How Do You Get People All In Face of Uncertainty?

0:00 The topics and opinions expressed on the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W four WN Radio It's employees or affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsement for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability, explicit or implied shall be extended to W four WN Radio It's employees or affiliates. Any questions or common should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W four WN Radio. This is Beyond Confidence with your host, d W Park. Do you want to live a more fulfilling life? Do you want to live your legacy and achieve your personal, professional, and financial goals? Well? Coming up on dvoparks Beyond Confidence, you will hear real stories of leaders, entrepreneurs, and achievers who have stepped into discomfort, shattered their status quo, and are living the life they want. You will learn how relationships are the key to achieving your aspirations and financial goals.

0:53 Moving your career business forward does not have to happen at the expense of your personal or family life, or vice versa. Learn more www dots, Dvpark dot com and you can connect with vants contact dancedvpark dot com. This is beyond confidence and now here's your host, w Park. Good morning listeners. Today's Tuesday, and of course it is one of my favorite times of the week because I get to be with you and bring you stories that are powerful and that help you live your best life. So today I want to introduce you to a specially guest, Robert, who has served thirty plus years in our army. And Robert, you know I want to thank you for your services.

1:43 So welcome. Thanks Devia. I'm glad to be here and proud who have been a soldier in the United States Army for thirty three years. It was an honor, absolutely it sits an honor to have you here because we wouldn't have the freedom that we all of us enjoy in our country without y'all. So thank you. So share with us a little bit about your journey as to how did you get into the leadership arena. Well as a as a young person growing up in Georgia and North Carolina, I found myself involved in activities in junior high and high school where I ended up being responsible for others and I found that to be something that I was okay with.

2:36 You know. There was a little discomfort there, but I was okay with it, both in a school environment socially and then in athletics. And so. I became the quarterback of my football team, and I was with the student council of the high school. And one night I came home from a football game and there were two Army football coaches sitting in my living room talking to my father. Soon thereafter, I found myself on the plane the parade field at West Point along with about twelve hundred other young men in July of nineteen seventy, entering a crucible in my life that I had never really expected. I want to play college football. I really didn't want to be a soldier. But I ended up being a very mediocre football player, even though it was a dream of mine. But I was part of what was then the Band of Brothers, and it was all mail at that time. I was successful in navigating my way through a very very attrition based environment called the culture of compliance, and then found myself a lieutenant the United States Army in charge of a platoon of forty two soldiers patrolling the East West German border.

3:46 In the spring of nineteen seventy five, and that's where my journey began. You know, it's taken me quite a way since then, but that's sort of how I ended up at the beginning of my leadership journey. Yeah, and you talk about the compliance leadership, So tell us your experience from back then and what did you learn from that and how did you build that community within the band we that you were working with. Yeah, we. Were brought up in an environment there at West Point which was very compliance based. You know, do what you're told when you're told to do it without question or hesitation, and we're not going to talk about the why. What we want you to do is learn to follow, in many cases unquestioning and comply with a very rigorous set of parameters that we have established over one hundred and fifty plus years and therefore it's proven to work and so we're not going to debate it or contest it.

4:54 So what you had to choose, I was either going to go with it, or if I chose to object to it, then they simply told you to go away. You know, it was that's the way it was. He had the complied with the rules and regulations and the directives and the cultural environment which was oftentimes not very respectful of individuals, and the greater good was always always the priority, and I understood that. I mean, the mission comes first in the military, but they sought to mold us into a somewhat different person as a result of your experience as a cadet at West Point. And you know, it's interesting that, you know, we had a forty percent attrition rate in the in those four years at West Point.

5:45 My younger son graduated from West Point in the class of twenty eleven. He had the same number. Of people that went in with him, you know, the twelve hundred plus men and women at that point in time, and their attrition rate was about eleven percent. Now, you know, what do you think happened there, Devian Well, I think the culture changed from a culture of compliance almost entirely, to a culture of commitment. And that culture of commitment is what I am a champion for now because I believe the buy in and the understanding of the why is essential to be an effective leader in the world that we're in now. But the journey for me was one of evolution, not revolution. As I progressed through the ranks of the army in a culture of compliance and learned as the army changed, I also changed my views about how important commitment was as a cultural standard.

