Cultural Mapping: How to Build Trust and Influence In Your Organization - Dr. Ben Johnson and Bobby Dodd

Most leaders have a vision, a plan, and the authority to move it forward, but real momentum shows up when you understand how culture is being shaped through trust and influence behind the scenes.

Host Matt Kirchner sits down with Dr. Ben Johnson, Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools at Bismarck Public Schools, and Bobby Dodd, Assistant Principal at May River High School, co-authors of Intentional Influence. They break down how influence really spreads inside an organization, in schools, in business, and in industry, and why the people with the most impact are often not the ones with the biggest titles.

At the center of the conversation is their cultural mapping framework—making the invisible influence network visible. You’ll hear how to identify formal and informal influencers, classify commitment on a five-point scale, and invest your time where it will actually shift the culture instead of just managing noise.

In this episode:

• How to move a team from compliance to commitment—without pressure, politics, or performative buy-in
• Why “trust is the currency of culture,” and how to build it in everyday leadership moments
• The cultural mapping basics: formal vs. informal leaders, a five-point commitment scale, and understanding how influence flows throughout your organization
• The difference between positional power and personal power, and why titles can create action without creating true alignment
• “Energy vampires” and the “pinging effect”: how attitudes spread through a team, and how strong leaders respond in a way that protects momentum

3 Big Takeaways from this Episode:
1. Lasting change is a culture outcome, not a plan outcome. Compliance can produce short-term execution, but commitment is what sustains new behaviors when nobody is watching. The work is to build alignment and trust so people internalize the “why” and carry the standard forward.

2. Cultural mapping helps you lead the real organization, not just the org chart. Influence runs through informal networks of credibility and relationships, and the highest-impact people often do not have the biggest titles. When you identify formal and informal influencers and where people sit on a commitment scale, you can invest your time where it will actually shift the culture.

3. Influence spreads fast, so leaders have to manage energy and momentum intentionally. “Energy vampires” and the “pinging effect” are real, and unchecked negativity multiplies through the network. The goal is not to label people, but to understand what’s driving resistance, address it directly, and redirect influence toward the commitments the organization is trying to build.

Resources in this Episode:

Get the book Intentional Influence: Harnessing Cultural Mapping to Build Commitment

More resources on the show notes page: https://techedpodcast.com/influence

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Transcript

TechEd Podcast Introduction: 0:09

Announcer, this is the TechEd podcast, where we feature leaders who are shaping, innovating and disrupting technical education and the workforce. These are the stories of organizations leading the charge to change education, to rethink the workforce and to embrace emerging technology. You'll find us here every Tuesday on our mission to secure the American Dream for the next generation of STEM and workforce talent. And now here's your host, Matt Kirchner My

Matt Kirchner: 0:38

name is Matt Kirkner. I am the host of the TechEd podcast, where we are securing the American Dream for the next generation of STEM and workforce talent. Today, one of our two guests a couple years ago whispered in my ear that he was writing a book about influence in education, about educational leadership. And I said, when you finish that book, we will put you on the podcast. He did. We are keeping that promise to my dear friend, Dr Ben Johnson, who is the Assistant Superintendent for secondary schools in the Bismarck public school district, Bismarck, of course, in the great state of North Dakota. And he is joined by his co author of the book that we are going to talk about in just a moment. Bobby Dodd is the assistant principal of May River High School in Bluffton, South Carolina. So in reverse order, Bobby, thanks for coming on.

Bobby Dodd: 1:25

Yeah, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm excited to talk about intentional influence.

Matt Kirchner: 1:30

It's a phenomenal book. I've read it, and we're going to talk about it with you and with my dear friend, Ben Johnson. I can just tell you that the moment I met Ben, super like minded folks that listen to this podcast every week, and we have tons of them, know we're all about disrupting the educational model. I didn't have the most particularly glamorous or beautiful pathway through education. I made it through. I managed to get through what I needed to do to get into the workforce, but it was a rough path at many, many points in time. I know Ben, from talking with him, is isn't too much different than I am so so Ben, awesome to have you on as well. And thanks for being disruptor, and thanks for taking some time for us. Thank you. Matt pleasure, always I want to start here because you've been and I've had some really, really deep conversations about disrupting education, and you are, at your heart, a disruptor. You do it the right way. You do it by winning people's confidence, by winning them over, by not shaking things up too drastically, and recognizing that at the heart of every one of these changes is another human life. And we want to be sensitive to that, but we also want to know that in order to move education forward, we have to change. And that's one of the things that I've absolutely loved about getting to know you, if you don't mind. I mean, you've touched on kind of your personal education journey. Our audience is familiar with mine. What was it about kind of your path to education, that through education, I should, should say that kind of led you to wanting to shake the model up a little bit.

