From my early days as a plumbing apprentice to a seat at the senior management table, my path has been anything but predictable. Along the way, I've discovered that the essence of leadership is not just about giving orders but about listening, learning, and lifting others up. In this presentation I'm spilling the secrets that have allowed me and my teams to thrive—secrets rooted in servant leadership, crystal-clear communication, and the kind of advocacy that doesn't just benefit the individual, but the entire organization. You'll hear stories and strategies that shatter the conventional job description, offering an authentic look at the messy, yet rewarding craft of guiding others toward their potential while keeping the business sailing smoothly.
Navigating the sea of modern technology can be treacherous, as one general manager discovered in the quest for efficiency through Power BI dashboards. It's a tale of data gone wild and the dramatic course correction that followed when collaboration and humility became the compass points. We then cast our gaze to the horizon, where departmental efforts align with an organization's true north, ensuring our work is less about spinning our wheels and more about driving meaningful progress. Whether it is through shedding light on mental models or distinguishing between mere activity and real productivity, this episode is an exploration of leadership that not only inspires but creates a workforce pulsing with motivation and purpose, all aimed at achieving exceptional business outcomes.
Let Primo know youre listening:
https://depthbuilder.bio.link/
Get on the path to Becoming the Promise You are Intended to Be
https://www.depthbuilder.com/books
From my early days as a plumbing apprentice to a seat at the senior management table, my path has been anything but predictable. Along the way, I've discovered that the essence of leadership is not just about giving orders but about listening, learning, and lifting others up. In this presentation I'm spilling the secrets that have allowed me and my teams to thrive—secrets rooted in servant leadership, crystal-clear communication, and the kind of advocacy that doesn't just benefit the individual, but the entire organization. You'll hear stories and strategies that shatter the conventional job description, offering an authentic look at the messy, yet rewarding craft of guiding others toward their potential while keeping the business sailing smoothly.
Navigating the sea of modern technology can be treacherous, as one general manager discovered in the quest for efficiency through Power BI dashboards. It's a tale of data gone wild and the dramatic course correction that followed when collaboration and humility became the compass points. We then cast our gaze to the horizon, where departmental efforts align with an organization's true north, ensuring our work is less about spinning our wheels and more about driving meaningful progress. Whether it is through shedding light on mental models or distinguishing between mere activity and real productivity, this episode is an exploration of leadership that not only inspires but creates a workforce pulsing with motivation and purpose, all aimed at achieving exceptional business outcomes.
Let Primo know youre listening:
https://depthbuilder.bio.link/
Get on the path to Becoming the Promise You are Intended to Be
https://www.depthbuilder.com/books
The title of my presentation is Ensuring Organizational Effectiveness Through the Effective Deployment of Work Across Senior Management Layers. What does that say? It's like word salad, right, it's not an effective word, so the translation is and other duties as assigned. Anybody live that life. How clear is it what it is you're responsible for and how clear is it what you actually do on the day-to-day? Every phone call, every text, every email, etc. So tell your story, I'm a storyteller. Email, et cetera. So tell you a story, I'm a storyteller. But, like, straight up, I'm not going to talk about these things because these are table stakes. I can look on everybody's website right now and everybody has this in some fancy, shiny form or another. But you still feel like this, right, and I'm not even going to challenge anybody to like recite what are your values, what is your mission statement, what is the vision? How does everything you do align with all of those other things? Right, because it's a tough world and so those things are. They're important, they add value, they do add some clarity, they do attract people, give us some direction and, like I said, I'm pretty plain. So I'm going to talk about, like, what you can do if you're not already doing it. I get the sense that a lot of the stuff that I'm going to talk about you're already doing, but maybe not on purpose. And so the things I want to talk about are things that you can do on purpose. How to do them? Cause I love that question, like, yeah, we keep talking about all this stuff, but how fool? Like how? How? That's what we want to know. And so I'm gonna use a fancy word, mental model, and that's about as fancy as I'm gonna get. So mental models from jesse land. That is the world universe that I live in. Uh, and those mental models are no bobbleheads socializing the intended outcome and advocating for yourself. Right before lunch there was some conversation about advocating for yourself, and actually when I get to this point, that's when I'll talk about some structural process things that we all kind of need to go back and tell our people about. But I'm just going to talk about the real, real stuff. And what's that, colin? What's Jesse Land? Great question. So Jesse Land?
