Retired Major General Keith Thurgood is a Clinical Professor of Healthcare Leadership and Management at the Jindal School of Management of the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) where he also leads the graduate program in Healthcare Leadership and Management. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Marketing and Entrepreneurship at UTD. In addition to his responsibilities at UT Dallas, Dr. Thurgood is a faculty member and senior advisor for the Thayer Leader Development Group (West Point, New York).
Retired Lieutenant General L. Neil Thurgood is the special advisor to the UAH president for military affairs and technology. Prior to his appointment at UAH, he served as the director for hypersonics, directed energy, space, and rapid acquisition in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (acquisition, logistics, and technology) at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama.
Connect with Keith & Neil Thurgood:
-Neil’s LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/eK9PJit2
-Keith’s LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/ehB75VBN
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-Leadership Resources: https://linktr.ee/McMillionLeadership
My Mission: I will end toxic leadership practices by equipping leaders with
transformational leadership skills.
Together, we will impact 1 MILLION lives!!!
Every day is a gift, don't waste yours!
Joshua K. McMillion | Founder MLC
Retired Major General Keith Thurgood is a Clinical Professor of Healthcare Leadership and Management at the Jindal School of Management of the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) where he also leads the graduate program in Healthcare Leadership and Management. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Marketing and Entrepreneurship at UTD. In addition to his responsibilities at UT Dallas, Dr. Thurgood is a faculty member and senior advisor for the Thayer Leader Development Group (West Point, New York).
Retired Lieutenant General L. Neil Thurgood is the special advisor to the UAH president for military affairs and technology. Prior to his appointment at UAH, he served as the director for hypersonics, directed energy, space, and rapid acquisition in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (acquisition, logistics, and technology) at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama.
Connect with Keith & Neil Thurgood:
-Neil’s LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/eK9PJit2
-Keith’s LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/ehB75VBN
✅ SHARE THIS PODCAST
✅ GIVE A 5-STAR REVIEW
✅ SUPPORT
-Leadership Resources: https://linktr.ee/McMillionLeadership
My Mission: I will end toxic leadership practices by equipping leaders with
transformational leadership skills.
Together, we will impact 1 MILLION lives!!!
Every day is a gift, don't waste yours!
Joshua K. McMillion | Founder MLC
You're listening to the Tells the Leadership podcast. This podcast is for leaders at any phase on their leadership journey to become a more purposeful and accountable leader what I like to call a pal. Join me on our journey together towards transformational leadership.
Speaker 2:All right team. Welcome back to the Tells the Leadership podcast. I am your host, josh McMillian. I'm an active duty army officer, I'm an army leadership coach and I run my own coaching company called McMillian Leadership Coaching, and I'm on a mission to create a better leader what I like to call a purposeful, accountable leader or a pal and my vision is to end toxic leadership, regardless of where you find yourself, by promoting transformational stories and skills. And on today's episode it's a little bit different. I have two brothers on and oh, by the way, those two brothers are both retired generals One retiring, keith Thurgood, is a rank of major general, two-star general, and then Neil Thurgood, retiring at the rank of Lieutenant General.
Speaker 2:Keith Thurgood is a clinical professor of healthcare leadership and management at the Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he also leads a graduate program in healthcare leadership and management, and he has had multiple different amazing careers throughout his military experience, to include being a reservist officer and working in as a CEO of very large corporations, to include AFIS, which is absolutely incredible. And then his brother, on the other hand, lieutenant General Neil Thurgood, is currently serving as a special advisor for the University of Alabama in Huntsville, president for military affairs and technology. Prior to his appointment to the University of Alabama in Huntsville, he served as the director for hypersonics, directed energy, space and rapid acquisitions for the office of the assistant secretary of the Army acquisitionquisition, logistics and Technology at Redstone Arsenal, alabama that's the place that I come from which is absolutely amazing, and the amount of wisdom that these two gentlemen bring is phenomenal. And I mean that because I have taken, I think, over eight different pages of notes on this episode alone, and that's why I love podcasting. I get an opportunity to talk to amazing individuals about leadership that I can actively go and use in my current role as an active duty army officer. And I do all of this not to make any money. I started from the standpoint is that I was on the pursuit to become the best version of myself so I can show up authentic and whole and help other people and help the team and help the organization win.
Speaker 2:And before we even start, I want to make sure you know that this podcast episode that is just released, you can go to McMillianLeadershipCoachingcom, click the Leadership Resources tab and you can find the blog that accompanies this, of where I have pulled out and distilled some of the key points from Keith and Neil, and you can go through and read that at your own time and use these principles and practices in your current leadership role. So, without any further ado, let's bring on the Thurgood. I'm going to start off by saying, gentlemen, welcome to the Tales of Leadership podcast. How are you both doing?
Speaker 3:Super Doing great today, thanks for asking Yep, same here.
Speaker 2:Thanks, joshua. Yeah, so I always like to take the time at the very beginning of allowing our guests to kind of introduce themselves. And, keith, if we could start with you, if you could take the time just to quickly provide an overview?
Speaker 4:Yeah, happy to do it and again, thanks for spending some time with us and allowing us to spend some time with you as we learn and talk about leadership. Keith Thurgood, I live in Dallas, Texas. Retired two-star general, spent some time in Iraq and Afghanistan and I've also had the opportunity to lead some pretty large organizations. So if you're in the military, you may know AFIS are now the exchange. I was the CG and CEO of that organization. For a period of time. I've been one of the senior leaders at Walmart and Sam's Club, leading one of their $15 billion business units, and today I'm a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, where I lead a graduate program in healthcare management and leadership, where we teach our clinicians and non-clinicians about transformation, transformational leadership, driving change, striving for excellence and then, finally, I've got five kids and 15 grandkids.
Speaker 2:Wow, congratulations on all of that, sir. Thanks, neil, if you could take the time to introduce yourself to the listeners.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thanks, joshua, and again thanks for having us on. It's not very often I get to do a podcast with my brother, so that's all a good thing.
Speaker 4:That is true.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I just retired from the military active duty for just under 38 years about a year ago.
Speaker 3:So you know, I enlisted as a young soldier in the infantry a long time ago and came up through the ranks and was blessed to do some pretty great things. I've commanded at every level, from captain to three-star, retired as a three-star. In my last job I was actually stood up a brand new organization to teach, to try to do the material buying of our army differently than it's ever been done, say, in the last four years. So building teams, organizational culture, leading teams, how to lead teams, was what I spent my time doing Since I retired. I work full-time with a company called Andrel, which is a startup company, very dynamic, very passionate, focused on the defense, which matches my passion for helping soldiers, service members, and then and I also work with the University of Alabama here in Huntsville on their leadership programs with President Carr, the president of the university. So just been a great opportunity now to serve so far along in the military and then now on the defense industrial base side and on the education side, which is a passion of mine for teaching.
Speaker 2:I think it's very interesting that I have two brothers that were in the military together on the podcast at the same time, but both of you have achieved exceptionally high ranks in the army and that's no like small thing. So I'm curious, having you both on here at the same time. Was there any level of competition between you as you're going through the ranks?
Speaker 4:Well, I would say this, this and he'll, neil, jump in. For a period of time we were both in the pentagon and I was up on the third floor or something like that. He was one below, literally one below, and every once in a while I'd go down to see what he was doing. At the time he was a colonel, he was the chief of staff for, uh yeah, part of the acquisition corps and I would go down out. At the time I was, you know, I was already been promoted, so I was a general and I would go. The first time I went down there, the people in the office looked at me and said, hey, weren't you a colonel when you left the office, and now you're a general coming back. I said, yeah, that's tough. Quickly things happen in the army.