Ben Johnson: 2:56

Yeah. So, I mean, I've, I did well at school, but I worked hard. I'm actually a high functioning dyslexic, you know, and have some of those ADHD characteristics too. And so fit in the box, but didn't fit in the box, right? You know, I learned to survive and figure out how passion wanted to be able to extend that, and had influence on a lot of my friends, actually. And it was seen that same impact had great educators, had some that maybe didn't see my full potential at different stages along the way. And so, you know, sometimes you want to be that change in impact that you wish to have experienced yourself, and be that educator that led me into teaching was teaching same thing, and students, you know, gravitated to the to myself and to my content, but I think ultimately is the relationships. And then you also started to have that impact as a young educator, on other colleagues in your department. And so I was starting to see some of that, and had a few experiences where a couple older veteran teachers tapped my shoulder and said, You need to go into education administration. I was like, No way. And now I'm even in central office, you know, to that role, but again, trying to live vicariously and intentionally through other people who have that direct impact with kids that can make that difference in the world. So definitely a little bit of the change agent is trend true, but also knowing need to go with people and work alongside people. So that's really a lot of what has been culminated into this book with Bobby. I love it, and

Matt Kirchner: 4:19

you, as you and I have talked, and my brother won't mind me mentioning it. I have a brother who's dyslexic. I watched him, I mean, and this was back in the 70s where, you know, we were really a long way from where we are even today, in terms of being able to recognize different learning styles and different opportunities to put in front of people. He's now the CEO of the largest cheesecake company in the world. Produces 80,000 cheesecakes every single day. Yeah, it is. And you know, you know this as well as I do. I saw it in my own family. You know, especially in those days, folks who are dyslexic get so good at working around hurdles and working around barriers, and you put something in front of them their whole life, learning through traditional education. Was okay. Well, this isn't working for me. I need to find another way. And then they get into the workforce. And this has been studied, and there's actually Dyslexics are hugely over represented in positions of leadership here in the United States because of that, because they have ways of getting over hurdles, because they recognize that something isn't working exactly the way they suppose it's supposed to. They've seen it before. They just find a way through and. And certainly that is there's a great, I think, testament to the work that you're doing into the career that you've had and, and thank goodness for those folks that many years ago said, Hey, this is a, this is a career path that you should follow, because certainly it has led to all kinds of great things happening, not just in the Bismarck public schools, but as we're going to learn today, well, well, well beyond that, Bobby, we talked about, we talked about Ben's path through school and maybe some of his influences in terms of early career opportunities and experiences that led to the LED to the book. Let's talk to you. You know, what inspired you to collaborate with with Ben on this work, and, you know, talk a little bit about how you would characterize, I think, the book, and give our listeners a little bit of an overview.

Bobby Dodd: 6:05

Yeah, so very similar educational path. I always tell kids that I work with, it's, I think I was on academic probation every school that I was in except maybe one. And I, you know, I have a law degree, so I struggled, but I was one of those people that it took me a while to process, took me a while to figure things out, and then I eventually did, and then also network with the right people in each place where I was. And so that kind of leads us to to the book and itself and and I'll talk a little bit about it then, and kind of take it to Ben, because I remember this day in Chicago that Ben and I were sitting on the river, beautiful day, sunny, and Ben came to me, and we were sitting down, and we were talking about the book and about intentional influence, about the thoughts that he had behind the culture mapping framework. I'm not even sure we didn't have a name for it then, right, Ben, it was still just the framework. And so Ben started talking about it, and I started thinking about my educational experiences and how everything and then at that time, I was still, you know, I was, I was a leader in school, and so I was a principal at that time. And it all comes down to relationships. And Ben and I did some coaching a little bit with some other leaders around the country. We always heard the same thing. It was, was always well, you know, I do this well, but I I have a few people, or a few staff members, or some students, or some parents who who do this, and it brings my culture down a little bit, or it hurts our culture. And so then started telling me about the framework, I think we had some, napkins out, or some or some paper and and he started jot some things around, and I'll slide it to Ben now, because he knows how deep it affected both of us that day when he was when he was talking to me about it.

Ben Johnson: 7:55

Yeah, I think that most leaders have experienced a time where you have resistance that's kind of creeping in, or you had momentum, and things just start to stall. And what we really have looked at is that a lot of times, everyone thinks it's through that Christmas tree, that typical hierarchy, that I just say the orders and just falls on down. But the reality is that it's to that part about the Dyslexic of seeing kind of that visual mapping that people, it's almost like a chemistry atom that's combined, right? Different people are connected to different people have different shapes sizes, and that relationship and bond is tighter in some spots. And that's really when people have a relational connection, when they have trust, when trust is that currency belief that I can follow it you. That's how we scale initiatives. That's how we get people aligned to the belief of the mission and the vision of where we're headed. So we believe that it's up to us as leaders to get the culture you build, not the one you merely want, and that you don't just have to accept it as status quo, but rather, you can intentionally work and foster that, but it's not going to always flow through you. If you do it right, if you build the capacity and others so that you're going far together with a team that's aligned from yourself out to others and across the organization. So really, then we started putting that, and how does it become an ongoing process that you intentionally look at, create a map and then use that to figure out what's my next steps. Where should I do the next work? And we'll go a

Matt Kirchner: 9:24

lot deeper in terms of what that process is. I should mention to folks that we are. We'll link the the ability to order the book up into the show notes. So I've got it right here, by the way. So as soon, as soon as Ben TechEd me and and said, Hey, I finished the book, and it was literally, like, 15 seconds later, I was on Amazon. I had it ordered. It showed up two days later. I've read it, as I mentioned, absolutely, absolutely terrific work, and I love the way that you guys center around culture. Let's talk about that a little bit. I you know, even taking a half a step back, you know, you get the culture you build, not just the culture you want. And even, even further back from that, I'm a believer that you either. Define as a leader, what you want that culture to be, and then work toward to your point building that culture or it's going to happen by default, that it's not a question of, Do I have a culture or don't die? You do have a culture in your organization? The question is, Are you actively managing and leading that culture? I always hearken back to the work of Patrick Lencioni, who's a terrific, terrific author. You know, what he says is that our culture is basically the answer to three questions, where are we going? Why do we exist, and and what attitudes, beliefs and and behaviors are absolutely necessary to get us to our goals? And if you answer those three questions, that's really, you know, some would call that a mission and a vision and core values, but it's really the answer to those three questions, at least as far as he's concerned. Let's talk about educational institution. Now, I should point out that this book has awesome content for really anybody who's leading any organization, and so it's not just for educators. And I can tell you, as someone who runs and is involved with a lot of different businesses, there's great, great lessons in here for all walks of life, nonprofit business and education, but in as much as the two of you both hail from the world of education. Maybe, Bobby, your question for you, how would you kind of define or look at the culture of an educational institution, whether that's a whether that's a high school, a school district, a university, at Technical Community College, is that different than any other organization, and kind of what would you say is the building blocks of a culture of an organization like that?