6:45 Yeah, commitment is such a beautiful word that can have such varying nuances and different layers. So when you think about commitment, what comes to your mind and how do you define it? I think commitment is defined by being all in now. Obviously that's the title my last two books. You know, it's a shameless book. Promotion wise, I'll talk about you know, We're all in and the power of being all in as my two stories about developing and nurturing a culture of commitment where people are all in. Now, how do you create that environment. It's not going to happen by OUs mosis typically, you know, you have to be deliberate as a leader in nurturing that culture of commitment where people are all in where they want to belong. I mean, we're basically pack animals by nature anyway, we want to belong.

7:39 But in the world that we're in, in the world of chaos that we're in today, and I think we are in a world of chaos, belonging is much harder than it's probably ever been. It certainly is something that adaptive leaders have to work at every day in order to create that belonging in that by. It absolutely the world that we are in. What are some of the first steps that leaders can do? Because culture is designed by people, Culture is designed by what we are willing to commit, because commitment does take time, and sometimes we may have to go against what may be the norm or what may be expected to keep that sustainability. So what are some of the steps I.

8:28 Think for the first person you have to lead is you, and you have to make a commitment to yourself. You have to decide, Okay. I am going to be committed to being an adaptive leader in an environment of chaos economically, politically, social, aid business, the chaos is there. I'm going to commit to being an adaptive leader to lead effectively through that chaos. So when I coach individuals and teams, I talk about building a personal leadership philosophy. That personal leadership philosophy is a statement of who am I and what do I represent? It starts with a personal mission statement and then followed with your values and then your way of doing things and your commitments and basically it's a charter where you sign it and date it. And in my latest book, I put a copy of my personal leadership philosophy in there so everybody can see it that I wouldn't ask other leaders to do something I hadn't done myself. The second that's the first component.

9:29 You know. The first component is a commitment to yourself and you state that commitment and you put it out there in front of other people so they can hold you accountable to it. Ah, that is the keyword that you're making commitment laced with accountability because commitment can be you know, anybody can say anything that they want, but if you're not held accountable, or if you don't hold accountable other people or yourself, then that commitment has no value because promises without delivery are just empty promises. That's all. So now as we talk about that, after you left the army, you know, where did you go? And like, you know, what was your leadership journey?

10:15 Like two weeks after I retired from the Army as a division commander, I went into a manufacturing company president of manufacturing company, and we went right into the Great Depression of two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine and there was some shock and awe involved in that process. I you know, I didn't have a lot of transition development. It was sort of like, oh, here you go. And that culture was also one of more compliance based than I think it was healthy for us at that point in time. And so I learned some hard lessons. I learned some hard lessons about culture. For example, I thought that, you know, people would emulate behaviors or positive behaviors automatically. Well, soon after I went in the company, someone sent me a picture of one of my employees sleeping on a palett at three o'clock in the morning, said, here's your culture in general. That was kind of a stunning revelation for me to realize that, you know, people weren't going to be all in just because we thought it was a good idea. They were going to be all in if they believed in what we were doing and why we were doing it, and we were willing to invest in them and underwrite some mistakes when people were making honest mistakes, and that was going to take time. It was not going to be you know, as we used to say, throw a hand grenades and the flash to bang time was about a second. Well, the flash to bang time of culture is not one second at all.

11:41 In fact, it's months and even I think a couple of years to establish a culture of commitment in an organization. And some leaders aren't willing to invest in that. You know, in the corporate world, people tend to be more transactional than you know, investment oriented in the people because the return on is not obvious there returning investment of selling a product or service and doing a conversion from you know, candidate to client, that's very tangible in. The eyes of many business leaders. So you've got to work through that understanding in your organization to start to develop a culture of commitment. I learned that pretty quickly when I ended the corporate world that it was not going to happen quickly or easily.

12:24 You're going to have to be dedicated to being an adaptive leader. Absolutely. And when you mentioned about that, oh, just because it was a good idea, we were not going to get the buy in. And there's so many initiatives that happen in any of the organizations, you know, so many organizations as we are talking about AI and a lot of people are thinking, oh, you know, we can just roll out AI it's not just about rolling it out, it's about building that psychological safety and connections. So when you started out with one idea, but when the next idea or next initiative came, what did you change and how did you get to buy it?