Speaker 4:But I would say I don't know if there was really any competition to say. What I would say is that we've been in our family, we've tried to do things that I think that most great leaders do, and that is focus on purpose, try to be somebody that's going to add value at the end of the day, and then when you do those kinds of things and you're focused on those kinds of things, the cards fall where they fall at the end of the day. And then when you do those kinds of things and you're focused on those kinds of things, the cards fall where they fall at the end of the day. So for me it wasn't really always about becoming a general or a CEO. That just happened to be the fruit of, I think, being self-aware, being humble, gracious, recognizing that you're not the smartest person in the room and that you can make a difference in certain areas in any organization. So I don't know, neil comment.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think when we were much younger, of course, like any brothers, we wrestled and occasionally we still do wrestle when we get together it was never a competition on a measure of success professionally and I would say the strength of that came from our parents, right, who really raised us well. And then in my case, and I'm sure in Keith's case, where we had great leaders that mentored us and taught us and put us under their wings and developed a soft potential maybe we didn't see in ourselves. And when you have a brother and we have a sister as well who is just like you know, just is successful in her, her professional domain, it really is a springboard, not a competition, it's. It's how do you, how do you learn from each other? You know, when Keith was working on his doctor and I was working on my doctor, what did we learn together? What could we do together? So I don't, it was never a competition, it was. It was more of a springboard of a lifetime of relationship.
Speaker 2:And that helped accelerate, I think, our learning capabilities and what we believed, and having an accountability partner almost in the way of being able to push through some of the more challenging experiences that you probably face. Because both of you, gentlemen, have achieved a lot, and include educationally you both achieved doctorate degrees and that's no small thing in itself. What I would love to kind of start off with at the beginning phases of your military journey what drove you both to join the military?
Speaker 4:Well, I'll start. And, by the way, I may add this to everything that Neil knows about generalship I had to teach him while he was a colonel. Just so you know, I would say I'm going to give you a little bit of a snapshot. I don't know if this will be helpful or not to the listeners, but when I got out of high school, my parents were in Germany. Our dad is a retired colonel, infantry ranger, aviator and at the time he was stationed at Stuttgart, germany, where I graduated from high school and where Neil went to high school as well.
Speaker 4:And I came back to go to school and I talked to a recruiter one day. He said hey, you ought to join the army. And I'm like, well, I know a little bit about the army, so I signed up and I was a private. I went to basic training and AIT and, uh, at the time they have a pro, a program called simultaneous membership program. So I I eventually uh, got through basic training and AIT and then went back to my reserve unit at the time and eventually got.
Speaker 4:Then I signed up for ROTC and they allowed me to be in this SMP program and what I learned from that experience was one as I went to basic training, it started to instill in me this idea that people can make a difference and it really doesn't matter what level you are, because organizations need leaders at every single level of every single organization. And this implies that we, as just good citizens of the nation and as good leaders in the military, we need to model the right kinds of behaviors. And so I started to see that, right in basic training, the impact that leaders have. In fact, if I were to see my drill sergeant, I'm pretty sure I would be locked up at attention standing in the hallways because of the things that you learn. So I learned from that experience that you know, leaders make a difference all the time. And those early experiences in real life leadership positions helped frame up my thinking so that when I was commissioned I was, you know, a regular lieutenant, and when I was a lieutenant one of my first assignments was to Europe and I was a platoon leader and we had I was in the transportation corps at the time. So it was all about logistics and we one of our missions was port clearance. So we would, you know, all these ships would come in, we would unload them, we'd put them on trucks and send them all over Europe and the Benelux countries.
Speaker 4:But I had an additional duty, much like you're familiar with, and one of my additional duties was to take an American team to what was then called the Nijmegen marches. So these were marches that were international in scope. The US sent a couple of teams. I took one and it was a march that was 100 miles, took one, and it was a march that was 100 miles, four days, 25 miles a day, to celebrate the World War II. And if you've seen the movie A Bridge Too Far, it's about Nijmegen and Remagen. It's those bridges in Holland. So I took this team. We walked about a thousand miles over the course of four or five months. That's all I did.
Speaker 4:Did every day, 20 to 25 miles a day, and one day the formation was just getting out of control and so I stopped the formation, gave him a half right face, front, leaning, rest position, knock out, a couple of push-ups back to attention, forward, march, and about 10 minutes later the same thing happened again and I stopped the formation. And I looked up the formation and I could see who was causing the problem. It was this young private up in the very front. So I ran up to the front of the formation. Now, if you can imagine this, how dumb this is. I mean, you'd never want to do this today.
Speaker 4:I reached in and I grabbed this shoulder, this young soldier by his collar, and I yanked him out of the formation. And he knew that I was totally irritated. And as I yanked him out of the formation, he tripped and he fell on the ground. So I'm staring at him, he's staring at me. The entire formation is like what the heck just happened here. Entire formation is like what the heck just happened here. And in that moment I recognized that I wasn't the leader, that I knew that I should be and that I could be. And that was one of the early moments in my life where I'm like, okay, yeah, I got all those awards in college and I got a bunch of awards on active duty, but you know what? At the end of the day, that was a turning point for me to recognize that you know what? You have a lot to learn here, lieutenant. You have a lot to learn. So, neil, over to you.
Speaker 3:So the question you asked, Josh, was a good one, which is you know what made you want to come in the Army? And I can think of two very specific things that shaped my thought of what I thought would be important values that drove me for the passion for success. So the first was in Germany, our father, who was then on the staff as a major and lieutenant colonel. He took us to Berlin and I remember very distinctly I was 13, 12 or 13 years old, and I remember very distinctly like it was yesterday I can almost smell it that standing on checkpoint Charlie, looking across the Berlin Wall, and I remember thinking very clearly in my mind those people are not happy, this can be better. There is something to this thing that we call freedom, and what I'm looking at is not that, and that has stuck with me for a long time. And then fast forward a few years. You might recall on military theaters they would play the national anthem before each movie, and I remember going to the theater with my father and we'd all, of course, stand up and he would play the national anthem two tours in Vietnam. Matter of fact, those two Chinooks on the wall behind me, if you can see those. One was given to me in 1967, my dad's first tour in Vietnam, and one was 1969, his second tour in Vietnam. Oh, wow, I can remember watching my dad listen to the national anthem and crying and I'm like you know, I was a young kid, I'm like hey, big cry baby. But now, having served for 38 years on active duty, I am that guy. What I learned that moment of time watching my dad was something I didn't understand at the time but came to appreciate. Which is this great country we live in, this great republic, this great experiment called America, needs people who are going to put the greater good above themselves. And that gets right to the leadership principles that I think have formed you know, Keith and I, over the years and the passion to do things. And then I'll just share you. I can remember the moment in time I decided I wanted to be a leader.
Speaker 3:I was enlisted, I was the RTO for a Lieutenant named Jane Conway. It was an infantry Ranger, airborne killer guy, and we were on a patrol. We've been awake for a few days and we were under our ponchos. We've been awake for a few days and we were under our ponchos in those days, under our poncho, with a red light, looking at the map, and I was the RTO. So I had the PRC-77 on my back and I'm down there on the map under the poncho with Jay Conway.