Bobby Dodd: 11:20

No, I don't think it's any different. I like what you just said. I think it's really about, you know what, what is reinforced, what's modeled, you know, what's tolerated in the building or organization. And then you go and you look at, you know, or do students, staff, do clients, does your organization? Do the people in there feel safe? Do they feel valued? Do they feel challenged? I think you look at all those things, and Ben, and I talk about this a lot with other people, it's, you know, that's the big part of intentional influences, is it's built on relationships. And so there's foundation pieces I just mentioned, you know, they all start with relationships. So if somebody's going to feel safe, if they're going to feel challenged. If they're you know what you're going to model. You want to do all those things. You got to get to know people. You got to build those relationships. So, you know, in my perspective, in my experience over the years, it's your original question about it, was it just schools, or is it organizations? I mean, Ben and I talk about this all the time, even with teams or clubs. You know, we look at it like intentional influence. This book can help help a coach, it can help a general manager, it can help an athletic director. Because, you know, the core, the foundation piece, is all built on relationships, and this gives you a framework to get from point A to point B. If you're wondering, well, how do I start? Where do I go? You know, intentional influence has the framework for you to do

Matt Kirchner: 12:43

that perfect. And, you know, one of the things that you mentioned, and I it echoes one of my really, really key beliefs about leadership. Bobby, you mentioned, modeling the right behaviors, and then, and then it comes down to kind of what you tolerate, if you will. You know, my, my kind of three word, three legged stool behind leadership is I, you know, leaders get the behaviors they exhibit, expect and tolerate. You can ask somebody to do something you're not willing to do yourself, and that's not modeling the right behavior. That is, do as I say, not as I do. It'll work for a while, but it doesn't work permanently. And then, if you don't set the right expectations and tell your team members what winning and what good looks like, and what success looks like. It's really hard to even know what you're marching for, and it's not fair to them, because you haven't set an expectation. And then, if you have team members to for whom you're modeling the right behaviors, for whom you have set the right expectations, who for whatever reason, aren't meeting those expectations, maybe because of something they're doing, maybe because of something you're doing, tolerating anything less than meeting expectations is a really, you know, a common downfall of leaders, I think, a lot of times, especially early in their career, when they may not be used to holding people to account or looking somebody in the eye and say, Hey, we need to do better here. So I really like the way that you characterize that aspect of culture. Certainly not any different for an educational institution as I'm hearing, than it would be for any other organization you know, Ben Bob, you mentioned relationships. You mentioned all three of the tenets of the of the book, that you're building culture, not just through those relationships, which Bob You mentioned, but also through trust and influence. Give me, give me a little bit of flavor on each of those. And then I'll ask the same question of Bobby, talk about relationships, trust, influence, what are they and why are they so important?

Ben Johnson: 14:22

Yeah, I think, you know, everything functions like we're humans, right? And so much of our work is interdependent with one another, and so you hardly anything done, whether it's in our education or whether it's in the business world, nonprofit team organization, it's all through relationships. It's not done in isolation. And I really think that trust is it's like that currency for culture. If I trust you, I know that your your word is gold, and I'm going to be able to depend upon it. And so because of that, then I'm likely to be open with those that I have relationships. With and those that I trust to be able to take that and HA and incorporate that, or go along with something, knowing that, that we're going to be all aligned and and, you know, you talk about different organizations, it's funny that, you know, I have several educator friends whose spouses are more in the business field, who have picked up the book, and they've started to steal it a little bit, because what you had talked about is it falls apart when people aren't aligned. But what body, and I think really have tried to outline here is most people stop at that, or they see it in isolation. They're not trying to map out a team, a department or the entire organization to see, okay, who's really on board and where are they at and if I know who's on board, I can start to figure out, Where can I build capacity to help them start influencing, to get greater alignment within the organization, within other fellow members.

