we need to Turn the ship around, and we had one Organization actually and then the other side of the state here that was hemorrhaging cash and they luckily they had a huge fund balance to tap into several million dollars. But if they didn't turn it, turn that around, it was not sustainable, obviously. So that's really what we went to work on is to to take them from the red back into the green. So it just like I said, it just depends on what they're trying to accomplish for you, tom, in your role.

Speaker 3: 12:02

What's your favorite part of it Like? What makes you? Obviously you love the whole thing or you know, I'm hearing that this is part of a calling for you but oftentimes there's, there's one component that you feel the most like, tom. What? What moment is that?

Speaker 1: 12:18

Yeah, that's a good question. I think my superpower is probably different than that question. In a way, I think my my superpower, if you will, is to listen the greatness out of people, but it and, ironically, my favorite thing to do is when I'm you know, when I'm working with the group, because we'll often cascade this work down. So if you start with the top six people, then the next level leadership may be 30 or 40 people, and that's a lot of fun when you're in front of a group for a couple days and you're you're trying to provoke their thinking by being provocative and trying to challenge them and to get them thinking and Really open up the room. To me that's. It's probably a little bit of a general adrenaline high, but those are.

Speaker 3: 13:00

Those are the really fun moments because when people feel, heard Right, that the light bulb goes on, or their eye, you can see it visibly. You can see the visible changes in their face or in their posture. Oh, you really heard me, saw me, believe to me.

Speaker 1: 13:18

Yeah, because it's not. We always joke that training is for puppies, so we don't do leadership training. You can't train to have the kind of insights, the sort of profound mind changes, the transformational changes by training them. You just at least I haven't seen anybody they can, unless you're maybe a dr King. So it's a process of inquiry.

Speaker 1: 13:37

You know, so much of our work is just getting people to think and to talk out loud with each other and to find shared values and shared commitments and shared understandings. It is a lot of Just sort of listening to them, putting an idea out there, getting them something to react to, but then Listening to what the room has to say. So that's fun too is I heard a great comment that coaching is being professionally lost. You know, when you get up in front of a group of 50 people or 40 people and you're not really sure where the conversation is gonna go, there's always that fear of like this could go sideways quickly. But that's part of what makes it fun, I think, for us is just being able to dance in the moment.

Speaker 4: 14:17

I. So, you said, your, your superpower is Listening. The potential of people is that, you said.

Speaker 4: 14:23

Great greatness, greatness. So I I'm glad you said that, because I there's a quote I wanted to ask you about. When you're talking about the coaching relationship, the challenge is for us to become coachable, to listen and learn, not to defend. Talk about that as it relates to, I guess, coaches or leaders. Listening is such an overlooked skill. There's a great quote that we've used another podcast episodes from pulp fiction about. You know, are you something that listens or just waits to talk? And so maybe expand on that, that quote from the book. But also I don't know if there's practical tips I'm using air quotes of like how does someone become a better listener and maybe get a little of that Superpower that you have?

Speaker 1: 15:03

well, it's what you guys are doing right now, right, you're, you're listening that out of me and sort of tapping into what I have to offer the world. So it's not terribly complicated, but it's really hard to do and the essence of it is Asking open-ended questions. It's, it's layering, it's taking something that somebody said and putting it in your question, you know, and so that you're you're showing the person one that you're listening, because I just sense something you said and I'm asking open-ended question which provokes thinking, it provokes inside, it provokes thoughts that you know, maybe the person's ever never had before. What I find myself doing a lot is keeping a piece of paper next to me and just jotting down when I have a thought, so I can get it out of my head On the paper and go back to listening to that person, because otherwise we get stuck Listening to our own thoughts, which means we're no longer listening to that other person. And then, when they're done talking, I'll reference back and then I'll realize, well, that that's no longer relevant or they already answered that.