13:08 I learned from some very smart people, and I think DVA certainly. One of my mentors that I've worked with was General Cole and Powell as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the most brilliant and capable Level five leaders I've ever known, and he he encouraged me, among other great mentors, that I was privileged to have to establish a framework for developing a culture that people could understand and adapt and keep it simple. So I developed six leadership principles, and those six principles were set the asimuth your cardinal direction. Listen with the intent to understand, trust and empower, do the right thing when no one's looking, when in charge, take charge, and balance. So around those six principles, I built aadership development program. After you establish your personal leadership philosophy, now you begin to nurture the cultural evolution through the leadership development of your organization. Using those big six principles and using practical tools to apply them, because that which is measured gets done. You know, I'm not a very esoteric person. So if you want to talk to me about the right brain, left brain, I'm not your person. But if you want to talk about you know, what works, I can talk about that because I think I've made just about ninety nine point five percent, maybe six percent of all the leadership mistakes you can make.

14:37 I think I've made the vast majority of them, and through that scar tissue, I've learned some tough lessons and I think the application of those six principles can lead to the development of the buy in which creates the conditions for the culture of commitment. And that definitely makes sense because you're listening and you're taking charge committing. So when you talk about making those mistakes, are there like, you know, two or three that kind of stand out from which our audience can learn from. Yeah, I'll give you a couple here. When I was a young lieutenant out there in the in the East German West German.

15:19 Border, in the forest area there near Fulda. You know, I had a platoon of forty two soldiers, ten armored vehicles, all of our weapons were loaded all the time. The Russians were within certainly with a you know, a gunshot distance. We watched saw them every day, and I thought that the best way to give instructions to people was to you know, issue in order and say, all right, we're going to go take this hell over in this part of the sector, and then we're going to orient to the east and we'll have to be there by midnight. Everybody got it, Oh yeah, yes, sir, we got it, okay, And then they'd all get in their tanks and many times go different directions. So I don't know if anybody's ever tried to stop a tank in the dark, in the rain, in the forest in Germany.

15:59 Yet I can tell you that it's not easy a sixty four ton tank. Once it gets moving, you can't holler at it. It doesn't do any good. It's louder than you are, and it's a very difficult problem to undo once you've got it screwed up. So I found out early on they just why asking people if they got it was not the way to confirm that people heard what you think you said. So I learned that the confirmation brief, what we call now the back brief was a tool that really worked if you applied it. So before we dismissed the group to go get on their tanks and go on a mission, I learned that we needed to confirm that they heard what I thought what I thought I said, So we would use the back brief, as I call it now, as a confirmation that they heard what you think you said. In the business world, that is absolutely indispensable as a tool. You know, in a manufacturing company, we often said I've often heard that saying that really bothers me. You know, we don't have time to do it right the first time. We always have time to do it over. That doesn't make a lot of sense. You know, if you're going to do it over, it's going to cost you money between the top line and the bottom line. So instead of chasing tanks in the woods at dark, in the dark, you're trying to figure out why you can't make the profit margin you should be making because you're doing things doing three times because you didn't do it right the first time. So I would say that's one of the key lessons I learned by screwing it up, is that you've got to make sure that people listen with the intent to understand and not just reply. And the back brief is one tool where you can confirm that what they heard is what you think you said, or what

17:32 you heard is what they think they said. And taking the time to do that. If it becomes habit, not episodic, it becomes habit can change the culture of your organization. It's one ingredient in that big six under that listening cornerstone that produces measurable. Results, absolutely, and that is so powerful that ensuring that somebody has got it and that you are aligned on the same thing. So, based on your experience, have you found that there may be one or two key things to kind of remember when you're doing that back brief so that you're full proofing it.

18:18 Yeah, I think that a couple of tools inside the back brief are you know, the fact that you can tell from the individual who's speaking to you, he or she has the body language to a company what they're saying. And it's not always possible if you're not physically in the room. You can do it virtually too, as long as you insist on having a video component to your their zoom calls, well just audio. It's one of the reasons video is important is you can get some body language along with the language itself to give you the I guess, the indication that they did indeed hear what you think you said. I'd also use the idea or the tool of having them recount one or two key nuggets of what they heard so that you know, indeed, they're not just saying, well, I got it, Robert, or I'm going to go do this by this time, but I'm going to employ these milestones or give you these updates as you passed along your instructions, so that they understood that there was a pathway that they're going to follow as well as the end result. And you can tailor that to the group. But I think it helps that clarity. You want to get that clarity that they did indeed understand what they are chartered to do absolutely.

