Tales of Leadership
Tales of Leadership is a veteran-owned podcast designed to equip leaders with the knowledge required to inspire others through transformational leadership. If you want to grow your influence and become a purposeful leader, you have found your tribe. Become the leader your team deserves!
Tales of Leadership
#111 Christina Bates - Unlocking Human Potential Through Authentic Leadership
Dr. Christina Bates is a mom to two sweet girls, an entrepreneur, a leader, and an animal lover with three dogs, two cats, one bunny, and one guinea pig. Passionate about all things military, especially weapons systems, she is dedicated to helping leaders and organizations excel and realize their full potential. She believes that God has a purpose for each of us, and in small but impactful ways, she supports leaders and members of organizations in living out that purpose.
Connect with Dr. Christina Bates:
- IG - @cmbatesconsulting
- Linkedin – linkedin.com/in/dr-christina-bates
🫡 My Why: I’ve seen the cost of poor leadership — how it can destroy morale, break trust, and in the worst cases, lead to lives lost, including through suicide. That’s why I’ve committed my life to helping others lead with purpose. Through Tales of Leadership, I share real stories and actionable insights on how to overcome adversity and become the kind of leader people remember for the right reasons.
👉🏽Leadership Resources: https://linktr.ee/talesofleadership
👉🏽10th Mountain Whiskey & Spirits: https://10thwhiskey.com
🏔️ Looking for an incredible bourbon or spirit? 10th Mountain Whiskey is a craft distillery that keeps the legacy of the 10th Mountain Division alive—bold, smooth, and built with purpose.
🎖️ Get 10% off with code pandocommando
✅ SHARE THIS PODCAST
✅ GIVE A 5-STAR REVIEW
✅ SUPPORT
Together, we will impact 1 MILLION lives!!!
Every day is a gift, don't waste yours!
- Joshua K. McMillion
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'm your host, josh McMillian. I'm an active duty Army officer. I'm an Army leadership coach. I run my own leadership coaching company, mcmillian Leadership Coaching, and I am the host of the Tales of Leadership podcast, and my mission is to eliminate toxic leadership by promoting transformational leadership practices, with the vision of impacting 1 million lives in the next 10 years. And I plan on doing that by sharing my self-reflections of me continuing to become a better leader, by sharing leadership principles and bringing on transformational leaders and having them share their stories from all walks of life, regardless of your background or regardless of the profession that they find themselves in, and on today's episode, it's absolutely fire.
Speaker 2:So Dr Christina Bates is a mom of two sweet girls, an entrepreneur, a leader and an animal lover, with three dogs, two cats, one bunny and then one guinea pig. She is passionate about all things military. We share that, especially when it comes to weapons systems. About all things military. We share that, especially when it comes to weapon systems. She is dedicated to helping leaders and organizations excel and realize their full potential. She believes that God has a purpose for each of us and, in small but impactful ways she supports leaders and members of organizations in living out that purpose.
Speaker 2:This is a great episode. Again, as always, stay to the very end, and I'll share the top three takeaways that I had from this episode. This has been a little bit longer than normal, but again we had to kind of cut it short. But this is a very important episode to kind of get some key methodologies and frameworks that I've used throughout my leadership journey, but I haven't really been able to kind of clarify or bound that down into words. Dr Bates does that beautifully, so let's go ahead and bring her on. Christina, welcome to the Tales of Leadership podcast. How are you doing?
Speaker 3:Hey, I'm well, josh, you.
Speaker 2:Doing well we always talk about. Right before I start a podcast, I always have the intro studio and we kind of talk through some of the struggles. And it's important to note that I just got back from the UK with my wife, so a little bit late, but thank you for taking the time and kind of going through your leadership journey, which is something I think we're both passionate about. So I'm excited to hear your story.
Speaker 3:And thank you for having me on Josh.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think always a great place to start is to kind of get a barometer on how you view leadership, because we have everyone from DOD to entrepreneurs to C-suite executives and leadership is usually always uniquely defined to the individual and how they went through their shared experiences. So the first question is how would you define leadership?