Speaker 1: 16:06

Yeah, so that's, that's one very Tactical thing, but it's a really powerful thing to do, but there, but the core of it is really just Asking open-ended questions, which is almost impossibly difficult when you're, when you're beginning this journey, because we all want People to agree with us, unconsciously. Yeah, so we'll say things like Don't you guys agree? And we just ask to close an equation and if you're the boss, you know, if you're the CEO, it's actually a wasted question because there's only one answer and it's yes, boss. And we don't realize that we're doing that to people. Even when we Intend to ask an open-ended question, we want to know what people think, and that's not one of those examples where you know CEOs get frustrated. How come my people never speak up? Well, because you're not actually asking them to speak up, and it's not because you're bad, it's just because you're an unconscious autopilot.

Speaker 2: 16:57

Yeah, tom, when you share that, I love that example because you're talking from, like the context within the team and the impact that that's having on how listening Can really directly impact what's happening within that team engagement.

Speaker 1: 17:12

It's no secret that we're not in a great state of the world right now when it comes to engagement, and you know, the great resignation was a pretty popular term and we think that's behind us, but I'm not so sure that it is. You know that Gallup did a study and found that 23% of people are engaged in their work, which is an uptick, which is sad, right, like what was it before? 21%, and we're celebrating an uptick to 23%. So this problem continues to linger and it probably will for the next several decades. Frankly, what do we do about that?

Speaker 1: 17:42

As the key, as leaders, we can blame the world, we can blame the this generation, right, this next generation. Or we can look in the mirror and get to work and try to create or engage in cultures and so really try to think about okay, what, what is that? The heart of it? What's, in a really simple, elegant way, what's engagement all about? What are people engaged in? And so we determine that it was more than just sort of putting out a vision and creating inspiration. That was actually aspiration, that if I have an aspiration for something, then I actually don't need you to convince me, I don't need buy-in, because I already bought it, it's mine, I own it. And so the first job of leadership is not just to inspire, which is great, to put spirit into people, but to then to the point where the person then says, yeah, that's what I want, because I want it, it's my aspiration. So that part of it is absolutely critical. And then the second part is empowerment that we need to empower folks to be able to do their jobs, and that sometimes means we need to empower ourselves. We need to stop waiting for our boss or the culture or the world to give us it, and we just need to step up and empower ourselves. And that's when we can really be on fire, because we've got the two key ingredients we have an aspiration, we have a future that we desire, that we're excited about, that we own, it's intrinsic and we're empowered to make it happen.

Speaker 1: 19:10

When you do those two things, there's engagement. We are engaged in the purpose, which is another thing that we should spend a second on is we've got all these engagement surveys out there, but we don't actually talk about what it is. We're talking about what do we engage in? And our assertion is that, if you want engagement, the real engagement is in the higher purpose. It's in something beyond ourselves. It's in something that serves a greater world. It's way, way, way beyond a mission statement or a vision statement or values exercise Not that those are bad, although most of them can actually create the opposite of what they're intending but it's about being on a mission, and so if you want people to be engaged, then figure out a way to get them engaged in the mission. Yeah, tom.

Speaker 2: 19:58

I'm hearing a couple of things here that I want to just maybe tease out a little bit or just maybe ask for some clarity, because, as you were talking about aspiration and that piece of the future that we own and then the empowering of ourselves, like that's really where the empowerment happens. That seems to me I don't want to oversimplify that, but are you speaking to an external, extrinsic motivation as well as the internal self-awareness as a motivation to then get us to the place of empowerment, or am I oversimplifying that?

Speaker 1: 20:29

Yeah, it could be both. So I'll use psychological safety as an example. Perfect. So psychological safety is a very hot word now. Lots of people are talking about it.

Speaker 1: 20:39

The challenge is, in our opinion this is again this is just our opinion that psychological safety can't stand on its own because we're giving up too much of our agency. We're saying, well, I can't be safe unless you, my boss, or you, the company, make me psychologically safe. Well, good luck with that. That's near impossible to do because we're all very complex. Everybody has different backgrounds. We don't know everybody's history, we don't know what traumas there are. So it's important to work at that. It's important to try to create a psychologically safe team.