Speaker 3:Jay Conway, he's my platoon leader and I'd been out there a few times and it was his first time out there and he was lost bigger than Stuttgart. He was lost, like you know, Monday morning, Easter egg, and he said hey, where do you think we are? I said we're right here, so we are right here. He goes no, no, I think we're over here. And I remember sitting there in the rain under the poncho with my red light going I can do this better, I can do this better and I'll do whatever it takes to never be the weak link in the formation. And I think that's what leaders do. They realize that leaders must always have the capacity, no matter what's happening around them, to help others, and those leaders that use all of their capacity or haven't developed enough excess capacity in themselves will struggle to become great leaders. Because they'll spend so much time looking inward, they won't spend the time looking outward to help those around them.
Speaker 4:I love that, Neil, because it reminds me of how the Army defines leadership, and I think it's a really great definition, even though there's no universal definition on what effective leadership is. But the way the Army thinks about it is it's the ability to influence others to accomplish the mission by inspiring them, providing motivation and purpose that we should probably come back to them. Providing motivation and purpose that we should probably come back to. But there's a second component to that, and it's about creating an organization that's better than when you left it. So great leaders, at least the ones that I know of, do those two things. They always accomplish the mission you can never take your eye off the ball of the revenue stream or driving productivity but simultaneously they also set the organization up for success. They're always developing leaders. They're building the capacity and the capability that they need so the organization can extend well beyond their own life cycle.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it is. If the organization only works when you're leading it, you have not developed the organization for success. The organization and the value stream you put in place, if it is of value, will work when you're not there. It will work after you leave the organization and you have to have the capacity to think through that. So to tie those two thoughts together, right, if you're so busy trying to keep yourself in the formation when you're running, then you have no ability to help those around you in the formation. You have no ability to shape what's happening around you if your entire capacity is used up just trying to do your piece and your piece only that was one thing that I had to learn quickly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm still active duty. And then, Neil, kind of to the point, I've served in acquisition corps. Now I started off as an infantryman, so a lot of those stories resonate. Keith, with you. As a simultaneous membership program, I started that through Marshall University. I was in the National Guard and then kind of commissioned through that process and then looking at a map with the red light under a poncho.
Speaker 2:I spent countless nights doing that, especially at Fort Polk, Louisiana, which I hope to never able to look beyond my current scope. I guess what I like to call like leadership intelligence. It's not about me anymore, and that was really at the company command slot of where I have to be able to look through me and then develop systems and processes that make the organization better. But also whenever I leave, which will happen one day that organization can still move forward.
Speaker 2:And what I would love to hear from both of you and then, Keith, you hit the nail on the head and I was going to bring that up of how you both defined leadership, purpose, direction and motivation, and it's universal in the Ranger Handbook or in ADP 6-22, because I kind of nerded out on that and I love how you go back to that definition of influence because I think that that's one of the core out on that and I love how you go back to that definition of influence because I think that that's one of the core pieces of it. But as you gentlemen kind of grew through your Army experience, being lieutenants and then moving to be a company grade officer and then a field grade officer and eventually a flag officer how did your leadership maturity grow through those ranks?
Speaker 4:So you brought up some really good points here, and one I would classify it as a journey. So some people think, when you think about leadership development, there's a seminar that I can go to, there's a great podcast that I could listen to, there's a great book I can go get, there's a Gantt chart, I can go get my 12 things that I need to go do, and those make me a great leader. It's called leadership development for a reason, and this is why I think that the military has absolutely got this right. I don't know of another organization and I've been senior leader, ceo, president of big organizations. Pepsi is a $50 billion organization, walmart is a $500 billion organization, and I'm just telling you there's two things you have to get right in every organization. One is leaders matter, and you got to get the right people. To paraphrase Collins, you got to get them on the bus, and once they're on the bus, you got to give them the right seat. And then the corollary to that is, once you have the right leaders, then you can develop the right strategies right, which should be theoretically and practically tied to the end state, to the vision, so that when people are executing, they know exactly what's happening and how their particular job impacts the strategy and the outcomes overall.
Speaker 4:And to your question specifically, what I've learned is in terms of influence, is this simple idea the key to human influence is to first be influenced. The key to being powerful is to give your power away, and that has all kinds of implications empowerment, responsibility, accountability, et cetera. But you cannot, as a leader, think that you're the smartest person in the room. You actually might be the smartest person in the room and this would apply probably to Neil more than me, because he works with rocket scientists but you have to be humble, you have to be grateful, you have to be influenceable.
Speaker 4:And the magic of that little formula is, when you are influenceable, you build trust, which is the glue that holds teams together, and you become known as a very trustworthy person, a person of integrity. You get those two things right. You can build an organization, you can build an effective team. So my early lesson for me was I'm not as smart as I think I am. I'm not as good as I think I am. Nobody in this room's got a corner on good ideas. Therefore, let me learn, let me grow, let me create some psychological safety in the organization, let me give team members a chance to fail a little bit here. So we recognize that failure is not a tragedy, it's a tutor, it's a way to help everybody grow and build the capacity that you need in the organization. So, neil, over to you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think the model you started with Joshua. I think the military's got a good piece of this right. But but the academic and learning of that military process, the decision-making process which, which is a consistent characteristic of leaders, right? I'm also the same school. I don't believe that you can read all these books sitting here behind me or behind Keith. These 16 things do these 16, you'll be a great leader. I don't believe that. What I believe is that great leaders have a toolbox and they pull from that toolbox the things they need to at the time. It needs to be pulled to empower the team around them for mission success, team around them for mission success. Leadership is, of all the definitions, the one I particularly fond of is leaderships allow teams to accomplish what they would not accomplish on their own and that's a very powerful tool and it encompasses many of the thoughts that we're talking about.
Speaker 3:You talked about being a young company commander. The maturation of leadership is also about the maturation of self. Great leaders know themselves. They know how they behave, they know how they assimilate and make decisions, how they re-assimilate information. They know what excites them and what upsets them. And you think about how you have been taught to make leaders and you see this in.
Speaker 3:I've seen this in corporations, I've seen it in the military Young officers. I'll just use a military example. Young officers come in and from the time you're a lieutenant to a captain, to a major, you're paid and you are excellent at accomplishing a task with a team. It's task orientation and it's task oriented thinking. And then you go off to CGSC or the advanced course and you learn to think differently and by the time you get to be a battalion commander and a brigade commander. It's all about strategic thinking right, because you're not the one probably turning the wrenches or climbing the hill or fixing the tank or fixing a helicopter. You're developing teams of people to do that. So this capacity to understand and link from why PFC Thurgood is going to turn a wrench today and why that goes all the way up to the National Defense Strategy. You have to be able to see that vision and explain that vision from top to bottom. Tasking ends, ways and means is a term we use in the military. It's the same as task, purpose, end, state vision, mission. All of those things are designed to create the vision of those around you.
Speaker 3:When I was in my last tour in Afghanistan in 17 and 18, general Nicholson was the commander and I was the DCG he started every staff call I went to in a year with these words. He would say team, and this is all the division commanders, right, all the two stars, all the commanders from the region. He said team. Let's begin with a common understanding and a shared visualization. Why are we here and what are we trying to accomplish? Let's make sure that we can all see the same side picture of the thing that we're here to do Because, as Keith said, if they're only going to do it the way you want to have it done, it probably isn't the best way. Right, you've got to energize the team around you and my experience has been, if you could do that, they'll come up with a really great solution and they'll come up with creative, innovative solutions that will actually probably accelerate the success of the mission and those around them.