Speaker 3:Well, to me, first off, I think leadership is a tremendous honor and also a tremendous burden. I'm sure you're aware of being in the military. Leaders do a lot of the blocking and tackling. To me, a strong leader always helps the members of the organization or their followers to make sense of what's happening in their environment, right? So one of the things I studied in my PhD program was something called sensemaking, and it's what everyone kind of naturally does, but sensemaking makes it more overt. One kind of naturally does, but sense-making makes it more overt. And so it's the idea that we're constantly in our minds as we act or as something happens around us. We're constantly, in a sense, trying to make sense. What does that mean? What does that mean to me? What does that mean in my environment? It kind of goes back also to the fight or flight idea, right? So your mind's constantly doing that, whether you're conscious of it or not. Obviously, folks who studied it tried to bring those principles and make them more conscious and study exactly how they happen. And obviously, being a person who loves communication, a big part of how we make sense of things to others is through communication, right? So to me, an effective leader one of the biggest things they're always doing is trying to read the environment, whether it be in the organization, outside the organization rapidly, ideally, figure out what it is that that person is passionate about, what are their strengths, what do they see as their purpose in the organization and I'll talk just from an organization perspective, because that's where I have the most experience, obviously. And then I think the leader's main task is to help each of those members realize their full potential in that organization and, collectively in doing so, help the organization to realize its full potential. And when you think about military leaders, for example, in the acquisition corps, the leaders are typically there for a three-year period, and so it'll depend on what point in the organization's life that that leader enters, what kinds of things that leader might need to emphasize.
Speaker 3:If it's an organization that's been tremendously successful, then it's probably grabbing onto those successes and extrapolating from them and keeping up the momentum and identifying what new talent you may need to continue building on those successes. If it's an organization that's facing particular challenges, whether portfolio-wise or talent-wise or morale-wise, or sometimes a combination of all three and many more, then that leader may have to draw on different skills and may have to spend more time emphasizing the strengths of the organization in order to motivate folks. So I think a strong leader needs to be very adept, needs to be able to pivot quickly, needs to be able to read the environment and the organization not only quickly, but generally fairly accurately. And I think the biggest way they do that obviously someone coming from my background is through communication, right, so I know a lot of leaders emphasize open door policy, but I think it's more than that I talk to folks always about.
Speaker 3:It's the small. What I call the small interactions is where you typically would want to focus your communication as a leader, right, and that's whether you're passing someone in the hallway or someone pops their head in to talk about something. It could be something significant or mundane. It's in those small interactions where you have that opportunity to showcase what you bring to the table as a leader, and in those small interactions is where you also have an opportunity to build trust. It's usually not you probably know this it's usually not in the big forums that are typically staged for obvious reasons and I don't think there's anything wrong with those forums and they're certainly necessary but it's usually in those smaller interactions and I mean not only in size, but in what exactly the exchange looks like from a communication standpoint, where I think you have an opportunity to show the person that, one, they are seen and two, they are heard. Three, you're processing what you've heard. It matters to you in heart and mind and you're truly interested in who they are and what they're sharing and you have something either meaningful to say in the moment or, if it's just, hey, that's very interesting, or that's something that hasn't been shared with me yet, but I need to take that back and give it some thought. But I definitely will get back to you.
Speaker 3:So, to summarize, I think a strong leader is someone who recognizes that their main goal is to help the folks in the organization realize their full potential.
Speaker 3:If you're a faith-based person, folks might refer to that as what you think your calling is in life, what you think you're here to bring, what change you're here to bring about, or what difference you're here to make before you leave this earth. Or it could just if someone's nonfaith based, it could just be what you think your strengths are in your career and your subject matter expertise and what you bring to the table, and I think a good leader's main job would be to tap into that within their team and to create an environment in which that is nurtured and drawn out of folks and obviously in our, in our world, directly applied to executing the organization's mission. The other piece I would say, in addition to being someone who can adapt very quickly their leadership styles and their tactics, I think also someone who's able to accurately read the environment and tap into that and, more often than not, be accurate with their reading of the environment.
Speaker 2:That's, hands down, the best definition of leadership that I've had, and I filmed over like 99 episodes. That was amazing and I've never heard of the sense making you tied into so many different principles from different leaders. That I've had on. General Petraeus was one that you kind of spirited with having a malleable leadership approach that it's not one size fits all. You come into an organization and you quickly read what you need to do, you set a path for your team, you communicate it and then you tie your strengths to the team, or the weaknesses, to make sure you fill that dead space, and you just keep moving.
Speaker 2:I love the concept of communication. While you're writing that down, some of the three pillars of communication for me is authenticity, transparency and clarity. If you can do those three things at least from what I've learned then you can build trust, and that was an amazing bomb that you dropped right there, too, is that that's what that does. Over time, our actions lead to our character of how people view us, our reputation, and that all leads into trust. That's amazing. We could end this episode now, and you've just already dropped so many pieces of wisdom.