Speaker 1: 21:11

But then every person needs to be willing to exercise psychological courage too, that even when it doesn't feel safe, you need to speak up, you need to share your opinion, you need to share your thought, because that's actually what reinforces and makes it even more psychologically safe. So you've got to have both sides of the equation. And this is often missing is that we do one over the other and it becomes well for lots of reasons, but because it's sort of popular, so many of these come and go concepts through our cultures that we're just like talking heads. We don't even know what it means, but we're like, yeah, that's what we do around here too. It's great. And so this is one of those concepts I think that we don't slow down and really think about. Well, how do I create a psychologically safe environment? Well, I've got to help create it, but I've also got to nurture an individual sense of psychological courage to speak up, because too often we let fear get in the way.

Speaker 2: 22:07

That's really okay, you fear courage, psychological safety, psychological courage. You're talking about these really intimate and delicate relationships, as well as some very powerful and transformative relationships between these two, what some people would think are oppositional forces. So I like how you're drawing these together and inviting people to create a different kind of relationship between the two. My question is around your word engagement, and how then you tied it to a higher purpose and then you also mentioned it's more than a mission statement, or it could be more than a purpose statement, depending on what the company uses for their vocabulary. Tom, what I want to ask is, when it comes to that higher purpose, are you asking individuals to tap into what their higher purpose is like, their internal sense of meaning and belonging, as a way to almost transcend the purpose of the organization? Is that where you're going with that?

Speaker 1: 23:07

concept. Yeah, I think that's a good summary, brian, is we come at this from a pretty different angle than most, in that a lot of times and I was guilty of this when I was a CEO I had a couple hundred employees and every summer we'd go off and do a retreat and we'd sort of go through the vision statement, mission statement and values and check them off the two list and be like, okay, cool, we'll be back next summer, right, completely missing the point. This wasn't something to do. This was a way of being that we had to lead every single day. We had to create that inspiration every single day, and so in many organizations we think the outcome is the mission statement. It's not. It's not even close. In fact, in Enron's case, one of their values was integrity and it was etched in marble wall right in gold.

Speaker 1: 23:55

So in some cases it's actually BS and people walk by and they're like what a bunch of BS, right? So it creates the opposite of what we're trying to create. So, as leaders, we got to Not the mission. Statements aren't hard, you know, we, I think we do need them, but that's not the mission. That's not the mission. At best it's a reminder of the bigger, bigger mission behind it, and we just have to be willing to talk about it every single day.

Speaker 1: 24:20

So back to how we approach the work. We always start with the individual and our book walks people through that. If they want to do their own exercise, they can do that in the book and just think about what is your life purpose? What's that? The essence of who you are and what you want to be, and what's your future you aspire to. And and when we help people Figure that out, then you try to figure out Okay, how does that map on to the purpose of the organization? Very, very different than what we tend to do, which is here's the purpose the organization. Figure out how to map your life onto it or get fired right like it's. It's a compliance.

Speaker 1: 24:54

It's a compliance model, not an inspirational model. So, yeah, we always start with the person, and I don't care what you do by that. We've worked with engineering firms in Chicago, we worked at nonprofits, we were to schools. It does not matter of convinced, unless you're just a complete Sort of self-serving, egotistical maniac. Like most people on this earth want to do something that's bigger than themselves. In fact, the most inspirational person I've met in the last eight years of doing this work was a janitor at a state university. Can you say, can you share more about?

Speaker 2: 25:28

that? What was the? We have that story to yeah, the part of him that was so inspirational.