19:36 And those are some of the ways that help people to make sure that you know not only the person that you're sharing with, that they've heard correctly, and sometimes even kind of having them like, okay, here's what we have agreed upon, here's the document. Let's send it out to everyone on the team, especially if it is crucial manufacturing or whether it's a certain initiative. Especially when you don't have the time to do it right, it becomes even more critical to have it nail down and ensuring that everybody's on the same page. So you talked about like, you know another story that you may remember from your leadership experiences.

20:19 Well, one other story resonates with means. I've been in a number of companies in my role at the level five associates where I'm helping them to build that culture of excellence commitment. And then I asked them the question, so what is your asthmas, what is your cardinal direction? And typically I'll get a response as well, we have a mission. We're supposed to make stuff or we're supposed to throw customers, And okay, well that's a mission, I guess, but I think it should be a little bit more understandable inside the framework of who you are and what you represent. So as we work together to build an asthmath, you find out that there is, indeed, in most cases, a lack of clip in you know, who are we and where are we going and why are we doing this?

21:04 So you build a mission statement as a team. You don't build it from the CEO giving the mission statement everybody, you build it as a team. Then the next component of the asthmuth is what is our intent. I'm not a big fan of the idea of vision because I think it is too broad. The idea of intent I got from the military, just as I did the term asimuth. The intent is where you take the mission and you distill it into key components. For example, what's our in state. What is our definition of success? Normally that's a two or three year horizon, but you define success as part of the asimuth development. Then you define the key tasks that enable that condition to come about into a three years What are the key tasks we have the must dues?

21:45 And then the other component of the intent is the why why are we doing this? So you've got the mission and the intent. The third component of the asthmuth is what are our values? What do we believe in? Let's define them instead of just list them. Instead of and loyalty and dignity and things like that, let's define what they are as a team. Then the fourth component is one of the behaviors, our cultural behaviors that we're going to manifest as a team. It's a leadership team the organization to bring those values to life. One of my favorite stories is in a company I was with a few years back. They wanted to have respect as one of their values, and I said, well, how do you define that? And after some you know, back and forth, it came up with okay, we'll define respect as having regard for myself and others. I said, okay, that's great because it's concise and people can understand it right now.

22:36 How are you going to put it in your cultural behaviors? Well, we're going to be polite. Well, okay, that's that's a sort of a broad term, sort of like boiling the ocean. How do we get more discreet in how we're going to manifestors? You know? And I said, how about this one? How about if respect is our value, then our behaviors. One of our behaviors could be we do things on time, sort of a silence than the room. And one of them said, man, I've wasted half my life on bullshit meetings. I said, yep, me too. Meetings that had no purpose, no agenda, no deliverables. They were just random thoughts while someone was out fishing or something like that. I said, why don't we do things on time? If we respect people's time, aren't we respecting them if we start when n we're supposed to, if we have an agenda, if we have deliverables, accountability, If we rotate the spokesperson role in the room so that people have to develop the meeting process and they learn from that, we're creating respect. We're being more than polite.

23:42 We are having regard for ourselves and others. And that company took asimuth and they became very, very successful because when they bought in to the Azimuth, then they were able to understand what the admission intent was and there was I guess you would say in alignment in the company that didn't exist before. Absolutely, Robert, that's such a great point because you talked about and that's one of my favorites is when I'm coaching teams, it's important that you rotate who the leader is going to be, because if a leader is the one who, especially stepping into a meeting and leads with answers, you know, then that just kind of shuts people up sure does not create the space for them to talk.