Speaker 2:All right, team, let's take a quick break from this podcast and I want to personally invite you to our private Facebook community that I call Purposeful Accountable Leaders, or PALS, and PALS is a community dedicated to inspiring and developing servant leaders by sharing transformational stories and skills Exactly what tells the leadership is all about. My goal is to build a community of like minded leaders that can share lessons, learn questions and celebrate wins when it happens, and my mission in life is clear I will end toxic leadership by sharing transformational stories and skills, and you will find countless transformational leaders in this group, many of them I have had the honor to serve with in the military. If you want to find a community that can help you grow both personally and professionally, we would love to have you. You can simply search Purposeful Accountable Leaders on Facebook or click the Leadership Resources tab in the show notes to join. I am looking forward to seeing you guys and continuing to grow together on our leadership journey.
Speaker 2:Back to the podcast. I love the concept of, like a psychological safe environment. I think the military, at least, does a fairly good job of that, especially within the acquisitions core with a lot of like the rapid prototyping elements that we kind of go through and thinking through like the engineering model failing fast and failing small, so being able to find a problem and then quickly integrate and improve upon that every single time but also the strategic level thinking of what both of you gentlemen said and I love podcasting from this point of view is that no other time would I ever have a one-on-one conversation for an hour with two highly successful generals that are also happen to be brothers. So that is awesome and I can see themes and correlations. So when I had General Petraeus on here, he were talking about strategic level thinking and how he thinks through that Get the big ideas right, the concepts, be able to clearly communicate those to the organization, set metrics out of how we want to get to those and how we can define it and then iterate. How are we continuing to get through that process? And I love being able to see those correlations between all the different.
Speaker 2:Regardless of what your background is a logistician, infantryman or being able to be an acquisition officer starting off as an infantryman those common principles and leadership core competencies and characteristics are universal and one of the key things that I wanted to go back to that you both kind of hit on is understanding the leadership methodology, the educational piece of it, and then having leadership experience. And I think in the military we do a fairly good job of educating our workforce, but the experience is where we really shine. If you give me an infantry lieutenant, I give him a task and purpose. He's going to go do it. It doesn't matter what it is, but the education behind that, I think, is often lacking in terms of like tools in the toolkit. How does the civilian sector do that? In terms of developing leaders would be something I'm very interested in.
Speaker 4:Well, I'll give you my perspective. Go ahead, neil, you go.
Speaker 3:I was just going to offer a couple of thoughts there. I've been teaching for quite a number of years in the academic world and in the industry world. Here's where there's a gap that the military has, through a very deliberate education process. So you went through officer basic course, advanced course, cgsc, war college and you name the school. We've been through that and that's a very it's a very deliberate way to refresh your professional knowledge over time. Go to your average industry partner and go. When's the last time you went to professional education? When was the last time you went to a particular thing Unless you're a senior executive, if you're in the middle of that organization, you probably.
Speaker 3:It was probably your master's degree, if you have one, maybe your undergraduate degree. I had the chance to go to a school up in Boston and I was a major at the time and I had just left the war fighting army and came out of Task Force 160 Special Operations Aviation. I'm an aviator by basic branch as an officer and I was with this group of people at school up in Boston and they were it was the economic minister from Japan, you know, lumber company presidents, oil company presidents, anybody that we would define as success In this 10-week course. I went to part of my doctorate program and about three weeks into it, after the teacher left, the entire class said hey, neil, we want you to stay behind, we want to talk to you. And I'm like, oh, this is going to be bad. I'm a major in the army. These guys are just by every measure of success and what they said to me, by every measure of success. And what they said to me lives with me this day.
Speaker 3:They said Neil, we want you to teach us how to make decisions. And like what he goes, yeah, we don't have a decision-making process that we can use repeatedly over and over. That's consistent and gets us to a good answer every time. And, joshua, I promise you you could do that in your sleep. We could give you 70% of the information nine times out of 10, you'll make the right choice and you'll do it so fast you won't even recognize, because you've practiced the process of leadership and decision-making inherent to the outcome.
Speaker 3:And what happens is and I'll just give you a simple example how many times have you given a task to a subordinate and you had the task clearly in your mind and it came out of your mouth and they went away and did the task and they came back and presented you a course of action or a resolution to the task and you said in your mind not out loud, but you said in your mind that is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And what you should have said, and what I've learned to say over time, is that how is it possible that it was so clear in my mind that I articulated it so poorly that the person came back with what they believe is a great job and it was so far off the mark. That's on me, it's not on them. That's how leaders think, right? Because no, I promise you, joshua, no one woke up this morning in any job I've ever been part of military civilian that said you know, I'm going to go to work today and screw something up.
Speaker 3:That's just what I'm going to do no one does that, so you must assume they're trying to do the right thing. So how is it when they come back with something that's so far off the mark? It must be that my guidance was so poor that I didn't use it correctly. I did not translate what was so clear in my mind common understanding and shared visualization so clear in my mind to them that they came back with that task. And a leader will be introspective when the answers coming back are not what's expected. Rather than assume the person across the table is not trying to be successful, the assumption is how is it that I did not help them be successful?
Speaker 2:That's powerful.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and I would add on this. I'll give you a couple of data points to think about. One is we talked earlier about the importance of purpose and the power of purpose in organizations. So once you're clear on that, which you have to spend a lot of time doing it. And oh, by the way, this applies not only at the tactical, the operational and the strategic or, in corporate lingo, the enterprise level. This applies at the individual level as well. So if you're not clear on what your purpose is, where your voice is, it's impossible for you to help others find their voice and therefore make a difference. But in organizations, specifically purpose-driven organizations, grow 10% faster, they have more successful product launches 56% of the time, and they grow globally faster as well. So there's a reason to talk about all this kind of stuff and really drive it deep down to the organization. And I think we're many organizations that I work with on the corporate side.
Speaker 4:So we said that the military does a great job. There's no question about that. You want to be a battalion commander. Guess what? You're going to be 20 years in the army before you get to be a commander at that level. And think about this when we fire a four-star general or one resigns or retires. We don't go to the Australians or to the Brits and say, hey, can you give me one of your four-star generals to be the next chief of staff of the Army? In the corporate world, we fire a CEO, we go find another one. We don't do that in the army. We grow and develop our leaders over a long period of time in a sustained, methodical way.
Speaker 4:And this is so important because think of these other data points, if you think and these are from a variety of different studies and we can cite them later if we need to 89% of leaders that come into organizations new hires admit that they don't have the complete skill sets they need to be successful. Now think about that. 89% Are you kidding me? That implies that we're not investing, we're not building the capability that we need. A couple of other data points for you. Great leaders create three times more economic value than poor leaders. High performing teams that are held together by trust, that understand the enterprise point of view, deliver 48% improved productivity versus average performers. A couple of other data points for you. I don't want to worry you out here.
Speaker 2:But these are important. I've already taken six pages of I'm not joking six pages, I love it.
Speaker 4:Think of this 58% of new senior executive hires, 58% fail within 18 months of being hired. Now, if that doesn't get you think about this Organizations that have great leadership. There's a 16% equity premium on the value of the company. And likewise, there's a 19% equity discount on the value of the company because of perceived poor leaders. And then one last data point. So, given all of that, here's a stunning one Only 30% of CEOs are confident they have the talent they need to grow their organizations into the future.