Speaker 1: 25:34

Yeah, I did a little program with a bunch of janitors and at Wayne State University in Detroit here and Frankly I'm happy and I'm like, what am I doing here? This is like Not what we typically do. I'm not sure how I got in the situation and then Karen started talking and Like our jaws were all in the desk just listening to her because she spoke about how she comes to work to throw down for these kids, because they deserve honor and dignity and respect, because they're the ones that are gonna go out and change this world, and like she went on and on and on. It was like it still it still makes the hair on my neck stand up.

Speaker 1: 26:10

She was so on fire for what she did that she didn't need a boss to get buy-in to the mission. She had her own aspiration, she had her own sense of purpose and she, she empowered herself to make it all happen. So there's a woman that came to work on fire to do what she did. She was tremendously engaged even though, frankly, all around her was dysfunction. No offense to Wayne State, they're just a large organization and that stuff can happen when you've got large organizations.

Speaker 3: 26:40

That's a beautiful story. We were, we did some work at a school in Asia and we got to work with the board members to every single teacher, aid, administrator and when we got, to these grounds when we worked with grounds and facilities, we noticed an emotional, a real emotional feel to the group, and so we started to ask them, like why they did as they were introducing themselves.

Speaker 3: 27:05

So why, why did you do your? Do you do your job? And there's one gentleman, his lip started to quiver and he said my role is to turn the lights on because of children can't see, they can't learn. And it was this, it was almost this. Do you know who turns the lights on in your school right? So, as you're, you're, you know, recounting the story of Karen. How is your work helped you define, refine your own sense of purpose?

Speaker 1: 27:34

Yeah, I've stopped trying to define it as what I've found, linda's. I used to write it down, I used to run a whiteboard and now I just have an image of a mountain in Colorado. My favorite place on earth is telluride Colorado, and just the majesty of the mountains Reminds me of my purpose, which is I'll say it differently right now I've never said it this way, but you know helping people to really climb the mountain of life. You know, I've got a Jeep Wrangler. I kind of like that.

Speaker 1: 28:02

I adore, I love the, the energy and the affect that you get when you're in the mountains and the clarity and it's cool and it's crisp and it's beautiful and there's sunshine. And when you get higher and higher up the mountain you can see Further and further and you can have have a whole different perspective on the world and on life. And, frankly, it can be tough sometimes too. There's boulders, there's rocks, there's. Sometimes you slip and you fall and you cut yourself up. Our goal is to help people to grow. My goals to help people grow, and then the ultimate end of that if I'm talking to somebody that shares my faith is really when we grow, only when we climb the mountain of life like that, we're growing closer to God. So to me, that's the ultimate image. So every time I talk about it, I don't worry about what I'm gonna say, I just talk about it.

Speaker 3: 28:50

Yeah, we often find that image and story are more powerful than wordsmithing. A really good statement, right? Because even Mission statements, purpose values, they're all detected, they're all detected, and then we have the charge to live them. So, thank you, thank you for that. Oh, brian's dying for another question.

Speaker 2: 29:07

Tom, as you're working with groups and with that great metaphor of the mountain and I put the Jeep Wrangler in there too so, with that idea, and I know that some of the things that you talk about in the book is about overcoming fear and really facing opposition and challenges with a sense of courage, and I know that the greater self-awareness people have, they see a close relationship between fear and courage. What are some of the things that you've learned in working with teams on how people move through fear, or do they embrace the fear and face it with courage? Like, what's the relationship that you've seen as people have tried to ascend their own mountain?

Speaker 1: 29:50

That's a big one, brian. I'm trying to figure out where to start. Brad's dad was a great guy. I never got a chance to meet him, but he was one of these 19-year-old pilots in World War II. You know just an amazing guy. And he said that we're all stuck in a fur-lined rut. It's a rut but it's lined with fur, so we kind of like it and that is our comfort zone.

Speaker 1: 30:12

It's good. It's designed to keep us safe. It's kept us alive for the millennia. You know our amygdala.