Matt Kirchner: 15:50

So trust is the currency of culture. I don't think I've ever heard that. I'm gonna, I'll give you credit a few times. I'm just gonna flat out steal it. That's really good. You talk about being genuine and being, almost vulnerable sometimes as a leader, being being open, and that's really important. In fact, as recently as this morning, I had a moment in a meeting with a bunch of the leaders of one of our companies where I had dropped the ball on something. I was just like, Okay, I'm not going to make any excuse for that. I screwed that up. I should have done something that I didn't. Wasn't on purpose. I own it. We're going to move on. But that vulnerability as a leader is something that, frankly, I've had to work on over time, because you kind of think about leaders as being infallible, and they're not infallible, and everybody knows you're not infallible, you need to probably be on your game as much, if not more, than everybody else, but, but it doesn't mean that you're not going to make mistakes, and you just need to own those mistakes when you when you make them. I think that's one of the key aspects of leadership and other leadership, another one that I want to touch on next here, I've got a good friend by the name of Chuck Zamora. Chuck was born in the US in California, lived most of his professional career in Australia. Became a really well known business consultant, organizational consultant in Australia, for some personal reasons, came back to the US about decade and a half ago, maybe a little bit more. He always talks about personal power versus positional power. And, you know, I think early in our careers, I can tell you, I was like this, like, Well, my title is, you know, head lifeguard, or, you know, director or vice president, or president or CEO. You need to listen to me, because I've been had, I've had this, this title conferred on me, and I learned over the course of time that that's not what leadership is, if anything, that is the result of being a good leader, being a good partner in that positional power. There again, people will do you know enough not to get fired if you've got a bigger title than they do, but, but they're not. I guess I'm stealing that one from office space, by the way, is a great movie, but the dude just enough to get fired, not to get fired, but if you, but if you're the type of person that recognizes the personal power, and going back to those relationships, is way, way, way more important than positional power, way more important than your position on that Christmas tree that you referenced a moment ago. I think that's another thing that really screens through this, this work that you to have put together. So, so talk about that, Bobby, if you don't mind, in terms of, you know is that what I'm kind of explaining that you see the person you are versus the title you have. That's really important when you when you go into in your book, the difference between influence and authority, yeah.

Bobby Dodd: 18:14

So that's, that's the part I like about what Ben was just talking about. You have relationships, and then you have the trust aspect to it, and then you have influence. And so you build those relationships, and that's, you know, the one on one meetings or getting to know people. That's what creates that trust. And then that influence is going to come from the people that are trusting you. And so when we start talking about authority, those positional power positions as anyone can influence. It's not and so that's the great thing about the book, is when you look at and you look at the framework that's set up, you're getting to know people more. And Ben has a great example. Talk about about a mountain biking and so you have a staff member, or maybe somebody on your team that mountain bikes, and then they can connect with someone else, like a mountain bike as well, or they have a passion for mountain biking, and you start getting that influence, and it doesn't matter what position they're in. And so that's, that's the great part about, about the framework that's set up is we don't look at it as well. You're the principal, and He's the assistant principal, and you're a teacher, there's no like, Well, I'm just this. It's utilize that influence, because it's about networking and relationships, and so that's what building a great culture. It's kind of like you were saying it's everybody feels it, and so that's where the trust is developed, and then the influence goes from there

Matt Kirchner: 19:40

first, I guess I'll say, as a quick aside to our producer, Melissa Martin, don't worry. She's anytime somebody brings up cycling or biking, she's worried that I'm going to go down the mountain biking or the cycling or the cyclocross rabbit hole. Well, we'll save that one for Jason. Yeah, right, probably. But yeah, it's like, that's a great example. You have somebody that has an interest or has. Something that you know they can make a personal connection on, and leveraging that to be able to build those relationships is a super, super example. Bobby, so we'll stay out of the mountain biking conversation and keep it, keep it focused on culture and influence and and education. But I want to, I want to touch on another, another aspect of the book in you go into Ben, this whole idea of compliance for and I was in a meeting within the last month, and one of the senior leaders of the organization that I was working with talked about culture versus compliance, and they're like, We can run around with a bunch of rules, and this, in this case, it was a manufacturing company, we can have a bunch of rules, we can have a bunch of expectations, we can have a bunch of metrics, and that's fine, and you can expect people to comply with certain aspects and work instructions and in whatever of their of their role, and some degree we need some of that. But that certainly is no replacement for building the right behaviors into the right culture and having people do things not because they're afraid they're going to get in trouble, because you've embedded those ideas so deeply into the culture of your organization that they just kind of do it on autopilot. You have this whole idea of compliance versus commitment in the book, and it felt about the same to me. But maybe talk a little bit about and are we on the same track there? And, and how might that look in an educational environment as opposed to a manufacturing environment?

Ben Johnson: 21:18

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. You know, compliance is simply following those rules. You know, compliance gets tasked done, but commitment aligns the heart and the minds of the people that you're wanting to lead. And I think that's the difference. Is, if people are truly committed, that means they're now aligned with the leader. And that's where we talk about some spheres of influence, like, do we all know where we're headed, and are we aligned to that work? Do we have like this? I believe, and so that's part of the exercise I have. People do I think, whether you're in education or not, it's like, this is what I believe in. Are non negotiables for me, in my world, how I view education, how I view students, right? So same I think, can play out in, you know, how you view customers, how you view interaction with one another, whether it's nonprofits, et cetera, it's what do you stand for? But does everyone truly believe that? And what does that look like? So once I think, you get people to be able to understand that they're truly buy in, not just buy in, but they've been part of helping craft and say that this is where we're headed. That's the catalyst for change. That's what's going to make sure that the improvement lasts.