Speaker 4:So you think about living in a world that is complex. It's ambiguous. You think about living in a world where there's black swans, gray rhinos. You have to have leaders that can think on their own. Distributed leadership matters more today than it ever has, and you have to get this right. And I think failure to get this right is a failure of epic proportions, and I don't believe that most organizations spend enough time investing in their people, and you see this every day. Why? Because if there's an expense, a crunch on the expenses, what's one of the first things that goes? A crunch on the expenses, what's one of the first things that goes? Training, travel, because it's an easy budget line, but it's the paradox of success, the very thing that you should not be doing. Most organizations end up doing it because it's easy, so go ahead, bill.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So think about this idea of leaders of organizations that invest in not only the people around them and in continuous education, professional education, right? All these books that we have behind us. We don't read them to memorize them, we read them for ideas. Right, there's books on mountain climbing. There's books, right, there's books on mountain climbing. There's books on farming. There's books on building trains. There's books. These books are about ideas. To create thought, right, to create ideas around you and use the ideas and the power of connective tissue. Great leaders will make connections that your average leaders won't make, and they do that because they have a set of wide thinking, strategic outcomes. So think about how we develop people to do that and what are the tools we use to develop people to do that.
Speaker 3:And I'll compare and contrast what Keith was saying within the civilian world versus the military world. So you're a battalion commander. Did you get to choose the people in your organization? Probably not, where in a civilian, you may have inherited, but you can change that relatively quickly to key point, right, a lot of people getting fired, a lot of people moving around the industry base Forced leadership to develop a successful organization in the military is a little bit different than leadership in a civilian. And I say different not in the values that we're talking about, but different in the tools you use and the knobs and dials you can use to change those particular outcomes. You look at your average PhD. You know. You said you're in the acquisition corps in the army and so you know.
Speaker 3:I interviewed every officer and every senior civilian that came in my organization when I was doing rapid capability. You know offensive hypersonic weapons and high-end technologies that we need to accelerate past the traditional model of PEO structures. We need to accelerate past the traditional model of BEO structures. So ask your next time you're in your office, ask your, go up to your average PhD and go hey there, mr or Mrs PhD, how many classes on leadership have you had to get your doctorate? How many classes on decision-making have you had to get your doctorate? Oh, by on decision-making have you had to get your doctorate? Oh, by the way, the system engineering process is not a decision-making tool. The engineering V is not a decision-making tool.
Speaker 3:So what happens is that they're very good at their thing, but we want them to become leaders over time.
Speaker 3:But we don't train them.
Speaker 3:To Keith's point, we don't train them to become leaders, we think, because they have a PhD, they're inherently leaders, especially if it's, you know, from a Tier 1 school, mit, where they've got, you know, an engineering degree, aerospace, you know, whatever it might be.
Speaker 3:You know physics, space dynamics, whatever it might be, space dynamics, whatever it might be. And so leaders that are passionate, value-based leaders that can see the vision of what the organization can become and build that to become what it should be, spend time with people and I would say, and I would go so far as to say I actually believe that it's actually a moral obligation of leaders to develop other great leaders, and I could give you story after story of leaders who saw in me more than I did in myself and spent the time with me and taught and mentored me over dinner or on a, you know, a helicopter ride or whatever it was. Leaders, as Keith indicated, right. You pick them and then you get the right ones in the right seat on the bus and then get out of the way because they will do phenomenal things for the organization.
Speaker 2:I always thought about the content Go ahead.
Speaker 4:Absolutely Sorry. Sorry, sorry, keith, I was interrupting you there. So this reminds me of a couple of things which is a great dialogue, and that is, if you want to improve an organization, you have to improve the people in the organization. There's no such thing as the procedures, the structure, the strategies better that allow you to enable the end state and Neil mentioned this idea of decision making which, again, I think it's important I think the military's intent, the confirmation brief, the back brief, the AAR, red teaming, that tool set, if organizations use those tool sets, I'm telling you there would be a step function improvement, not only in leadership development but in the outcomes that they're seeking.
Speaker 4:That's how powerful this stuff is and I just don't think that we spend enough time. Powerful this stuff is and I just don't think that we spend enough time, at least on the commercial side, doing this. As Neil said, it's a deficit. People talk about it. I'm going to send you to the next seminar, but you've got to invest in people and when you invest in people you expect an ROI at the end of the day.
Speaker 2:This is the easiest podcast that I've ever ran. Continue, go ahead, sir.
Speaker 3:I was just going to say. Here's the thing about training. This book right here, you probably have one just like it. It's my battle book when I was a captain in the 160th. I have had this on my desk since I was a captain. It was on my desk when I was a three-star Wow, to remind me of the fundamental skill sets.
Speaker 3:And what happens is we tend to think that we can't resource training and we can't provide the training because we're so busy, and it's a fallacy, right? The actual fact is you can't afford not to. So when I was, when I was in my previous job, just before I retired, I required all my o6s and above. You will go to one school every year, no matter what you got one week. You pick the school, I'll pay for it. I don't care where it's at, I don't care what university, what organization, what industry training, but you're going to go to a school. You're going to continue your professional education. Now, the problem with that idea is you don't get relief from your day job while you're in school. You got to do that at night, but you've got to dedicate some time to where you can think and step back from the forest that you're fighting in every day, the trees that are around you that you're trying to cut down every day. You got to step back and go.
Speaker 3:Here's the big scheme of things, and this idea of a very centralized vision and the clarity of the vision is really important. In the task force, in the special Operations Aviation Regiment, task Force 160, there is one mission in life and everybody knows it. It is the value base of the organization. You will get to the target plus or minus 30 seconds, no excuses, and everybody is on that mission set. Everybody in that organization is on that train. We will not quit until that reality becomes true and you reinforce it in everything. And when the organization and the leader has that clarity, it's very, very powerful. And it's not about what you put on the wall. It's not about a vision statement on the wall with these 16 priorities. It's got nothing to do with that. It is embedded in the thing that you breathe and the thing that you bleed. It is what the organization sees themselves as collectively and individually. And when those are aligned, the outcome is hugely powerful.
Speaker 4:This reminds me of something that is often attributed to General Patton, but others have said it as well Never tell people how to do something. Always tell them what has to be done, and they will amaze you with their ingenuity. And that's the exact point that Neil's making, and I've been thinking about this for a while now Well, longer than a while but I've recently developed a new word, and I'm going to share this word with you, and the word is transformance. It's just a word that I made up. So when I think about strategic leadership, or I think about enterprise leadership, there's two things that you have to get right. One, you have to perform today.
Speaker 4:So this is about working in the business. It's about working in your unit, but simultaneously, you have to be thinking, as a leader, about changing the organization for the future. That's what I would describe as working on the business. Now here's the trick you have to do both of these things simultaneously. So if you're in the corporate world, you can never take your eye off the revenue stream. If you do that, you're not going to have a business over time. If you do that, you're not going to have a business over time. But if that's all that you're focused on and you're not thinking about what the future will look like, you will not be able to thrive, probably not even be able to survive, in a VUCA world. You just won't make it. And so I've taken these two words, this idea of performing and transforming, and I've combined them into this word called transformance. That's what leaders have to do if you want to thrive and win in this world. You have to be adaptable, you have to be agile, you have to have the right structure, systems and processes that enable the team to execute.