Speaker 1: 30:18

I don't know if you guys have heard this sort of latest idea that the amygdala is actually a novelty detector. It's constantly scanning the world looking for things that are new and novel. And so a few thousand years ago, when there was a Saber II Tiger, we wanted to notice it quickly and get into action quickly, right the challenges. Fast-forward to today. We don't have a lot of Saber II Tigers in our life, right?

Speaker 1: 30:43

The closest I ever got was doing a safari in Tanzania, africa, and I almost stepped on a black mamba.

Speaker 1: 30:50

That was fear-inducing definitely fear-inducing because I learned later it's called the two-step snake you have two steps and you're dead. But very little of our day-to-day life do we have existential threat like that, which means that we're left with a different kind of fear, a threat to ourselves. That's imagined mostly, and it could be that email that the person didn't copy us on, or that tweet that somebody put out there, or the Facebook post right, or the way that person looked at me in the hallway and out of a perceived commitment to wanting to maintain the relationship, we avoid the conversation. But the opposite is true, as you guys know, that when we avoid the conversation, the relationship gets a kink in it, it gets a crack in it and that crack widens and the solution is to have a conversation. We joke that one day we're going to write a second book and it's going to be titled Just Go Talk to them, and then you open up the book and it's going to say Just Go Talk to them, the end.

Speaker 1: 31:49

Because so much of our coaching really comes back to that right, Because we have these fears and they're mostly unconscious. We mostly don't realize that there's some fear that's blocking us and we all do it. This is true for me, Like I just was talking to my wife last week. I said, oh, babe, I gotta do this. I have to go give this keynote speech in a few weeks to a bunch of people about our book. And she stopped me right there. She said you have to. I was like, oh, that was good, babe, that was really good. She just woke me up to unconsciously I was thinking I had to do it and as soon as she said it it changed everything for me. It was like I get to, what an honor, what a privilege they're going to pay me to do this. And ever since then I'm looking forward to it, I'm not dreading it, it's exciting.

Speaker 1: 32:35

And again, so all of us do this we don't realize that we're gets back to that unconscious autopilot thing and the trick is to leverage courage, because courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is seeing a fear and then doing it anyway. It could be something small, like riding a roller coaster, or it could be speaking up when my boss is boss is in the room and sharing my opinion. And so the real work, if you simplify the heck out of this that the transformational leadership is, noticing when I've been in a fear, I've been triggered by some fear, and then mustering the courage to flip the script to the other side of the emotional continuum, which is love, and specifically agape love, this idea of putting the other person first, and that's it. That's it. That's the whole difference is you're transforming your thinking from a fear-based reaction to a love-based response, and again, this is true for all of us. So what my wife did for me, Tom, wake up, stop whining about this. And that's my fear, it's about me. What are they going to think of me? What if I don't do a good job? What if it doesn't go well? What if they don't like the book right To? I get to be of service to them in what an honor. And when I get focused on serving others, it makes my own fear start to dissipate. Good question, I don't know, Brian.

Speaker 1: 33:55

I read the book with a great quote from Warren Buffett and he basically says that you know, when you get to my age, you measure success by how many people that you want to love. You actually do love you, and so, for me, I think that is the essence of it. The other day that we all get to work, we all have a chance to work, and it's a huge part of our life. In fact, we spend most of our waking hours at least money through Friday at the office with people that we're on this one unique journey together with, and so why not love them?

Speaker 1: 34:28

Or why not be more engaged? Why not make that a more enjoyable place to be, Because we spend so much of our time there, and so it's not easy, but it is very, very doable, it's very, very possible, and it really boils down to the commitment of the leader. Are we committed to making this place a better place to work, or are we not? Because if you're committed, there's absolutely possible to do that. There's many folks out there that'll be happy to help you and go do the work you know.

Speaker 2: 34:59

Get to work to make it happen, because it will happen if you put your mind to it, Tom this may not get in the podcast, but I likely just did, Because you let us down this little trail about love, love of work. You made it really, really personal. Then you kind of put the fish hook in it and said it's about the leader. I think it puts us kind of where we started.