24:34 So what has been your experience around that, Well. I think the leader of the meeting or the leader of the organization should speak last. I've always been in meetings or ninety percent of them where the leader spoke first, and then he would say or she would say, well what is everybody else think? And then you get the crickets, you know, where you get the well I'm with you, you know, boy a great idea boss greatly, and then they go have the meeting after the meeting and they decide what they really want to do. So, you know, the alignment of the organization is facilitated by the buy in that is created when you get when you gather, when you gather in a meeting, forum or other forums. And I think the leader should be the last one to speak, you know, he or she should be the one that sets sets the meeting conditions in terms of the time, agenda, or at least approves that. But the people in the in the meeting who are attending the meeting should have a role, to have a role in making the meeting successful. And I like to rotate it because it gives everyone more ownership of what's going on in the meeting. You know, I don't want people who are just sitting there figuring out what else they would like to be doing. In many cases too, I find that you don't have the right people in the room for the meeting. You don't want to offend Robert, so you don't invite him, or you don't want to offend so you don't invite her. But you and I are not relevant to the meeting. We can get you know, minutes after the fact. You know, especially with the EI capability we have now, you can publish the minutes in seconds and send them out to people who don't have

26:05 to necessarily be in the room, and they could be doing something more productive for the organization. But you have to condition people not to take it personally. If you're not invited to six meetings a day, you know, the four of which you don't participate in with any active contribution. You brought a couple of two good points. So earlier you mentioned about that so many people are attending meetings which they don't need to be there. So that's one aspect of it. Then there is a second aspect when we talk about, oh, don't take it personally. You may feel bad you are not invited, So how can be amalgam made the two where, of course, you know most of the times. It is the battle of the ego that stands in the way of progress culture transformational leadership.

26:53 What are some of the strategies that or your wisdom nuggets that you could share. Well? As I mentioned dev, I think this is a journey to create in a culture commitment and it's going to take a couple of years, and the persistence here is going to be essential. Once you set your asthm withth as a team, as an organization, now you're have to walk the talk and you're going to have to have periodic checks of your asthmus health, health and welfare of the asthmauth and to see if you actually are doing what you say you will do. One of those and I've seen a lot of companies do this in their behaviors to indicate respect and honor and the other values they create is to have one on one meetings that are indeed deliberate with their team members. When I look at calendars of the most executives, I don't see one on one developmental meetings on the calendar very often, and that's because some executives tell me they don't have time for it, and yet they will indicate to you almost universally that the most important meeting you can have is the one on one. So I get a little frustrated sometimes when people say, Okay, this is the most important meeting I can have, but I don't have any of them, And then they wonder why their team members don't buy in, or they take a lot of stuff personally that they should, even those one on one developmental sessions, if you calendar them and prepare for them and have you know what I call power questions involved in the conversation. One of

28:25 the things you can diffuse is this taking everything personally problem that's going on. You can help condition your team members through your conversation that, look, you know, we are professionals and we respect each other individually, personally and professionally. But just because you don't get invited to a meeting doesn't mean that you're not part of the team and we don't love you and you're not making a contribution. It could be that we value your time right that you could devote your time more effectively to the mission accomplishment in our asthmath right of where we're going. Then you could sit sitting around a zoom call or around the table here with us discussing a topic that's not necessarily relevant to what you're doing. We can inform you of the outcome of the meeting, but you don't have to be part of the process of discussing it, particularly if it's an informational meeting and non decision meeting. You know, meetings only have two purposes. One is information or the other's decision.

29:19 A lot of. Organizations can't sort out which one is which, or they have something in between. But then in reality, the only two forms of meetings that are effective are either informational or decision And if you set that standard, then you can decide who's there, and then you can explain to people why it's relevant for them to be there or not there, and they I think over time most people become conditioned to it so that they are less I guess you would say offended if they're not in the room. I understand. I've seen Hamilton, and I know that you want to be in the room where it happens. But in some points you don't really need to be in the room where it happens, and you have to condition folks to understand that and to understand that what they're contributing while they're not in the meeting may be far more important than what they would be contributing if they were there.

30:04 And definitely that makes sense that conditioning people. But when we are talking about the conditioning, whether we are developing the culture, and as you mentioned that, you know it takes a good couple of years you are going to meet resistance. Because here's what I can say that coming from a neuroscience background, brainy is used to doing what it's used to doing, and now from going from there to helping them adapt the change, because if you have read the studies, you know something that's out there is that I think so there was a study out there somebody had hard issues. I don't know, like how many people were involved in that and they knew what they were not supposed to do, and yet they didn't do it even though it was life threatening. So going back to the culture, Yes, we want to condition the people, but how do you bridge the gap between that resistance to that conditioning or to that acceptance and becoming part of the culture and continuing it.