Speaker 3:I think when you say authenticity, that's an interesting concept too right, because I think another leaders that I've observed that I thought were exceptional. One of the things that they did really well was they recognized that the way they communicated with me, for example. I'm more of a straightforward communicator. When I'm dealing as particularly one-on-one with leaders, I, you know, kind of say what's on my mind.
Speaker 3:I'm polite and tactful, but I don't sugarcoat, but I think some folks don't communicate that way and if you spoke with some other folks on your staff and interact with them the way that, for example, a leader interacted with me, it would be highly ineffective and you would probably silence that person or probably leave them wondering whether they'd ever come back and talk to you, for example, one-on-one. So I think authenticity might look different depending on who it is you're interacting with, right, how I perceive someone's authenticity, particularly in terms of their communication style, whether verbal or non-verbal, may be very different than the factors that you would look at, as Josh, in determining whether someone is being authentic. And that's where I said good leaders, developing that ability to accurately read folks, read their comfort zone, read how much personal space they require, read how they communicate and what makes them comfortable and what makes them uncomfortable. And grasping that very early on, especially for the people that you work around regularly, like, for example, a leader with their staff, I think is absolutely pivotal, especially in the inception of a leader coming in. Because I think once you lose ground with folks, the unfortunate part about trust is it can take a long time to build it up, but you can destroy it in a moment. You can destroy it with a look right. You can destroy it in a moment. You can destroy it with a look right. You can destroy it with a word.
Speaker 3:And so I think that ability to read folks is incredibly important. And, of course, that flows right into your ability to adapt right, because there's no point in adapting if you can't read right, because what are you adapting to? Typically, you're going to adapt to what you think you've read in the environment, similar to like a radar, right? I liken a good leader to a very, very sophisticated radar. You're always reading your environment right and you're constantly scanning to understand what's noise, what's meaningful, what's something that I can grasp onto that aligns with my agenda, and what's important to me that I can run with, what's something that doesn't necessarily align, and how and when should I address that if at all. So I think that ability to adapt is only as good as your ability to accurately read your environment and determine what is the best response from a content standpoint and, obviously, from a timing standpoint and from a caliber standpoint, right, how much of a response is required.
Speaker 2:That's one of the hardest things and that's always been a superpower of mine and I don't know if that was learned through the military of if you're a junior officer, of kind of like painting the picture for everyone.
Speaker 2:I started off in combat arms so every year I would switch and have a new role, a new leadership position, like platoon leader in combat, platoon leader in garrison company XO, and I would keep doing that and I'm still doing that up to this point as a senior major. But it's kind of unique because I work in SOCOM right now and there are some organizational challenges so I had to cover a position and go into another position, which is okay because the organization needed that. But I think over time and those reps that I've gotten, I've been able to read people like and it's a, it's a literal superpower. I can meet you like face to face and I can pick up on your emotions and I can learn how to communicate with you. But for someone who doesn't have that, how did you learn through the academic piece and your just experience, to begin to communicate with people and pick up on those social cues and emotional cues?
Speaker 3:That's a great question. I don't think I've ever been asked that directly, but it's a great question and I think it was a combination of things for me. I think even when I was a kid I was always very curious. I didn't have anything that was my favorite, that I liked to do, I just love learning. So whatever was put in front of me, the exciting thing to me was the learning, not necessarily even the subject matter. So I think I just had a natural curiosity about people, about why they do the things they do, why they think the things they think, and I had that drive for learning.
Speaker 3:I think the other thing was in college I was a dual major in sociology and communication and that was again an extension of my desire to really understand what makes people who they are Right, what makes a person think one way versus someone who could think dramatically different, even people in the same families. I'm sure a lot of people see that, especially people who have siblings, and so a lot of what I studied kind of furthered my and fueled my interest in that. And then I was always a big Sherlock Holmes lover and what I loved most about him was it was all about observation, right. So by the time I got into consulting early on, I was fortunate to have folks all of the folks that I worked with early on in the boutique firm I went to in my late 20s. They were all much older in age but also had different experience. Most of them were engineers or finance folks. A lot of them were engineers former GE engineers and so they had a different way of looking at the world and I loved that because it gave me exposure to folks who thought very differently from the academic world I came from. Obviously, the subjects I studied, as well as the work I did as an attorney, right, in some ways we were similar, like, right, very logical, logic-based thinking, obviously as an engineer, but in many ways we were different. So I would say the folks I worked with early on were they were all high-caliber consultants and they lived and died by their ability to go into an organization that was relatively unknown.