Speaker 3: 35:18

You like it. You want to go to the mirror and get to work.

Speaker 2: 35:21

Yeah, and a little side note one of the things that Linda and I have been playing around with personally is how much of our work is a love story, and a love story about the relationship, a love story about how we love who we are as people. You bring up love in the last section of what you were talking about. How far do you go into that? When you're working with people and you mentioned agape Do you discuss love and let people define what love means to them? This is just a real curiosity for me, because you're touching another little nerve ending of ours of just that word, Because we embrace truth and love the truth of who you are and the degree of self-acceptance actually love who you are in the midst of. You can fill in the blank there With love. Tom, how do you use that word? How do you coax?

Speaker 1: 36:16

the conversation.

Speaker 2: 36:17

And tease that conversation out.

Speaker 1: 36:20

Yeah, great, great question. We had struggled with that initially. So we start our orientation, which is a four-hour meeting with the team, and about halfway through it we bring up this idea. So we'll start with Elizabeth Kuber Ross, the woman who made the Five Stages of Grief famous, that she made a compelling argument that foundationally, underneath all other human emotions, are two emotions. We suppose those are people throw ideas, we talk about it, we kicked ideas, and so it's all inquiry-based again, and then we ultimately land on fear and love. And then we talk about that, we talk about what that means, and then we move on. And then at the retreat, the two and a half day retreat, we'll come back to it and we've actually identified these 12 cultural mindsets there in the book that we then put our. We build our surveys around our conscious culture survey, our conscious leader survey, which is like a 360. And so people start to see, okay, this is what's going on with our culture. And then a few hours later, oh, this is how I'm contributing to that culture. It's the exact same cultural mindsets.

Speaker 1: 37:28

And then we come back to, well, underneath those, those sets of cultural mindsets, guess, fear and love. And so what's in your way? What's? What's the fear that's got you operating out of nefarious intent and a lot of schools, I can tell you. In particular, avoidance is a big one. We avoid conversations because we don't want to damage relationships, not realizing that the opposite is true. And so you can kind of take them through that journey and have them build the, you know, connect the dots themselves. By the end of that, you know that second day it's like their mind is like oh, now we know exactly what to do. We don't have 50 tasks. We have like two or three underlying root cause issues to go to work on. And if we just go to work on two or three, it's like going to, you know, it's like putting fertilizer on the roots of a tree.

Speaker 2: 38:21

Yeah.

Speaker 4: 38:22

There's a quote fairly early in the book where you're talking about how exceptional leaders understand that every day, like every opportunity that they can as a chance for them to help build exceptional culture, exceptional leaders understand this, and this isn't quotes, because this could refer to everything that we have just talked about. So what could you? Maybe?

Speaker 4: 38:42

They understand everything, yeah, everything, everything you know, fear, like empowering people, helping them understand, like the conscious purpose and all of that. Could you, by way of maybe sharing a story of these exceptional leaders that you worked with, what are some of the things, like the simple daily activities or actions or things that they do that you've seen to really help build this exceptional culture or really empower their people? I think it could be helpful for listeners to walk away with oh yeah, that's a simple thing. I could maybe go and do that today.

Speaker 1: 39:12

Well, the first is to sort out and think about what is your fundamental job, which most leaders don't actually have a good answer to Good one.

Speaker 1: 39:20

I didn't. I was 34. I was a brand new CEO. I was doing, frankly, I thought I did but I didn't. So we think that at the most basic, basic level, your job is to grow your people, period. You're no longer the master problem solver, you're no longer the master get stuff done person. Your job is to grow your people, because if you want the organization to grow, you gotta grow your people. There is no such thing as an organization, it's just a bunch of people. So if you want the organization to grow, you gotta grow your people.