Speaker 1:I entered, and who was born in the 90s? Okay, I started working in construction in the 90s, in 1995, I entered as a plumbing apprentice, went through four years of apprenticeship, then, instead of like just terminating me. They decided to punish me differently and they promoted me to different levels, right, foreman, superintendent, all these sorts of things. I did that for about 20 years working on the plumbing side of the business. I was on the installation side for maybe eight years. Then I got into a little bit of learning and development unofficially, right, little people department stuff, unofficially had a lot of fun. And then I went to the dark side.
Speaker 1:I went to work for a GC for about three and a half years, right, and it was interesting because I worked for when I was with the trades. I worked for an amazing organization. They had really good systems to help me and people like me develop leadership skills. Right, servant leadership was the core value there. They had a great mechanism to help me understand that. However and I know this was the only company that suffered from that not everybody, not every leader in the organization, demonstrated those behaviors. Y'all know the company. Y'all are all not in your head, all right. So what was interesting is, I thought, because we were a trade contractor, we were just less evolved. We didn't, we couldn't, we didn't have the caliber of personnel to be the best of the best of the best.
Speaker 1:And then I went to work for the general contractor big, gigantic general contractor the best of the best of the best, right and guess what? They had the same problems, right. Then I went to work for a developer owner operator. They did everything and the same thing. However, one upside consistency was at every level.
Speaker 1:So as a trade partner, trade contractor, I got to work with a lot of GCs Before I went to work for a GC. Gcs were just jerks, like it was a requirement to be ignorant and not listen and demand things that were unreasonable. Then, when I went to work for the GC, it was like oh, there are people too right. So I got. But there were a small number of GCs, and when I say GCs I'm really talking about superintendents, project managers, project executives that were phenomenal to work with. The number is so big. I still remember their names. It was two names that I had to remember. What was different about them was they had a people-centered style of leading.
Speaker 1:Then, when I went to work for the GC, I got to see a bunch of leadership from the trade partners. My responsibility was to support departments, business units, in their lean implementation right and project teams and all this other stuff. So mostly I got a lot of eyes rolled at me. I had to figure out how to connect and lead through influence, and same thing. So I got to travel the country and help teams deploy these things that they really didn't want to deploy. They're like I don't know why the hell we're doing this Like I've been all right, everything's fine.
Speaker 1:Again, there was a small number of leaders that had phenomenal results in terms of financial performance, in terms of personnel retention, all those little things, and guess what? It was their people-centered focus. Then I went on to the next job Same thing big, fancy people, bigger numbers, bigger backlog, all that stuff Same thing. There was a small number of people that the folks that worked with them, that spent time in their space over an extended period of time, had a much higher quality of life and they had phenomenal business results. So then, kind of like the question that was asked earlier but how, like, what were the things that they did that? I got to see over and over again that like fostered that, that created the ingredients for this fertile environment for people to grow, excel and perform.
Speaker 1:Number one thing no bobbleheads. So when you hear no bobbleheads, what does that mean to you? Anybody, yeah, you get that. That's the number one rule I have whenever I'm, you know, talking and flapping my gums in front of people. It's like no bobbleheads. And what that means is, if you think it's BS, say so. Why is that important? We all have blind spots, yeah Right. And so these folks at some point I ended up kind of had to get like shiny boots. I always make fun of the shiny boots and the carpet dwellers. I'm one too right Like now I am Same thing.
Speaker 1:They all had a practice of making sure or minimizing the bobble-headedness. And so what did that mean? The way they responded to bad news, painful news, less than awesome news was ah, let's find out more about that thing. It wasn't damn it, freddie again. That thing, it wasn't damn it, freddie again. That's a different experience. And so people were I don't like the word, but enabled or empowered to surface problems.
Speaker 1:They also had an immaculate skill of who's kind of like the quiet person in the room that just doesn't really say anything, because all the loud mouths are always talking Anybody All right. So they had a great skill of saying I can see you're thinking about something, what's on your mind about this? And not like I asked you a question answer Like okay, let's follow up because I can tell you have something that you care about that the group needs to know. So they created that connection of like OK, big fat talker Jesse's always going to say something, hurry up and say, get out of the way and let's go and farm information from the rest of the people. No bobbleheads. So there's a, there's another, there's like graduating levels in this bobblehead world. One of them it's the illusion, the person that does contribute.
Speaker 1:But all they did was rearrange all the words that the leader said and repeat it back and repeat it back. Anybody seen those? Who's guilty of that? Nobody. Yeah, thank you, thank you, I've done it, like when I don't. And then they use like these really, really powerful words. There's actually two sets. They would say I don't know. They would also say I need help. Does that make anybody uncomfortable? And when people were doing the word salad, like oh, great idea, what I really do agree. They're like okay, you said a lot of words, but what the hell are you adding to the conversation? Oh, damn, gangsta, right.