Speaker 4:And I'm often asked well, why do we talk about culture all the time, if this is so important? The reason that we talk about culture is because the culture is an enabler to the execution of the strategies. That's why culture is important, and leaders have to shape that culture and they have to do it every single day by the things they say, the stories they tell, the model, the behaviors that they exhibit. Super important to get right, right, and all that ties to everything that we've been talking about purpose, vision, mission, supporting strategies, allocation and resources in ways means all of that. When you, when you just listening to ourselves talk about this, it makes total common sense. Most people would agree with all of this and yet somehow we've got 30% of our CEO. Only 30% of our CEOs say I have the right capacity, I don't know, yeah.
Speaker 3:so think about that capacity right and tie that to the connective tissue of the earlier conversations. So if your capacity as a leader is all used up in getting the thing right today, then you have no capacity to think about tomorrow. If all your capacity is used up in the performance of today, you have no capacity to be the transformational leader for tomorrow. And it gets back to the vision. I'll use Andrel as an example. Right, the six founders of Andrel all came out of the commercial marketplace very, very successful. They said these words and this is a core thing. This is like plus or minus 30 seconds on the target.
Speaker 3:We are going to do things differently, period. Whatever we've been doing since 1950 in acquisition, we're not going to do it and we're going to find ways to do it differently. And that passion drives that organization. The widgetry is widgetry, but the idea to be different and stick with that, and they talk about it all the time in every meeting. What are we doing different? Why are we doing it this way? How can we do it faster? And you have to reinforce that conversation every time you get into a common, you know a meeting. General Nicholson's words common understanding, shared visualization. And when you have that complete picture and, by the way, it's a continuous evolution of work. It's not something you get done today. It's something you develop every day and work on it every day and change every day.
Speaker 2:All right team. Let's take a quick break from this episode and I want to share a leadership resource with you, and that is the Resiliency-Based Leadership Program. Want to share a leadership resource with you, and that is the Resiliency-Based Leadership Program. Rblp's vision is to create a worldwide community of practice committed to building and leading resilient teams. So why do you need to build and lead a resilient team? Resilient teams are the key to individual and organizational growth, regardless of being in the military or in the civilian workforce. Building collective teams allows for exponential growth and the team's ability to overcome adversity, adapt and, most importantly, grow. And then bottom line, up front. Resilient teams are just stronger together. And here's a fact 99% of the people who take that course recommend it to others, and I'm one of them. I just completed my certification and I highly recommend this. And the great news is it's most likely free to you, and if you're in the military, it is a hundred percent free to you. And if you want to learn more, you can look in the show notes for this episode and find the link and use the discount code J M C M I L L I O N code J-M-C-M-I-L-L-I-O-N, and that is also in the show notes Back to the episode.
Speaker 2:So I wrote down culture and that was one of the things that I really wanted to kind of to talk about, because I've worked in organizations that have okay cultures and the performance has been okay, and then I've seen the power of what one leader can do, both for the bad and both for the good within 90 days, being able to completely change what that one company was the ugly sister of the bad company within a battalion to the top company because of that one leader and how they were able to shape the culture. And I just started writing things down, as both you gentlemen talked about having that leadership capacity, frequency, being with your people, focusing on your people, deeds and words, and I always used to live by that motto deeds, not words is that actions speak louder than words. But as I'm growing in my leadership maturity, I understand words are also just as powerful. So you have to be able to to communicate clearly but also follow through with action and having trust and then, most importantly, going back to your people at every given time.
Speaker 2:I think culture is one of the hardest things to really bound down. Um, especially like strategic level leadership. Keith, for example, I think what, uh, one of your corporations that you ran had over 35,000 people Sam's Club. I was doing some LinkedIn stalking on you. Oh, there you go.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But that blows my mind from an organization that is that large like AFIS, maintaining a culture, how do you do that at such a high level? And then, sir, for you too, like working within RICTO or being a PEO of Missiles in Space, like that is a culture of a huge organization. How do you manage and keep that?
Speaker 4:Well, I'll give you my perspective and again, I'm just one man thinking about it. But this is as we talked about earlier. Leadership is a journey Building the culture and sustaining that culture. And if you're trying to change your culture, by the way, in a transformational way, the data suggests that those journeys are five to seven years. So, as a leader, one way that you can do that is you're always under the microscope, so to speak. You're always on display, you're always telling the story, and one of the ways that I used to do that is when I was a CEO and when I was a CG is I created some little three by five cards and everywhere I went, I would talk about what I called my four rules of the road, basically my leadership philosophy Don't bunt, no second place trophies, look for yellow cars and solve for yes. And then I tell a story about each one of those.
Speaker 4:So you have to model the right kinds of behaviors, and I think it's also important that, when it comes to shaping culture, you have to be able to get rid of all of the policies and procedures and the structure that makes absolutely no sense, because people will hide behind the policies. And if we have time, at the end I'll tell you a Burger King story, but it's a common thing. Middle managers love the status quo, because there's no intellectual curiosity, there's no emotional energy that you need to exhibit. It's like just float on, let's kick the can down the road here. And that attitude is rampant in large organizations because everybody can kind of hide in the middle here.
Speaker 4:So you've got the senior leaders nodding about yes, we're going to go do this and we've got this vision and purpose and we're all rallied behind it. Then you've got the middle managers that may be nodding their heads in meetings but at the end of the day they're like nah, I don't believe in this, I'm going to kick the can down the road. So I think one is you have to have you got to have a stump speech, you got to talk about it all the time. You have to recognize and reward those that are living up to the standards and the behaviors and, as shine would say so he talked a lot about culture there are primary levers you can pull and they're embedding levers you can pull, and recognizing and rewarding the right kinds of behaviors is one of the things that's on the top of the list I'll.
Speaker 3:I'll add to that if I could, and those are great points. I'll put this on a little more personal level. If you want to change the culture in an organization, you have to be that culture. You, as the leader, have to be that culture, whatever culture you want. If you are not that as a leader, the organization will never become that. I'll give you a couple examples. I'll give you a military one and not a military one.
Speaker 3:As a young captain, when I was flying in the task force, I were on a mission set and I had a young soldier. His call sign was Weasel. His real name was Jim Lee Grand Great young E-4. He was a crew chief on my aircraft. We were flying MH47s at the time. We're out of country doing a mission and back in those days we had satellite phones right With biggest suitcases. You know there was no pocket thing back in those days. So I carried my big old suitcase with me everywhere. I went with a little bitty phone in it and I'm out there walking around you know, walking around leadership and watching Jimmy do some maintenance on the aircraft, and I can tell he's very distracted and he's struggling with this task, and so I walk up to talk to him hey, hey, what's going on? You okay, he goes. You know, sir, my wife is back at home and she's at the doctor today with our first baby. They're doing the prenatal checks and his wife was hearing challenged and I'm like, okay, I got it. I broke out my suitcase phone. I said call your. I got the doctor on the phone, talk to your wife right now. That was a very impactful thing for that young soldier.
Speaker 3:Now, fast forward, 10 years later, I'm as a one star in Afghanistan. Jimmy Legrand is now the first sergeant of a company and I walk in I didn't know he was. I walk into the Chinook company there to just to check on and walk around the middle of the morning because you can't sleep when you get there, right. So it's three o'clock in the morning. I'm walking through the hangar that's what aviators do and I walk into the talk and there's Jimmy as the first Sergeant. By the way, it happens to be the same company of that top Chinook that my dad commanded in 1967 in Vietnam. Oh wow, same company, the pachyderms and it was great to see him again and I had forgotten about that whole experience until he brought it up. Because you have no, he said sir, you have no idea the impact that you made that day. You have to be the leader of the culture you want around you. Fast forward now.