31:07 I think you know in some cases by in is going to be very very difficult. And I mean you know this because your expertise not everyone is going to actively I guess you would say embrace change. You know, John Cotter and others have described this in some detail about how how change is hard. I think change is hard even if you violently agree with the idea or the concept, because we are accustomed to patterns, we're custom and pattern behavior. What time am I going to work? What time am I going on? You know, what time the kids get out of school? You know, we could go on and on here, right, And so if you if you're going to implement change, and I think in many cases the setting of your asthmuth or resetting of your asthmuth uh, the establishment of the Big Six Principles in your organization is going to represent change, and that change is going to scare some people. They're going to be actively or passively resistant to it. I think the most effective tool that I've seen is the executive acceptance of the fact that this journey is going to have initial buy in, and then it will have subsequent buy in, and then it may end up with people who never buy in getting one hundred percent of your organization to buy in to the concept of the Big Six Principles.

32:26 It's probably beyond the Pale. It's probably a bridge too far for most of us humans, because we are who we are, and some of us in many cases, are going to be resistant to change to a high degree. Others will be tacitly accepting until they see results, and then they begin to emulate the behaviors of others who are now living their personal leadership philosophies and having one on one developmental conversations where they're listening with the intent to understand that Stephen Covey says, and not the intent to reply. So I don't leave. You can convince everybody of the goodness of what you're doing right away, but over the period of time, I think the bulk of people that you want to be on the team will buy in. They'll buy in, they'll want to belong, and they'll see the goodness in terms of the outcomes, the business outcomes, the personal and professional well being outcomes that occur from becoming part of this team of teams.

33:26 Very powerful. Thank you Ofbert and tell us there. How can people connect with you? Where can they find your book? Sure, you can write to me. You can write to me personally at Robert at Level five Associates dot com. Spell out to five, and I can tell you. Unless I'm incapacitated, I will respond to you. I'll respond to you, and let's set a conversation. My website is Level five Associates againstpell to five Level five Associates dot com. You can go there and you can download chapter one of my book We're All In and my book The Power of Being All In for free. You can download it, and i'd encourage you to do that. Read what's there.

34:11 I write short books, not long ones, so I try to get right to the point. The third way you can reach me is through my substack platform, and you can reach me there at Robertmixon Altogether dot substack dot com. Come subscribe, you can subscribe for free. You can see my articles that I publish on a regular basis about adaptive leadership, about the culture of commitment, about application of the Big Six principles, and we can begin a conversation. Or I can certainly work with you individually or with your leadership team on this journey of transition from good to great, which I think adaptive leadership provides.

34:56 Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your list down. Are there any last thoughts that you'd like to share. Thanks Divia, I would just like to share with the audience. First of all, I applaud the work that you've been doing in helping people understand the essence of adaptive caring leadership and the need for commitment to the people that we represent. I just want to be part of the solution and help others and give back at this stage of my journey so that all of us can become more effective people and more effective leaders as a result of knowing each other.

35:36 Well. Thank you so much for your recognition and one thoughts. I really appreciate it. Thank you for joining us and I'm sure that you'll continue doing great work and driving impact. Thank you wonderful audience for being part of her family because without you, those share would not be possible. Reach out just like as you always do, let us know how we can serve and support you and living the best life you can. And thank you one for making the show technically possible. Be well and take care until next time. Thank you for being part of Beyond Confidence. With your host v Park, we hope you have learned more about how to start living the life you want. Each week on Beyond Confidence, you hear stories of real people who have experienced growth by overcoming their fears and building meaningful relationships.

36:27 During Beyond Confidence, Vpark shares what happened to her when she stepped out of her comfort zone to work directly with people across the globe. She not only coaches people how to form hard connections, but also transform relationships to mutually beneficial partnerships as they strive to live the life they want. If you are ready to live the life you want and leverage your strengths, learn more at www dot dvpark dot com and you can connect with dvat Contact at dvpark dot com. We look forward to you joining us next week.