Speaker 3:And as a consultant, especially if you're highly paid, which they were everyone's watching you, right, they want you to deliver value very quickly and very significantly out of the gate. And typically you're not doing anything without people, right, I don't care what you're doing in an organization, you're not doing it without interacting with people to some degree, and typically to significant degrees. So I watched them and we'd have many debriefs, which in the military we'd call them AARs, right, but they served the same purpose. Right After every meeting particularly consequential ones, but even ones that were fairly standard we'd all sit around and ask each other what did you see, what did you hear, what do you think that means? And I would joke with folks. Once I was more well-versed in it and I became more adept at it, I would joke thinking back to what I called my old self and I would say I would leave meetings with them and we'd debrief and I'd go was I at the same meeting you were in? Because I didn't see any of that or I didn't pick up on even half of that? And slowly, over time. And we would observe each other as well.
Speaker 3:If one of the people was leading a session or a working session with clients or teams of folks, even down from the front line all the way up to SVPs and C-suite, we would critique each other. So one of us might sit in the back of the room suite. We would critique each other, so one of us might sit in the back of the room and, in addition to helping, we would be assessing and we would give very candid you know, polite and tactful but very candid feedback. And I remember early on the managing partner gave me feedback which I try to think about to this day. He said you know you were doing very well, but you don't realize that you saw the track, the train, 10 steps down the track, very well, but you don't realize that you saw the track, the train, 10 steps down the track, and you lost the audience at like step three. And he said I knew you weren't even aware of that, and so he would.
Speaker 3:We would often give each other very detailed, constructive, helpful feedback and then we'd spend, sometimes even after hours. We'd spend hours if we ate dinner together. We'd then spend time talking about again what did you see, what do you think, what do you think so-and-so might do next, or do you think there was an offline conversation that we weren't around for? And so I continued to hone those skills. And so, as I'm doing this right, I reread many Sherlock Holmes stories over the years and I would see the parallels right.
Speaker 3:And so eventually I would go into someone's office and I'd try to get there a little early on purpose and if they were nice enough to let me in, or if the admin let me in, I'd sit down and I just observe what was in their office. Right, and I tried to get a sense of, in my mind, a very quick back of the napkin profile of this individual, right, what was important to them? What seemed to matter to them? Did they have quotes hanging on their wall? Did they have nothing at all on their wall? Were their blinds closed even though it was daytime and they overlooked a beautiful field? Or were they open? What kinds of furniture did they have in the room? How was their table set up? When their folks came in the room, where did they sit? Who did they sit next to? So, in my mind, I trained myself to be a radar that, as I said, that was always turned on. So in my mind, I'm processing what's happening in the room at the same time that I'm thinking about what I need to do while I'm there, what I have to accomplish.
Speaker 3:My mission for that meeting, or whatever the interaction was, observing folks in the room, understanding the dynamics, do you get a sense that certain folks are allies or not. All those things become critically important and then they become the input right. So I would gather all that information, mull it over in my mind Hopefully I had some other folks in the room who were trusted people that I could bounce things off of later. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't, depending on how you operate. And then I would mull that over and when I came to some what I thought were fair conclusions or reasonable, I would hold those conclusions and those would be my input for the next meeting. And then, of course, in a meeting it depends on your objective or your interaction. You know, sometimes I would not say much on purpose because I wanted the person in the meeting to wonder what I was thinking and maybe talk more and more and more. Right, a lot of times when you're silent, people feel compelled to talk more. They may not want to, but they do, and so they share things that you otherwise wouldn't have learned from them.
Speaker 3:And other times, if I'm going into a meeting with a colonel and we think you know there's a lieutenant colonel where there's something that's being held back that is really driving what we see on the surface, and I kind of sense it's there. The other shoe needs to drop I might just show up for the meeting when I was not really supposed to be there, because, one, that's unsettling, right. And then, two, I might turn up the heat at some point because I want this person to show their cards, and oftentimes that's something hard for the leader to do directly, depending on their relationship with that person. And that's where someone like me can be tremendously helpful, because I can be that other person in the room who doesn't carry the same burdens, who has similar objectives, but can carry that water in a different way for that objective than that leader could themselves Right, and oftentimes it worked right. The person would feel unsettled by my presence, wonder why I was there.