Speaker 3:Just last week in our company we had a young lady in the UK to Keith's earlier point, she was filled with some equipment to the Royal Military in the UK. She's down in the battles of the organization and she is doing a great job. She has no idea who I am. She knows who I am. I'm the division lead, I'm the senior vice president. I call her on the phone in the UK hey, you don't really know me, but I'm just calling to tell you thank you for working so hard and doing such a great job. And she I don't think anybody ever called her before.
Speaker 3:So I guess my message to those two stories are if you want to change the culture, you have to become the culture you want and you have to demonstrate it in your actions. And, as Keith said, you have to repeat it all the time and you have to live it, because if you don't leave it because you're in a glass house that Keith said you don't get any B days. All your days are A days and you have to behave that way, not only when people are watching you, but when people aren't watching you, and because there are no B days and there are no free days when you're a leader.
Speaker 2:That's one of the most powerful things, I think is that always do the right thing because it's the right thing to do, not because it's the most convenient or other people are watching you, because I think that's the truest test of a character, for anyone is like, if you get in the car, the grandma rule would you put your seatbelt on if your grandmother was in the car besides you? A hundred percent you would, but do you do it when you're just by yourself every single day? And I think that's a hallmark of a great leader, regardless of the level. I want to be respectful of your time. If I could still two hours, I would.
Speaker 2:I haven't even touched the top of most of the questions that I want, but one of the things that I really wanted to get into was the leadership program that you both worked on building the curriculum for the University of Alabama, huntsville. So that's something near and dear to my heart, because I'm thinking now about potentially getting a doctorate in leadership, because I absolutely love this topic and you can see I just got off work. I'm still kind of in my uniform and this is stuff that I absolutely love doing work. I'm still kind of in my uniform and this is stuff that I absolutely love doing, and I just moved from PO Aviation where I worked on smaller drones, so the University of Alabama Huntsville is like a close to my heart. If you could kind of go through that curriculum and the topic of what you guys are offering.
Speaker 4:Well. I would say this Go ahead, Neil.
Speaker 3:No, Keith, go ahead. Go ahead, please Okay.
Speaker 4:Well, I was going to just underscore. One of the things that we were just talking about is people will believe the messenger long before they believe the message. This whole idea of developing culture, as Neil was talking about. You just cannot overcommunicate that enough. That's one of the secrets to great leaders In terms of the University of Alabama. I think Neil hit on this earlier.
Speaker 4:What we've discovered is especially on the technical side. We have some great engineers, we have some great rocket scientists, we've got some great contractors in organizations and in the military, but they're civilians and they just haven't had the leadership training that they need to make a difference. So if you fundamentally believe that leaders make a difference at every level in every organization, regardless of your functional specialty, then organizations need to invest in people. That's how they're going to improve the revenue stream. That's how they're going to drive costs. People that's how they're going to improve the revenue stream. That's how they're going to drive costs down. That's how they're going to drive radical collaboration and improve trust.
Speaker 4:And so we were looking at this and saying, okay, how can we develop some curriculum a class, if you will that at least begins to build the foundation of what effective leadership is about? And notice I used the word effective here as opposed to efficient. So we need effective leaders. What do effective leaders do? These are leaders of character, competence and courage. They do the right thing. They do the harder right instead of the easier wrong, as you just said. That's what we need in organizations and that's what that was all about, neil. Over to you to add.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'll just add to that. My experience has been pretty clear in a lot of areas and what I found in industry and in the military we did the same thing. I'll just use Army Aviation as an example. We picked great platoon sergeants in Army army aviation because they were great crew chiefs. They may not know how to be a platoon sergeant at all, but, man, they can fix helicopters and and sometimes we get a great mechanic who's also a great leader and occasionally in industry and in government, civilian workforce where you have high performing, high thinking phds. Huntsville is a very good example of high performing, high thinking phds.
Speaker 3:Huntsville is a very good example of this yeah now more phds per capita huntsville than any other place in the nation. And and we, we bring them out of college because they're great at their task. Man, they can do engineering like no one's business. And then they will go back and get a master's and they're good at it. They go back and get a master's and they're good at it, they go back and get a PhD and pretty soon, because they're great engineers, we put them in charge of two engineers, and then we put them in charge of three engineers and that's okay. And then pretty soon they're in charge of 20 and have no idea how to be in charge of 20 people because they're not doing the math every day anymore. Now they're responsible for people doing the math and the engineering.
Speaker 3:The life is like an hourglass right, high skill sets at the base, but we put them through this funnel of leadership and a few come out on the top and they're great physicists and great leaders, but very few. Why is that? It's because we don't spend the time in organizations developing them outside their expertise in a PhD area. So I'll use an example in acquisition you get a young major, comes into a command and he's coming out of the operational army. He's done great things, very successful, or he wouldn't be in the acquisition corps. Same in industry they progress up because they're very successful and all successful, and also they're in charge of a team. And if they're young, aggressive people in the industry or in the military, they're in charge of a team with generally older than them yeah, have more experience than them, have more education than them, and what happens is they immediately abdicate all their leadership responsibilities based on experience, and I use that term deliberately. What they don't have they have a lot of experience but they don't have is the academic education of leadership that Keith's talking about. The combination of experience and education is called wisdom, and bringing those to bear as a leader is what we're trying to get them to think about in this course. They have all the technical skills, but we need them to lead through those technical outcomes.
Speaker 3:And it's the same on the other side. Right, you got a lot of great leaders. They can't do the math. Yeah, they can't solve the technical problem, they can't even understand the technical problem. And so, building leaders that can balance both sides right, there's a plenty of studies and you know, keith and I can quote numbers all day long Most CEOs are well-rounded people right, they were good at one point in their life about a very specific thing, but most of them have a pretty well-rounded outcome, at least the successful ones. And I know we're going long here and, if you can't tell, keith and I are very passionate about this thing called leadership. It is something that we feel very strongly about and have a lot of passion about and have a lot of experience Some not so successful, some very successful and the scar tissue that we call development and the leadership skills. So I'll just pause there.
Speaker 2:So I think it's almost impossible to distill down all of the leadership wisdom that both of you gentlemen have in one hour. I could probably do an individual episode with each one of you and it would be two hours long, 100%. And it's funny in Huntsville we were playing soccer with my kids. We'd always go out Saturdays and I'd ask the parents hey, what do you do for a living? I'm a mechanical engineer, I'm an aeronautical engineer, I'm an engineer and it's like what do you do? I'm an army acquisitions. Every single person that my daughter would play on sports teams with was was an engineer.
Speaker 2:But that level of technical acumen kind of raised me up in a way of where I had to kind of grow that area. And I've always looked at from a standpoint of leadership, of being a lake versus a well. I I'm okay with being a foot deep in a mile wide. I don't need to be that dangerous in certain things. Certain things maybe I got to get a little bit deeper in.
Speaker 2:But wells that's people on my team, those subject matter experts at least of where they need to be a mile deep and a foot wide and being okay with not understanding everything but being able to get down to at least the third level. So if you ask me a question, sir, I'd kind of pride myself on being able to get to that third level. But beyond that, that's what I have my team for, and that's very hard to do, I think, for a technical person who is an engineer by trade, being able to pull back from the work because that's all they've ever known, that's, their self-worth is tied to that, their job satisfaction is tied to that. And then leading other people, that's a challenge and I commend both of you because that curriculum, I think, is going to be extremely powerful, especially in Huntsville with some of the hypersonics and the space programs, especially the drone technology that is taking place and that is needed right now. If anyone wants to learn more about that program, how could they find it?