Speaker 1:So they were very clear about the expectations in terms of communication. They created the situation where people were drug in, whether they liked it or not, to contribute, maybe in the group, maybe outside of the group, and they did not demonstrate bobblehead behavior. They did not tolerate bobblehead behavior. But, more importantly, they showed people what it looked like and helped them build the skill. Why would that be valuable? Because people need to share their perspectives and ideas. Yeah right, we're in the room because we're decision makers. We got responsibility, we got influence. We're ballers. We need to contribute to the thing. That doesn't mean we need to cheerlead. Yeah, I love your idea. If your idea is stupid, I'm going to tell you it's stupid and it's that is phenomenal, because we could be running off a cliff, because I'm only going to see things through my perspective, and so what it really did, what I got to see, is it really helped develop this idea of problem ownership.
Speaker 1:How many of y'all have people come to you with their problems, see me, and then they kind of Is that helpful? No, but if I come to you with my problem and you say, jess, what have you tried? Oh well, I haven't tried anything. Ok, well, go try something. Fool, haven't tried anything. Okay, well, go try something, fool, right. Or we get there to like, oh, I'm not going to be diminished because I'm being vulnerable and saying I have a problem, I need help and I'm going to have to own the damn problem the best example I have of that.
Speaker 1:And I learned back. I was an apprentice at the time. I was really. I was very opinionated Anybody surprised and I would always complain about the water. Water's not cold. We need ice on our water. This is inhumane, right. Guess what happened after that? I became the ice boy, which rightfully so it was really. I pretended like it was really important to me. How important is it if I'm not willing to take action upon it? I worked for Ed pipe fitter and he helped me learn this Do not complain about anything you're not prepared to take action upon. And he taught me that by making me get the damn ice for the water cooler every day. Now, like he gave me cash, like I went and I could keep the change. It was awesome.
Speaker 1:So these people because they didn't have like the bobblehead no, bobbleheads was a thing People didn't come and pitch their problems to other people. We brought a problem to the table, knowing that I'm going to maintain ownership of it. I'm just accessing the resources available to me by bringing the problem to the table. And then we got additional resources to go and solve the problem. That sound like miraculous, pretty simple stuff, right? So, in terms of how do you apply this? You can do this now, right, you can stop being a bobblehead Now right, you can stop being a bobblehead.
Speaker 1:If you think it's crap, it's crap, say so. If you think I'm full of it, you can walk out of the room. It'll hurt my feelings a little bit, but you'll be better off than sitting here the rest of the time, except for you. Damn it. Don't just tolerate things that mediocrity. Don't just tolerate what's happening. If you disagree, you have value. You have decades of experience. You're a human being that has accomplished grand things and because of that, you have something to contribute. If you disagree, say so. If you think that idea is twisted, say so. Now, I'm also going to be very clear. Going behind the corner and saying it after the meeting, that doesn't count as saying so. You do it at the table, all right. So that's how you can start doing it. The other thing you can do is when you get back to your people.
Speaker 1:I use this kind of language because everybody kind of knows what the hell we're talking about. I use this kind of language because everybody kind of knows what the hell we're talking about. You probably thought like oh yeah, I know who. You probably gave names to people that are bobbleheads. Oh, I know that person that always repeats whatever the boss said and they say the same crap and they just take up all the time because they want to be heard. Right, like, make yourself visible. There's other ways to do that. Right, like, make yourself visible, there's other ways to do that. And so the problem ownership.
Speaker 1:It also fostered this situation where if I was assigned responsibility for a problem, maybe it wasn't my problem but because of my skill set. My skill set was like connecting with people and getting attention and engaging people and challenging which sucks, because that means I got the hairiest problems like, yes, we want you to do this one. Right, can you come help it? But because I knew that I could say this is a waste man, like, why in the hell are we doing this? We would have the conversation, we would get clear and I would carry forward the mission. Let me go solve this problem. Let me go solve this problem, which takes us to socializing the intended outcome.
Speaker 1:So when Power BI? When did it hit the market? Like five years ago Well, maybe it hit my world around that time and, oh my God, dashboards. We got to have dashboards and so I had a general manager in a particular business unit who called me up and he was one of these people that was very like no bobbleheads, everybody was straight up in that business unit, rocked man Like they rocked everybody. Anyhow, he calls me and he's like Jess, I really need your help. You're the lean guy, right? Not that this kind of lean, the other lean. He says I've asked all my department heads for dashboards and they're all giving me dashboards, except for these three or four. Like oh, okay, sounds great. He showed me all the dashboards he's like, but they all look different and it's taking a lot of time and I'm not getting them until the day before. I'm like okay, so dashboard rich, but directionless. I see you nodding your head like sound familiar.