Speaker 3:You turn up the heat a little bit and then all of a sudden they share the real thing that was bothering them about another leader, about an issue with a project. And I don't do that to put anybody on the spot. Let me clarify the leader needs to have that information to be effective for the organization and to determine what needs to happen next. And if there's something bothering a person that's more on the emotional side of things and not on the logical side of things. That's as important as the logical, and so you need to get to the bottom of that in order for you to kind of get past that hump and then achieve what you need to for the organization and also help this leader understand how to manage to that, so that they can have that teachable moment and recognize that that's part of what they're doing, whether they were conscious of it or not, and help them move past it. So I would say leaders need to be constantly observing ideally someone who's a lifelong learner or someone who's just passionate about learning and passionate about understanding people and why they do what they do and why they don't do what they don't do. Again, all with the goal of figuring out what is this person's full potential and how do I, as a leader, help them reach it. And in doing so, if you think about it in the aggregate, if you're doing that, at least with a lot of the key people in your organization, but ideally every person in your organization who presumably is there to deliver value if you're doing that, then in the aggregate you're helping the organization to realize its full potential, and that may be different for an organization depending on where it is in its life cycle.
Speaker 3:When I was trying to get into college, my main goal then was getting into a good college. Once I graduated then my goals shifted right and my potential. I then kind of reached that azimuth. And once you reach that azimuth, of course you're now able to see the next mountain, whereas if you were still at the bottom you can't see what's next. So I always said that once you achieve a certain success, the good part is yay, I achieved it.
Speaker 3:The, I guess, kind of downside is now I see the next success or potential for success that is in front of me that prior to that me having the previous success, I would have never even been able to see. And that's where the lifelong learner becomes important, right, because lifelong learners recognize it's not really about achieving a certain degree of success or reaching a zenith. It's the fact that the zenith never really it doesn't really exist and it never can really be reached, because there's always something you don't know, there's always something you don't fully understand and therefore that means there's always something you can learn. So the best leaders I've seen are folks that are humble, in the sense that they recognize that yeah, they're in that seat because they've accomplished a great deal and certainly they know quite a bit, Otherwise one would assume they're not there. But there's also things that they still have yet to learn, and so I've learned tremendous things from the leaders I've worked with.
Speaker 3:Even though I was often there to help them lead, I never in my own mind I knew it was a two-way street and I always treated it as such.
Speaker 3:I was there to help to teach as much as I was there to be taught and in a sense it was. I was like wow, this is like a free education in a sense. More than that. I'm actually getting paid to continue to be educated by watching leaders in action, because, as someone who's gone through many programs, I'm not shy about saying this there's only so much you're going to learn from books. There's only so much you're going to learn being in controlled environments with other students and professors. To me, the biggest learning happens by interacting with folks kind of raw and natively right and going into those interactions with the mind of I'm here to learn as much as I can because that'll help me realize my full potential and it will better equip me to do whatever mission is in front of me, and my mission is typically helping leaders and members of organizations be effective so that the organization can be effective.
Speaker 2:There's so much wisdom in there, and it's funny too that we share a lot of similarities. So my bachelor's degree is in criminal psychology and I wanted to learn the psychology of how to read people and be a criminal profiler. And then I wanted to join the army and then I joined the infantry and I didn't even use my degree and now I have a systems engineering master's degree.
Speaker 3:So I'm sure you use it, though I'm sure you do use it. You just don't make. You may not formally use it, but I'll probably guarantee you you use it probably in every interaction, and, and, and, and. Your task would be to try to draw the subconscious and make it conscious, to start to figure out what are the things you're doing. That you almost do naturally through education and through practice, so that you can compartmentalize them and package them in ways that make them accessible to others who may not have the same background and experience, but who are certainly in need of those kinds of skills.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there was two other great things that you said, and I've never heard anyone say this, but I do the same thing If you're going to have a meeting with someone, try to get there a little bit early, because that's just good TTP or tactics, techniques and procedures.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Like your recon right.
Speaker 2:But read the room is like straight fire, and I've done that all the time. Because if you're going to meet someone for the first time, like if you come in my room and you see all the crazy stuff behind my plaque, then you could probably pick up one that I'm a Marvel fan, I'm an acquisition officer, I've done some combat arms things, so you could probably quickly read on my background. But what you don't know is that all of those things tell a story, and a lot of people I think they're so tunnel focused. When they go in to talk to a senior level leader, regardless of the organization, they're rehearsing their scripts. They're trying to get what they're going to think.
Speaker 2:I've changed my mindset, especially when it came to public speaking. I don't memorize speeches anymore. I have key points that I want to bullet and I want to communicate. But I naturally let it organically flow and I read the room. But I've learned that too with having one-on-one conversations, of trying to pick up on everything, the entire environment, to help me be a better communicator. And I love the concept of a radar. I'm totally going to use that.