Speaker 1: 39:50

So then from there there's lots of things you can do leadership, management, coaching, which we talk a lot about in the book, which I would highly recommend you read, because we come at those from very different and very unique perspectives. But of those three tools, the one that's most often missing and the one that's most powerful is leadership. It's putting out a future that others take on as their future. It's that aspiration component most often missing, because we don't like it. It's uncomfortable for us, we don't think of ourselves as leaders, we don't think of ourselves as the Dr Martin Luther King's of the world, and so we shrink back into doing stuff and to task management and to chores. So lead, lead, lead, lead, lead and then do some more leadership. And there's a great quote from Zig Ziglar that says people complain that the effects of leadership don't last very long. He says well, that's true, but neither do the effects of taking a shower. But we recommend it daily.

Speaker 4: 40:43

That's. I love that. I've heard that one before. That's a good one, yeah.

Speaker 1: 40:47

We've got to just lead every day. We've got to put that inspiring future out there, because if we don't, it gets filled in with the negative stories that we tell ourselves and we can fill that vacuum pretty quickly with pretty negative stuff.

Speaker 2: 41:00

Tom, I want to thank you for this time. I love your delivery and what I love about your delivery is I can tell that it's intellectual, it's developmental, it's personal. So I love those components in what I'm hearing and how you're answering the questions. Next, I love how you put together two to three word phrases and I know you know this, but the way you do that gives people so much to, you know, hook into, because any one of those phrases might be something that they jot down or remember and they're very quotable. So I like how you're doing that as well. Next, the way that you actually answer the question. Love that because you actually have a thoughtful process and how you thoughtfully respond to what was being asked and you also then bend it towards what you need to say. So that the way you do that, that's awesome.

Speaker 2: 41:59

I've heard podcasts where it doesn't matter what the question is. Someone's going to say what they want and it seems very disjointed. But you're not doing that. You're doing something that's respectful for the question asker and respectful for the listener. So that, I think, is really well. And you're so calm. I love that. Calm meaning you're assured what you have to say and that experience roots you and I think that the way how grounded you show up, love that too.

Speaker 3: 42:28

And your wife is right, you're going to nail that. Talk, yeah, so, and the next one, and the next one, and the next one.

Speaker 1: 42:33

Thank you. You guys are amazing too. I really enjoyed the conversation and you're actually you're doing a great job, reminding me that I need to insert more stories, because I do get a little intellectual sometimes. So that's a huge gift, because I think that's one thing I need to insert more of, and especially when I go to do this keynote in a few weeks.

Speaker 4: 42:52

We hope this episode has sparked a renewed sense of purpose in your leadership journey, encouraging you to reflect, act and transform the cultures that you lead. Remember, the journey to great engagement begins with a single step, recognizing our role in shaping the future of our organizations and the lives of those we lead. Let's embrace this opportunity to create environments where everyone feels empowered, connected and committed to a shared mission. Together we can ascend the mountain of leadership, to use Tom's metaphor, and witness the transformative power of engagement at its peak. Thank you for listening to the Leadership Vision podcast, our show helping you build positive team culture. Our consulting firm has been doing this work for 25 years so that leaders feel emotionally engaged and mentally connected, and we would love to do that for you.

Speaker 4: 43:43

If you have questions about anything that you heard here on the podcast or any of our other resources, please reach out to us. You can send us an email, Connect at leadershipvisionconsultingcom, or visit us on the web at leadershipvisionconsultingcom, or follow us on all the social media platforms. Subscribe to our email newsletter, follow our podcast, leave us a review in iTunes and Spotify. There's a lot of different ways that you can connect to us, but most importantly, we would love to hear what you are doing to build engagement, to build positive team culture, to elevate your leadership, to elevate the leadership of your team. So please reach out to us and if there's any way that we can help you on this journey, we would love to do that. My name is Nathan Freeberg and, on behalf of our entire team, thanks for listening.