Speaker 1:So what happened was one business unit went down this path. It was pretty awesome, and then they generated dashboards. It was pretty awesome, and then they generated dashboards. What everybody else heard was they, that business unit over there has got dashboards, why don't you? So everybody went and made dashboards. So I got to get involved. I got to spend a bunch of time. It was funny because, like, oh, we're going to the principal's office because I had to meet with every department head and apparently I was the principal and what I got to learn was they didn't understand the purpose of the dashboard. Every single one of those leaders told me well, I'm creating it, but I, because he asked for it, I'm like, ok, but what like? What do you use this information for? He's like most of the time is like well, it was the easiest one to create a dashboard for, right. Then I also found out that there was only one person who was the head estimator, right, the lead estimator in the business unit that had this Power BI curse. It was knowledge, but it was a curse, so everybody was feeding them their garbage and he was spending 40 hours a month producing these dashboards.
Speaker 1:The other thing that you may be that may be happening in your organization right now there were three department heads that had no concept of the idea of utilizing data to make decisions. Is that scary? It's real. And they were being super, like they were being really successful, by luck, I think. Right, especially those three folks, anyhow. So then I said, okay, thank you for all the information I'll get back to you.
Speaker 1:And then I said wait a minute, what happens after you finish submit your dashboard? And then I said wait a minute, what happens after you submit your dashboard? He said what do you mean? So you've got to submit them monthly? What happens after you submit them? Who wants to take a guess? Nothing, they got the opportunity to do it again. It's kind of like my view on dating, right? I've got to spend about three hours of my time like taking a shower, fixing my hair, going somewhere, spend a couple hundred bucks for the opportunity to do it again. It's not a great investment of my time, right.
Speaker 1:So these people were doing this thing so that they could do it again. And when they submitted it, boss said that's not what I'm looking for. Well, what are you looking for? I'm not exactly sure, but not that Anybody been through that. So this is not a foreign thing. I'm not talking about your outfit. This is a super special one that nobody knows about.
Speaker 1:The awesome thing was when I brought this information back to him no bobbleheads and said here's the thing. And the number one question you got to answer is what's the purpose of these freaking dashboards? He said crap. I probably should have thought about that before I asked for them. Yes, ok. The number two thing is if you want people to be doing these things and like learn rapidly and experiment because he was really comfortable with experimentation why aren't you having a meeting to review the dashboards, discuss the intent or at least figure out the damn intent as a group? And he said man, you always talk about social stuff. I was like, oh well, yeah, of course I didn't know what the hell he was talking about and so that's what he did. He knew that the big big boss wanted dashboards, conceptually understood the value behind visualizing KPIs, plan versus actual, all these wonderful things. However, how do we do that for this business unit that's precise and specific to our situation, unit that's precise and specific to our situation.
Speaker 1:So he socialized the intended outcome and in some cases it's I'm very clear. We're hearing about learning management systems and training and development programs. And how do we socialize? How do we help people know about what the hell's going on and how do we we receive? What are the signals back that it's actually hitting the mark right? That's one version of socializing the intended outcome. Another version of it is saying yeah, we're all in this bag together. I don't exactly know, keyword, I don't know. Let's figure this out together. And so they did. That takes immense humility for the leader to say I don't know, I added a whole lot of burden to your day and I'm going to make it right, but I can't do it by myself. Would it be awesome to work with a leader like that. Yeah, so that's what they did Socializing the intended outcome. Eventually, they pared it down. They're like we don't care about all these things. These are the four things. Phenomenal, so keep that in mind.
Speaker 1:How do you do that? If you have a problem, like a business problem, you're trying to solve, understand it from multiple perspectives, because what we typically do is there is a business problem, I know what it is, it's VDC, vdc. You need to fix this Effective immediately. But that's only from my perspective of the problem. There are other people in the business that are experiencing the pain of the problem, so we have to understand it from their perspective, and I'm not talking like kumbaya. How do you feel? Right, like, how is this disrupting your workflow? How many hours are you spending on this? How many times are you responding to emails, phone calls? How many clicks are you spending on this situation? Right, we can get precise about what the problem is, understanding it from multiple stakeholders' perspective, before we decide to say this is the solve.
Speaker 1:Who is solution-oriented, problem-solving person in here? Yeah, how many of you have solved the same problem year after year, project after project, team after team? Are you problem-solving? We're firefighting, right, because of our schedule pressures, budget pressures. We stopped the bleeding forever, right, because we think we've attacked the problem with a solution.