Speaker 3:And you bring up another great point when you said a lot of folks go into a meeting and their mind and I guess rightfully so is on. Okay, what do I need to accomplish here? What were my key points that I need to make sure that I make? Did I shore up all the math in my briefing, et cetera, et cetera. And I think this is why I emphasize to folks all the time master what it is you do. Right, make sure that you've mastered that briefing long before you get to that meeting so that when you speak in that meeting you speak with conviction.
Speaker 3:You're polite, you're tactful, but you speak with conviction because just the tone of how you speak and the eye contact you make, the other person doesn't even realize. Because it again goes back to the fact that we're animals. Right, it conveys something to them. Right, immediately inside them they're thinking this person knows what they're talking about. Right, or at least they believe they know what they're talking about and they've come armed right with the information. So if you go into a meeting and you're kind of a little unsure, and well, maybe I didn't do as much work on this as I should have, or I didn't do enough recon on who I'm meeting with, or there's a number of things, right, you're not going to have the extra mental space and energy to do the things that I just talked about, like look at the room, like observe the people that come in, who shakes whose hand and who doesn't.
Speaker 3:Where the people sit, what's in the room? If it's in the leader's office, right, what is the room communicating to me? Because everything is, as you said, it's trying to tell a story. Now, some of that is going to be interpreted through your own lens. Inevitably we all have a lens, right, and it's going to be interpreted by our lens, right, because we're seeing the world. We each have a camera in front of our eyes, right, and that camera is calibrated just to us, an individual. And so some of the things that camera is going to see because it's what we see, and some of it we're not going to see because it's not in our worldview.
Speaker 3:But that aside, right, everything in that room is saying something to you, right, it's conveying a message or messages, and if you go into a meeting and you don't feel as confident in your preparation, your mind is never going to have the space. Right, it's like a radar that has an old operating system, right, it's not going to be able to do the things that a very sophisticated top-of-the-line radar would be able to do, right, it simply doesn't have the memory, it doesn't have the software and the technological and hardware capability. And that's why I always hammer folks on being the epitome of prepared, because when you are, you then have the mental space and energy and requisite calm and in your demeanor to go into that space and be able to take all of the data that it's offering you. Now, if it's repeat, and the more you do it with the same leadership or group of leaders, you should still be actively gathering your data, right, drawing preliminary conclusions, and those are all inputs to the computer. That is your brain, right, and so you should be feeding. The next thing you're going to do should be fed by and informed by those inputs. And if you go in and observe early, right, then part of the meeting, if you're really good, you can use part of that meeting to either confirm or deny your preliminary conclusions, right? So if I saw things on your wall there, I may come to some very preliminary conclusions, recognizing this is the first time I'm speaking with you. This is the first time I'm seeing what's on your wall and so those conclusions I'm drawing by anything I see, I have to acknowledge to myself those are very, very cursory preliminary conclusions.
Speaker 3:Now, if I've come to the conversation feeling like I'm prepared on my side what I need to talk about, what we're likely going to hit on some of the things I know I want to make sure I include, then I can use some of our conversation to try to confirm or deny those preliminary conclusions. Right, and I can do that more directly by speaking with you and you speaking with me and I've done that many times with leaders, right, I've purposefully observed the things in the room and then, throughout the conversation, without them realizing of course I wouldn't necessarily do it pointed, unless I had that kind of close relationship with the person I'd probably indirectly try to confirm or deny some of the preliminary conclusions I was drawing in that interaction. But in order to be able to do all of that, as I said, the first step is be prepared, know what you're going in there to discuss, have a mastery of the material to the point where, ideally, you wouldn't even really have to look at the brief. At some point the brief becomes a prop because you already know it in heart and mind. And the reason I say heart and mind and I do mean that literally is mind meaning you have mastered the material and the content. Now, this is where my legal background comes into play. Right, you mastered your argument. You've anticipated the likely counter argument. You've developed your counter counter argument, anticipated the likely counter argument. You've developed your counter counter argument and you go in there with that requisite confidence. Right, and at that point the brief in many ways is really just a prop. Right, it's there because most folks, even to this day, they expect some kind of piece of paper. Right, they expect it to look a certain way, right. But if you really know what you're doing, you end up having a dialogue with that leader and unless it's a really, really technical brief where they've got to look at like an eye chart and it's about a number and a decimal point, you should find through that conversation that the leader is looking less and less at that brief and more and more directly into your eyes as they're speaking to you and as you're speaking to them, right.