Matt Kirchner: 22:23

You know, I just finished a book in the fourth quarter of last year called Becoming supernatural by Dr Joe Dispenza. I don't know if either one of you read it. It's a there's some weird stuff in it too. So there's some stuff that can scare you away a little bit, but, but there's a lot of really, really good information about aligning the heart and the mind. And as you were talking about that. It really kind of went right back to that that book, for me, Ben, is this whole idea that, think a lot of times we don't recognize how. You know, in this case, it's actually the electromagnetic activity of your heart, and in that alignment with with your brain says a lot about who you are, whether or not you're committed, whether or not you're doing things for the right reason, and you want those to be aligned, and that's exactly what you're talking about, that if you have an individual whose mind and their heart and your organization is aligned, then we're going to have somebody who's admitted to what they're doing. It's less about doing things for the because we don't want to get trouble or we don't want to get fired. We're doing them because we have a mission, and we're part of an organization that's bigger than we are, and we want to perform at a high level, because we think that the work we're doing is important, and certainly nowhere is that probably more evident than the world of education, where we're changing hearts and minds, literally every single day, if we're doing it right. So you know, thinking about aligning hearts and minds, and the two of you are doing exactly that while you're sitting next to this river and in Chicago some time ago, and kind of dreaming and talking about what this book could be all about, and you come up with this idea that didn't have a name yet, but it's what became cultural mapping. So Bobby, talk a little bit about what cultural mapping is, and you know why it's important, and if I'm gonna I'm gonna use a tool like this, how would I go about doing it?

Bobby Dodd: 23:57

Yeah. So we've been talking about relationships, and so I think it's something that the mapping itself is, it gives you a framework. And when I say you your team, or you give your your department leaders, it gives them a framework to follow. And so what it really is is, you know, we're meeting, sitting down with people, learning more about them, building those relationships. So we're asking purposeful questions. Once we do that, we start having a map or a framework of where our staff or where our team is, and that really helps guide us further along. And so we can see, you know, well, you know, this person is here, this person is here, and it lets us guide us to see what else we need to do, what type of work we have to put in, what questions we need to ask in order to get us from, like I said earlier, from point A to point B, to get our culture even stronger. Well, we used to coach, we coach leaders, and they're always worried about those resistors, or the people that well, you know, they're, you know, the I don't know why they're they're upset, or I don't. Know why they're angry, but you know they're affecting the culture itself. And so sometimes people say, Well, you know, move away from those and really focus on your strong people. And so Ben and I believe that if you learn more about these you know those individuals, and figure out, you know what's what's bothering them, and ask the specific questions and write questions and get them connected with the right people on your staff and on your team. Slowly, there can be change. So we'll never sit and tell somebody, Hey, cultural mapping, you do it within the first semester. You do it in the first quarter of your business, everything is going to change. It's like any process in life. It takes time, but at least now people have a framework, because Ben and I would sit and we'd work with people, and they just didn't know what to do. And that's the beauty of the whole thing, is Ben said, Well, you know, I have this idea, and then myself being a leader at the time, I started using it, and I just saw it change right before my eyes. You know, the things I was doing, even the little things like 15 minute meetings with staff members and asking them specific questions, I was figuring out on my team and in my building who the influencers were and how they could influence other people, whether they were a resistor or they were one of my leaders. And so I think that's kind of cultural mapping. In a nutshell. It's, it's really building those relationships and helping move your culture, but giving you a framework as well to do it and

Matt Kirchner: 26:28

paint a little bit of a picture. First of all, I love the idea that, you know, if we have a one size fits all leadership mindset, that the recipe for disaster, right? Because individual people are different than what I'm hearing here, and I've long been a leader or believer of I should say is that we don't match our people to our leadership style, and necessarily we should match, to the extent we can, our leadership style to the individuals, because everybody's got different different triggers, different backgrounds, different different goals and different reasons for doing what they do. And if you can figure that out as a leader, it makes you that much more effective. Love the fact that you gave an example or so there as well. Paint us a picture. Ben, a little bit. So, you know, I'm familiar with this because I've been through the book. But you're creating this culture cultural map. You've got different kind of symbols for the different people in your organization. Not that we're boiling people down to minimizing them down to symbols, but but different symbols on this map that we're drawing. Talk a little bit about the different types of people that you would be putting on that map, and then how you use the map to kind of understand your influencers. Yeah.

Ben Johnson: 27:27

So again, I think it's really important that first of all, just a broad philosophical is, it's just a temporal shot. It's just that what I have evidence of. So I think sometimes people get like, Well, are you sure? Are you should be classifying people? And Bobby, and I really believe it's this is the evidence that I have at this time, and I hope and know that it'll change. In fact, we want it to change, or we want to have different evidence that people are different. So first of all, look at people. Do they hold a formal or informal leadership role? So for education, might be department chair versus social influencer, hey, you know, people go to their room when they speak. Head coaches might be, I might be a department chair for the science department. Have a formal role, but I'm also have this when I speak. I carry weight, you know, and so it allows, and then we say, for typical members who don't have that sway, either through positional, formal channels, or through that informal social impact, you know, we make them a circle, and then we categorize their commitment again, five point scale, committed, nearly committed, compliant, disengaged, and resistors. And we tease out, you know, the difference between some of those. But again, it's just, what evidence do we have at this point in time? Because we're always trying to increase the individual but also the collective commitment towards that, and then really understanding that it's relational and it's bonds. So where does the influence flow from? From one individual tying lines, whether it's strong, we make a solid line or a dotted line. So it might sound a little confusing, as you said, if you look at the book or look at some of our social medias, you can start to see some start to see some simplistic examples. But again, it just starts to give you now a visual. It helps make the invisible of that network visible. And now, with creating a map, I now have a key. I can start to think about, where is that flowing, where might I want to put my time and intention and intentionally invest to increase it. Then, of course, we have activities that we do that we outline in the book, as well as with some of the coaching and workshop type things that we do with people, where we work them through reflection and planning based upon their map and based upon what they know of their people to try to drive change over time across an organization. That's pretty simplistic.