Speaker 3:So the best place to do it is part of the School of Business. Dr Jason Green is the dean of the School of Business. Under that umbrella is a continuing education program for the University of Huntsville and Alabama Huntsville that's where it's at and we've got a great team that has been putting this together and helping Keith and I put this together and Fatia, who runs the continuing education program, has just been really super. Her and Amber and the whole team over there have been super, helping us do this. And just watch for the announcements of the school you know this kind of a three or four day workshop, depending on how it folds out and just watch for it there on the University of Alabama Huntsville's school page and then, of course, here locally there'll be announcements in Huntsville and in the area, so just watch for it there.
Speaker 2:I'll work with Amber too, within the show notes. So when this actual officially airs, I'll work with Amber too, within the show notes. So when this actual officially airs, I'll work with her to make sure that that's kind of bounded and clear for anyone who is listening to this episode. The last question that I have for both of you, gentlemen, is how can our listeners find you and add value to any of your current missions if they want to reach out?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's real easy for me. You can just reach out to my email address. It's lnthurgood at gmailcom. Lnthurgood at gmailcom no-transcript.
Speaker 2:you taking time to go through your journey with me and also share your leadership wisdom. I've learned a lot. I'm now on page six, so thank you again.
Speaker 3:All right, have a great evening. Thanks for having us.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and, by the way, my last piece of advice to you, josh, when you work on your PhD, make sure you call us so we can give you some good advice on setting up your dissertation committee.
Speaker 2:Okay, no, so you know All right.
Speaker 2:All right, all right, have a good evening. All right, team. That was a phenomenal episode with Keith and Neil Thurgood, so one that was completely nerve wracking and amazing at the same time. Right? So I'm a major in the United States Army and I just had the honor and the privilege to talk to two retired flag officers, one being a major general, another being a lieutenant general. That is not a small thing a two-star general and a three-star general, and them being brothers.
Speaker 2:Honestly, this was one of the best podcasts in terms of leadership content that I've had the ability to record, and that's saying a lot, because I have recorded now over, I think, a hundred different episodes. It's absolutely incredible, and some of the leadership nuggets that Keith and Neil provided are different from other episodes, and that's great. And having two brothers that can play upon each other and share their experiences is phenomenal Keith having a logistician background and running very, very, very, very large organizations to include AFIS, to include AFIS. And then Neil having a more technical acumen background, focused on technology, but also being the cutting edge capabilities of acquisitions and how we can improve that process and leading people. Those two together, I think, were very powerful. So what are my top three takeaways. I took a lot of notes. You may take different key takeaways and that's okay. These are my top three.
Speaker 2:So number one is leadership development. We always focus on problems. We always focus on the bottom lines. If you want to create extraordinary results as a leader, it's simple. Keep it simple right. Focus on the people, give them the training, give them the resources, ensure that they are stretching themselves beyond their capability. Focusing on people just isn't providing them education and giving them the tools to be successful. It's also holding them accountable, forcing them to develop growth plans, and I like how Neil talked about he would always have his 06s take a academic class every single year. And oh, by the way, you're doing that outside of your normal duty hours, like me filming this podcast right now. I do not allow my extracurricular activities to take away from what I'm doing in the army, because that's a no-fail mission for me, but this is something that I am deeply passionate about and I will happily spend time focusing on talking to leaders and being a better leader. That takes discipline, but it also takes a level of accountability right, and so when you are a leader in an organization, understand that and focus on developing people. If you can do that, you're going to create extraordinary results.
Speaker 2:Number two key takeaway that I wanted to kind of focus on was transformance, and then Keith brought this up. I love the merger of two words, essentially performance and transformation. As leaders, we still have the basic capability of producing results. That is what you were put into that role to do and that is to get results. And that's one of the phases on leadership for me is achieving results.
Speaker 2:The fourth phase of leadership, after you take over a position, is focused on strengthening relationships. And why do you want to strengthen relationships with people? Because they work better together, and performance is one of those key metrics. You can always tell a functioning team if they're hitting home runs and they're consistently getting base hits. That's what makes a great team a great team is they're always moving forward and they're proactive. And then transformation is another powerful tool, because we can't have status quo thinking in all or any of our organizations. We have to be able to transform to whatever environment that we find ourselves in. So the leadership style and trait that I have now, if you would have went 10 years ago, 11 years ago, 12 years ago, would be dramatically different, because I've matured, I've learned more. I've educated myself more. I've pushed myself outside my comfort zone more times than I can count and I'm a better person. For that Transformance. Make sure you are a transformance type of leader.
Speaker 2:And then the last one was building a robust culture, and Keith just started throwing out a lot of different metrics in terms of data, of data. One of them that stood out to me is 30% of CEOs do not believe they have the right resources to be successful. 89% of the people do not believe they have what it takes or the skills to be successful in their job. 43% of people believe that when you have strong leaders, you can have better performance. There's a correlation there of that. We always have imposter syndrome. Even if you have the tools and the capability to do things, it comes still down to leadership. You have to have that ability. If you can have someone get on the bus and put them in the right seat exactly what the two gentlemen talked about get on the bus and put them in the right seat exactly what the two gentlemen talked about you can have extraordinary results. And that is one of the most important things is putting the right person at the top.
Speaker 2:And that's the third takeaway is culture. Culture starts at the top, it's water, it flows down the mountain and it touches every single aspect of the organization. But culture encompasses a lot of different components or characteristics. One is modeling the way and I love how Neil talked about this be the culture. What other way can you put that? That is clear, it is concise, it is directly to the point. If you want other people to model or emulate what you're doing, be that person.
Speaker 2:Policies and procedures. I think one of the most hamstring things we do, especially as Americans, is just throw more policies and procedures at things, thinking that that is systemizing and making things better and in essence, all you're doing is you're just adding another layer of bureaucracy. And trust me, I'm an acquisition officer and if you want to get into the level of bureaucracy it is absolutely mind blowing. We have to be able to take that away to build an effective culture that is transformative. Getting after our second point recognizing and rewarding people, being positive, because it's infectious. If you show up every single day with my motto every day is a gift, I'm not going to waste mine. People just are naturally going to want to come to work and they're going to love what they're doing.
Speaker 2:You have to have the leadership capacity. You have to have more in the tank and the drive to go, continue to educate. You have to invest in people. You have to be more in the tank and the drive to go, continue to educate. You have to invest in people. You have to be willing to do the hard things because it's the right thing to do, not because it's the popular thing to do and there's people watching you. And then, finally, you have to be able to establish trust. All of those things, and probably countless more, go into developing a culture. But at the top, it's all about who is in that seat. It's the leader. You are the leader of that organization, your organization. You establish the culture and it takes time to build that. It's consistency, it's routine, it's a discipline Remember RAD, routine, accountability, discipline, all of those things kind of go into building that culture.
Speaker 2:Hey, team, do me a favor If you like this content and the content that I continue to push out, make sure you share this podcast, make sure you rate it on whatever platform you listen to. You can listen to me on any major platform that you're listening on currently, right now. And then, number three, you can support this channel. Go to mcmillianleadershipcoachingcom. You can click the leadership resources tabs. You can read additional content to include this podcast. We'll have a blog article associated with it and I'll distill down what the key points are that Keith and Nill made and you can find ways at the bottom of that of supporting the show. And as always, I'm your host, josh McMillian, saying every day is a gift, don't waste yours. I'll see you next time.