Speaker 3:So brings me to another point, which is when you, when I, go into meetings, I always ask folks, before we even start preparing, what are your measures of success for the meeting? And I always say, asked another way, if you leave them, what would it take for you to leave that meeting? And high five everybody. Versus leave and think we just barely got through that, versus leaving go. Oh my God, we bombed. I said what are the measures in your mind? You must have some. And I said I need you to make them overt because that's where we start with the briefing. That's where we start. And in military lingo you might say, okay, what's our overarching mission? And then what is our mission for this particular unit? And then how would we know that we met the mission very specifically? And then you backwards plan from there. In my mind it's the same with any interaction, especially the ones that are planned and scheduled. That's what you do first.
Speaker 3:So again, a big part of what a leader can do with their team, as far as being a good leader, is kind of hammer those things home to your team, where that becomes part of their natural way of thinking. And then you'll notice I've always joked with leaders and said the brief looks like a mess, because the brief is just merely a reflection of the thinking I said. Now some people are better at PowerPoint than others, no doubt. But if a briefing is wending and winding, if it's logically not flowing the way the logic should flow, that's more reflection that the thinking is and where it needs to be. And so I've often emphasized to leaders one of your main jobs is to teach your followers how to think right, how to structure their thinking and, ideally, their critical thinking. And once you can get them to a place where they do that fairly well, you typically start to see their briefs improve.
Speaker 3:Now, the graphics may not be terribly sexy or anything like that which someone can readily learn, but the thinking, the flow of the logic, the A must proceed, b must proceed, c, and if C is this, then it means that E and F must be that You'll start to see that improve.
Speaker 3:So I think you know and that all goes back to a leader helping people realize their full potential right is equipping them with those skills that are readily transferable.
Speaker 3:Because that critical thinking, no matter what environment you're in, whether you're on the frontline fighting, or whether you're in the acquisition core performing more business type functions, whatever you're doing, that kind of thinking is readily applicable. So those are life skills, right? And so, again, I think a good leader feels that it's their responsibility to impart those skills to their followers, and also to find folks within their organization that are particularly good at that and provide those folks with the necessary underpinnings and environment where they can use those folks like a force multiplier, right, and let those folks do a lot of that for them. So, yeah, the reading the room, though, is pivotal, and, as I said, if you go in there and you're not prepared, or you don't think you're prepared, because a lot of it is all in your mind right You're not going to have mental space to do any of these other things. In fact, you probably miss things that are blatant, that are right in front of you, that aren't even things that you'd have to have a more sophisticated radar to pick up.
Speaker 3:You'll probably miss the things that are very obvious, and those things, if you miss them, you miss the opportunities to calibrate in the moment right, it's almost like you know how the military is now talking about transforming in conflict, right, that's basically what I'm talking about in a sense, but it's not conflict per se, it's transforming I would say transforming in interaction, right. So as a radar, right, if you're reading that room and you get pretty good at it and you're accurate and you're quick, you see something going sideways. You know exactly how to calibrate it and you know exactly when to calibrate it, right, and and and and. By the time you do it, people don't even realize that that's what you've done, right?
Speaker 3:They may never realize that that's what you've done. But that's why that reading the room becomes very, very consequential, because if you're, if you are, if you're hoping to transform in interaction, right and I'm taking this, I'm extrapolating, from the transforming in conflict, because I think the underlying constructs are exactly the same right is how quickly can you adapt? As I said, adapt assumes that you've already determined what it is you need to adapt to, right. And so if your process of how, determining what you need to adapt to, is flawed, then your adaptation is going to be flawed and, in some situations, actually dangerous and worse than sticking to the status quo. So I think a good leader, good leaders that I've seen, have an exceptional ability to read rooms that they've been in for many, many meetings and for long times, and to read rooms that they never stepped in before, and to do that with fair degree of accuracy and at a decent speed, and they're able to calibrate and adapt quickly in those moments, and they do all of that with a relatively high success rate, and that, again, those are skills that take time to learn.
Speaker 3:Well, first they take desire and interest.
Speaker 3:That's number one.
Speaker 3:If you don't have the desire and you don't have the interest, I mean you could have the best person in the world teaching you.
Speaker 3:So first it takes the desire and an interest and then it takes the dedication to want to do that and then, of course, as you see small successes coming from that, you get more confident, right, you get, you get more practiced in what you're doing.