Matt Kirchner: 29:42

Yeah, no, it's and I would also tell people, you know, both Ben Johnson and Bobby dad active on LinkedIn, I've seen you posting a ton, so I track them down and follow them if you're, if you're interested, as well on social, because there are a lot of great examples of what we're talking about here. And it really creates kind of, kind of a roadmap for interpersonal relationships. In the organization, and then, as we're trying to drive change, understand who the individuals in the organization are that can be catalysts for that change, that can be supporters. Obviously, just because someone's an influencer doesn't mean that's a good thing, right? Because if they're influencing their teammates on the bad for bad reasons, or they're not committed, but they're an influencer, that can be an issue as well, but identifying who has influence with the organization, who's committed, and then and leveraging those people. And then, can you change people over time? I mean, if you have somebody that isn't committed, if you have somebody who's disengaged, if you have somebody that is maybe, you know, an influencer, but not necessarily for the right behaviors, is that a lost cause? Or will they will they change over time?

Bobby Dodd: 30:38

Bobby, no, definitely not a lost cause. So that's that's the beauty of this whole thing. You know, I even have an example of like, I had a teacher at one point, and I had to have him go do a different responsibility teaching wise. And so he was very disgruntled, very angry. But then over time, as I got to know him, got to meet with him on a regular basis, got to listen to some of his concerns and things that upset him over time. I still remember this. I met with him one day I was I used to do quarterly meetings with staff members, and as I was leaving, he said, hey, thanks. And I said, this was a year later. I said, thanks for what he's like. Well, you know, I You're right, and so as you as you got to know me a little bit more. I needed to be in a different space, and I'm in this space, and I'm joining myself, and I walk out, Rhema said, Oh, it's okay. It's I, you know, I'm glad you're in a good space. You walk out, and it's a leader. We usually just leave and go and walk on to our next thing on our list. But, you know, I stood back and thought about it, and I thought about all the steps that I went through, you know, with and it was really with cultural mapping. And so I saw that change, right? And so he was one from a person that was a big time resistor started really carrying the banner, as Jimmy cassis would say, for for us, for our team, even the administration, who is completely against. And so that that is an example of like, I think traditionally, we look and say, Well, you know that person, they're very upset. You know, they don't want to be here. They have 12 more years to retirement. I don't know what we're going to do. And really, I look at it like, well, let's just sit down do really a root cause of analysis of where they are. You're not going to figure out what's wrong with them or where they are unless you meet with them, unless you try to build a relationship with them. And sometimes I know traditionally, we think as leaders like well, if that person's that way, and they're not one of my cheerleaders, I don't know if I can do it. And as a leader, you have to have thick skin if you are going to do intentional influence, if you are going to read it and believe it and do cultural mapping, you have to have an open mind, and you got to have thick skin, because you're going to hear some things sometimes that aren't, you know, not what you want to hear, but you always have to remember in the back of your mind, I want to make a change. I want to have a better organization. I want to make this better for my clients, for my students, for my staff, these are the things I need to do. So I would say absolutely not. When somebody's in that spot, there's always room for change, but it's a lot of work. It's on us as leaders to to invest in them and try to make it happen. Because at the end of the day, if you're going to look in the mirror and say, hey, you know that staff member, or this the people on my team that are resistors, what am I doing to make that change? Because it's easy just to say, I'm going to solder them off to the side here, then I'm going to go work with people who are my cheerleaders, who are already carrying the banner. That's not going to work. It's like we talked about earlier. It may work for a short time, but if you want commitment, and you want to you want to work over the long haul, you're going to have to invest.

Matt Kirchner: 33:33

No question, you're going to have to invest. You know, as you're walking through that story, Bobby, a personal experience of mine comes to mind, and I'm really kind of slotting this experience into the framework that you're talking about here, and some of the definitions that you've got. This goes back quite a number of years. We had a, there's a manufacturing company that I was running in the early zeros, and we had a gentleman who was an officer in the union, right? So we had a union in that company. He was one of the four top officers in the union. Forget exactly what position he was in. His name was Jesus. He was an influencer, right? You don't get to be the president of your union unless you have influence over your fellow fellow co workers, your fellow employees. He was not committed to our cause, at least he at one point, we were in the middle of a union negotiation. We had some pretty, you know, pretty strict rules about what you could and couldn't do when we were, you know, when we were negotiating and so on. One of the rules that we had was you couldn't disrupt the shop floor. This guy was out on the shop floor one time blowing a whistle and trying to get attention, you know. And there's some challenges with that relative to safety and decorum and customer visits and, you know, all this other kind of stuff. And so I just told them, Look, you can't do that. There's certain things you can do, but you can't stand out on my shop floor and blow what was floor and blow whistle. And he said, Okay, and I turned my back on him. It was the first thing he did when I turned my back on him after he said he wouldn't blow the whistle. What did he do? Everybody knows he blew the whistle, right? Yeah, I knew he was gonna blow the whistle. He knew he was gonna blow the whistle. And I had to walk him out of the out of the building, and said, You know, I suspend him for a few days fast. Forward five or six years, we had built a relationship with each other. I got to know him, you know, he come to the Christmas parties. I got to know his kids, got to know his family. Gave him some increasing responsibilities, kind of a long story of what happened with that union. But over the course of time, he became a leader in that company. So he was somebody and totally committed and totally serious about quality and productivity and yield and everything. So he was and he was an influencer before, and he was an influencer after. He just got to a point where he was influencing the right behaviors, at least the behaviors we thought were the right ones and that he agreed were the right ones. He came to me about a year after I left that company. We ran into each other at a social event and literally had tear a tear running down his face, and said, Thank you so much for what you did for me and for my family, and he was somebody that you could easily have plugged into your culture map and understood exactly where he fit, that he wasn't particularly committed, that he was disengaged, that he was An influencer, and that we together because it was and it was the kind of stuff you're talking about, Bobby. It wasn't me telling him what he needed to do. It was listening, understanding, trying to figure out where he was coming from, finding some common ground. Probably went on too long with that story, but I absolutely love that story, and I love it because it perfectly fits into into what you what you're talking about here, and how our greatest, our greatest detractors, in some cases, can become our greatest advocates. And I know that's your big believers in that as well. Ben, what's an energy vampire? Tell me about that? I read about that in the book. Yeah.