Speaker 1:What I want to plant in your head is that what you did was you tested a countermeasure. It did stop the bleeding, but it didn't solve the problem, so it's not a solution. So shift your thinking just a little bit about that idea, that thing you want to do to mitigate that negative impact. Instead of calling it a solution, call it a countermeasure, and it is not a solution until it has produced the intended outcome. Is that fair? Is that pretty clear? Ok, four minutes coming in round and third baby.
Speaker 1:The last one is advocate for yourself, and I know this is kind of slippery slope. I got a baby brother who's 18 years younger than me advocating. It was like he was born knowing how to do this, right? So when I tell somebody that doesn't have as much as many highlights as I do, to advocate for themselves. They think of a different thing, right? Whatever that is, what I'm referring to is most of us, or a lot of us, are very good at like. You told me to do this. I'm going to go do this thing.
Speaker 1:My boss said who's actually let me ask this question show of hands, how aware, and like raise your hand super high if you're super aware, and then do it like this if you're not very aware. How aware are you of how much your words are amplified by your position? Awesome, so you've probably talked to somebody a direct report and said hey, you know we got this thing. Can you take care of that? And in the next 10 minutes they're all over it. You see that, yeah, is that productive? No, right, because unless it's an emergency, if 100 percent, if we need it now be clear about that, they will always respond. I should say we will always respond immediately because you're the boss. So we get clear about time frame. Can you get this done by X? I don't need you to stop what you're doing. You finished what you're doing and what's it going to take to get it done by this date? Because people will react. Anyways, back to advocating for yourself.
Speaker 1:So I was fortunate in that I led some super talented people in the region. I had different people, different business units, and because I had the biggest team in the organization, we got a lot of the side projects right, the extra things, and who knows. The other curse of the only reward for good work is more work right. If you get stuff done, guess what? They give you more stuff to do. And so I had to learn how to advocate for myself and luckily I had some team members that, and they taught me the most powerful thing that I think I've learned in the last decade. They taught me how to take time off. They taught me how to say I'm at my limit. So, because of what they poured into me one day, they didn't hesitate. They're like Jess why do we keep getting all the new initiatives? What about NorCal? What about SoCal? Why is it just us? Because of me, duh. I keep saying yes, so, and who does so?
Speaker 1:I had my boss, awesome dude, national director. He would always ask me all the time, every single time I talk to him is there anything I can do for you? Who has an answer for that question. Raise your hand. One person, can you guess what? I would say no, everything's good, thank you. I said that is a perfect opportunity for me to advocate for myself and tie it to the mission and all the other stuff. True North, is there anything I can do for you? Yes, can you please give the next three initiatives to the Southeast region? He's like uh, like you asked, can you please give that other thing that you have on my board to Northwest or Boston? Was I advocating for myself?
Speaker 1:At the same day, he was forced to say but Jesse, y'all always get stuff done, like I know, and they're not getting an opportunity. We do get stuff done and we need a break. And so here's where I got like extra squirmy and slimy with it. It's like that other thing that you wanted me to do doesn't align with our true north. So here's kind of like the processy stuff. Right, who's familiar with true north? Or hoshin Connery?
Speaker 1:Okay, so for our department within the organization, the primary objective was to help our influencers, decision makers, leaders, the people with the most influence and responsibility shift from command and control to a coaching style. Piece of cake. Right, it was a lot of work. That was the number one thing that we were responsible for. That was True North for our department. All these other things are supposed to contribute to that, and so, when I was advocating for myself, I got extra clear Like, can you give it? You could do this, you can give it to somebody else. We're at capacity, we've accomplished all these other things, and can you explain to me how this new thing whatever the hell it was is in alignment with our core objective for the year? What do you think happened? It helped. I didn't get a yes all the time, but I got less work than I used to get.
Speaker 1:So these are things that you can do as the person that continue. That's down here. Right, you're getting the pile of stuff. Organizationally, you get when you get ultra clear about what the primary objective is. When you get ultra clear about what the primary objective is, you give people agency to let you know that you're deviating and to at least have the conversation, because why we don't have bobbleheads To at least have the conversation about well, we're adjusting, we're realigning that thing's changed. It's no longer the initiative, etc. Instead of people just staying busy. There's a big difference between activity and production, and this is what we're trying to achieve. And so the idea is, if we do these things, you will less burden your senior management. If you equip them with these simple mental models, they will understand and have conversations and have clarity around what is bringing value and what isn't, and what resources are necessary, and you won't be burning your damn self out.