Ben Johnson: 36:31

So Matt, I think John Gordon probably gets credit for that. But at the time, I heard her from a teacher who was describing another teacher, and they're like, Okay, she's just like an energy vampire she sent me. I'm like, what? She's like, it's like, she sucks the life out of you. You're just like, drained and feel like there's no hope, where, like, things are just so terrible, and so like you talked about, people can influence others, and that is not always in a positive direction either. And again, that's why I think your stories, and Bobby and I have those examples too, of where disengaged people can come back. There's a comeback story yet to be written, I believe, for everyone. And yet I also don't want to pigeonhole and label people. That's why we talk about categorizing versus labeling, because this is the evidence I have and at that time. But there might be personal or other struggles going on that are affecting people's personal life. So if someone's an energy vampire, again, doesn't mean that they have to always be there, but sometimes, maybe no one's talked about the influence that they have. Maybe no one's figured out, why is it that they feel the need to share, or whatever behaviors are leading that other people are feeling that way? But as Bobby talked about, we really believe in a lot of one on ones, because it's relational, and that's the joy of leadership too. Is getting to know your people and figuring out what makes them tick a little bit, but then also giving them honest feedback and coaching so that they can be better. But I definitely think that they exist in every organization. It's just a matter of identifying that, and then what are you going to be able to do about as a leader, to be able to try to help them recognize that, but also instantly that others from maybe some of that negativity at times.

Matt Kirchner: 38:09

And I, you know, I'm just a big believer that we have a certain amount of energy in an organization. We can use it to move the organization forward. We can use it to pull the organization backward. And the question is, you know, where are we going to put that energy and how do we best we best focus it? You know, the way that you characterize it is, I think, similar to what Stephen Covey says when he he says, Seek, first to understand and then to be understood. A lot of times, somebody doesn't feel listened to, and we haven't taken the time to really, truly understand where they're coming from. Not that every one of those stories ends well, but they certainly can't. Bobby, I asked, I asked my friend Ben to identify and to define what an energy vampire is. What's the pinging effect? That's something that came up in the book as well.

Bobby Dodd: 38:48

Well, you it's really and Ben talked about it earlier. It's being able to affect other people. And so you'll see that effect go around organization. And can it be bad? Sometimes it can be but it can also be good. And so what you really want to do, again, I would keep saying it, but it's, it's the more you get to know each one of your individual people on your team and on your staff, you're going to figure out how that effect and how the pinging is going to work. And so I, you know, it's really, you know, it's built into the framework itself. And as I said, Ben was talking about it. And so it's, it's, it's building those relationships and then seeing the influencers know whether it's good or whether it's bad, and it affects everyone. And we talked about positional authority. And so when you really sit down, if you mapped out whether it's a small team or a large organization, like when I was a principal, before I had a very large staff. And so it was pretty neat to be able to sit down with other people and watch, you know, the pinging effect itself, and how it worked, and how we could see small things come to life. And so another story I have is we would meet with certain departments, and. We would see some positive things. And then maybe a week later, you're doing a walkthrough, and you see something that happened in one department in math, that's happening in science. And I didn't go and tell anybody to do it. None of my administrators went to do it. And I say, hey, Cody, how did you learn about that? It's like, oh, well, I I ran into so and so in the hallway, and they were talking about what they did. And then I started trying it here. And then Paul came into my room and and, you know, it's that, it's that spiraling, it's that, you know, it's that effect that you want to see. And so that's, that's a great thing about it. Now, I tell people, can that be a bad thing? It could be. It could come negative. It definitely can pinging. Can definitely negative, but that's where you want to kind of jump in and figure out, as we've been talking about, why this is going on, and what are we going to do to try to stop it, and kind of flip the script.

Matt Kirchner: 40:52

Well, in your particular example, you've got somebody that's working in a math department that influences somebody in science for the better, and, you know, the embedded, I think leadership lesson here is that that wasn't you going to tell all three of those people do this. It was one person becoming inspired, trying something at work, they told other individuals. And it really kind of is an example of a flywheel of effect of sorts in any institution, where you get some of that positivity, and you get people doing things for the right reasons and the right influencers influencing the right people, and you can create incredible change in an organization without you being the person at the top of the Christmas tree directing the whole thing to happen, because you've built that that kind of behavior into your culture. That's a great story. Bobby Ben, do you have one, just a specific story to share? Where this is this has worked really well for you?

Ben Johnson: 41:41

Yeah, I think that that's where sometimes I've seen the the disengaged come back to life again, right? Because they see it happening through a few other colleagues, and then that they're seeing that synergy and that energy, and then they start to maybe Ante up again and come back into and so I've seen that one of the stories I talked about with Larry, he's like, Hey, I don't want to waste my hope one last time, because he'd kind of been shut down for a while, but he saw what was happening with others, and because of that, it made it more acceptable, and felt like there was hope that I could try to do this again. And so he helped create an amazing humanities curriculum and and ideas that he had back in the 80s came to life in the 2000s because he had colleagues that he could build ideas off of one another, and then that just started affect others. And that's where we're talking about, those spheres, and those ripple effects end up flowing across the system that you don't always see. You don't always know the math teacher is connected with the science teacher. When you start mapping out, what do you know about people, whether it's the mountain biking example Bobby alluded to, or realize, hey, these two people actually were roommates back in undergrad. Like a lot of that starts to come forth, and you don't realize those things until you start to have those deep conversations. So that's where there's just some work that we try to help coach people, which might seem natural to some, but for some young leaders, especially in education, a lot of people are accelerating into those leadership roles, and they just haven't maybe had as much seasoning, you know, and it just doesn't come as natural. Here are some deliberate steps that you can try to do, or through the coaching that we've done, where we just try to share, hey, try to do these things. What do you know about your people? Know what connections you have? Do they know that they know this about each other? And so that's been really amazing. I scale a lot of initiatives, not just culture. So we talked about using this to scale initiatives. That's where in your world of business, I think a lot of this could be not just about alignment to culture, but how do you scale practices that you want? And I saw some amazing work, because I had influencers and people that were connected in different social pockets, stand up and say, This is good, and this is why it's effective. And going now go talk to two or three people and see they had a lot of volunteers to come join. And that's where we create some awesome momentum.

Matt Kirchner: 43:51

No question, you've got tremendous momentum with the book. And it's just, it's been an absolutely amazing it was an absolutely amazing read. We'll give the information on the book one last time here before we close up shop. Before we do that, I did get to the, you know, we asked two questions of every single guest here on the TechEd podcast, gentlemen, I kind of posed the first one, which is based on your own personal education journey. What's something you believe about education that would surprise others? We kind of hit on that in the outset, right? Because we talked about your education journeys and and I think the the work that you've done in the book. Is probably a fitting answer to that. I want to I want to ask one other question of each of you. We'll start with Bobby, and then I'll go to bed. This is a question we ask every single guest here on the TechEd podcast, and that is, if you could go back in time, Bobby, to that 15 year old sophomore in high school, Bobby, dad, and give that young man one piece of advice. What would it be?

Bobby Dodd: 44:41

I like that question, and I really think it's explore more opportunities. And what I mean by that is I was one of those people. I was raised in a family, and again, a great family, but it was, you go to high school, and then you go to college, and then you go and get a master's degree, you go and get a job. And then that's how you march through life. And so I think back to my 15 year old self. You know, one of the places where I spend the most time right now is an auto tech shop at the high school, because I see the students in there, I see the teacher, I see the hands on activities. And so I would tell my 15 year old self, explore opportunities, be open to learning about different things. Be, be that person. Maybe you have five brothers and sisters and they all did the same thing. Maybe you're that person that steps away and try something different. You know, as I think about it, college is always there, right? I have a daughter that's, you know, she's, she took a different path than the rest of us. And so I would tell my 15 year old self deck, explore all opportunities.

Matt Kirchner: 45:44

I love it. Explore all opportunities. We've explored some great opportunities with you. Bobby, dad and Ben, same question to you, that 15 year old young man going through his education journey we talked about before sophomore in high school. Give him one piece of advice.

Ben Johnson: 45:57

I think then there's just the sense of feeling that there's more that connects us than you always realize. You know, I was going through an airport the other day, and it's like, saw someone. It's like they need a napkin. I had an extra napkin. That little act of kindness, you know, just saw those little opportunities to like, whether you call it the butterfly effect, and it's kind of similar, like this, with ripples be a positive sense of for other people and and model what you want to see in the in others. And I think that I really have faith as part of my life, and so I think there's a huge foundation for that within my family and being intentional about building that have kind of, what I call a rightly ordered life. And it's more aspirational and a call to be grounded in that than necessarily, that I'm living that perfectly, right? And so just giving that permission to go back and be like, What do you want to be first and foremost, and forgive yourself in and keep moving forward, you can always be a better version of yourself today and tomorrow and the next day.

Matt Kirchner: 46:59

We can always do better. I like that idea of lifelong learning, lifelong continuous improvement. That is what it is all about. You never know when the connections and the influences and the way that you're coming across to other people, be it positive or otherwise, has an effect on them. Huge believer in the butterfly effect. It's a great answer from Ben as well. Also a huge believer in the work that you did with intentional influence. We'll hold the book up one more time. It is a phenomenal book. It will be linked in the show notes, harnessing cultural mapping to build commitment. It's been an honor and a pleasure to have that great works. Two authors, Dr Ben Johnson and Mr. Bobby Dodd Esquire, join us on this episode of The TechEd podcast. Pick up the book. It is outstanding. A couple things we're gonna put, put all that information in the show notes, but put those at TechEd podcast.com/influence, TechEd podcast.com/influence, if you're looking for influence, check out these two gentlemen on social media. I see Ben stuff in particular, all over LinkedIn. You'll find the TechEd podcast on LinkedIn as well. We are on LinkedIn, we're on Facebook, we are on Instagram, we are on YouTube. We have an incredibly high youtube channel at the moment. You can also find us on Tiktok, wherever you go for your social media. Say hello when you're there. And we would love to hear from you. We'd also love to see you again next week on the TechEd podcast. Until then, my name is Matt Kirkner. I am your host. We'll see you next week. You.