Speaker 3:You, you kind of learn the process in your mind of take these inputs, take these outputs from this meeting that are preliminary conclusions, use them as inputs for the next interaction, recognizing that some of them are preliminary, probably more like research questions, and some of them you've seen so many times with this person that you can squarely say it's a hypothesis and you're fairly confident that that's one of the attributes of this person in terms of their thinking or how they just approach their, how they interact with the world, right, and you're constantly using those outputs as inputs to your next interaction and over time you'll find that in your mind you've amassed quite a data set of very clean, very repeatedly validated data that you can then use to continue to hone those interactions again to achieve what it is you think you need to achieve as a leader.
Speaker 2:I love podcasting because I just naturally do these things, but you have a clear framework methodology in place that anyone can take this and repeat the same steps. But I love that. Take this and repeat the same steps but I love that. One of the things that I've had a mentor tell me is that you have to care, prepare, then execute. If you care about a position. I think that's the hardest thing too.
Speaker 3:Cares the heart, prepares the mind.
Speaker 2:There's another thing that I've learned throughout my career. I call it the rule of triple H head, heart, hand alignment. If you can see it in your head and you can create an emotional, intrinsic connection, something that will actually make you motivated and inspired, then your hands will just naturally do the work. And I've always kind of thought it through that lens head, hand, heart alignment but I love how you kind of frame that and then you tie it back in to this radar framework, which is awesome. It's funny, we're 40 minutes in and I haven't even asked you any questions.
Speaker 3:Oh, I'm sorry.
Speaker 2:No, it's great because you've just naturally explained so much of what I do as a leader and I've learned over time, but I've never been able to put it into words. And you've said it beautifully.
Speaker 3:You need to write a book on that. Oh, maybe, maybe that's coming. But something else you said that kind of I wanted to hone in on, was the head, heart, hand. The ancient Greeks talk about ethos, pathos, logos, right, so ethos is appealing to someone's values and ethics. Pathos would be like it's directly the root of the word, like pathetic, right, which really is about. It's a feeling oriented thing, right, so pathos would be appealing to their emotions and their feelings. And then, of course, logos is appealing to their logic and reason, right, and effective communication typically would be able to hit on all three.
Speaker 3:Right, but this again goes back to your ability to read the environment, right, because if I inaccurately characterize your values, right, I might be tapping into values that you don't espouse to at all, in fact, values that may be diametrically opposed to your values, right. So, again, I think all of those things are great, but it all goes back to it's like what we do in the military, right Detect, recognize, identify. Right, you can't recognize until you detect. You can't really identify accurately unless you've detected accurately and recognized accurately, right. So certain things necessarily precede others. And so I think, in order for a communicator to understand, hey, if I'm talking to Josh and I'm trying to employ principles of ethos, pathos and logos. Well, first I have to have a pretty good read on Josh, because the ethos, pathos and logos levers that I may push may at worst be the opposite and may at best just be apathy. Neutral didn't get me anything, I didn't win anything and I didn't lose anything. Neutral didn't get me anything, I didn't win anything and I didn't lose anything.
Speaker 3:And so I think a lot of it does come back to being able to accurately read people, and I think part of that is having requisite empathy, being a person who can empathize with others, being a person who actually cares enough about other people to have the desire to read them right. Because if you're a person who doesn't care, you just go in like a shotgun blast, you deliver your message or your briefing and you hope that you achieved what you wanted and you leave. But I think part of being an effective reader of people is having a requisite degree of care and empathy. And empathy obviously is very different than sympathy and trying to put yourself in that person's shoes as best, as best as you can, because no one can do that one-to-one and anyone who says they can, I think is either not being totally genuine or is probably a little bit delusional. You can't do it perfectly, but you can try right, and it's in the effort whereby you pick up on these little cues right and again, because because communication scholars always talk about, you know, way back in the day they thought communication was as simple as giving someone a needle. You deliver your message and the person gets it exactly as you intended, and very quickly.
Speaker 3:That was debunked, and we recognize that the message, the efficacy of the message, is as much about the sender as it is the receiver, right, and so then that begs the question what do you know about your receiver? And I don't just mean the cursory. Here's their title, here's what they did in their career. I think it's much more nuanced than that.
Speaker 3:Those things aren't really going to get you to knowing what levers to push and how much to push them and when to push them and in what forums to push them, and what other folks should be around when you push them or, ideally, wouldn't be around when you push them. So I think, going into each interaction and each relationship, no matter where it is in its life cycle, whether it's at its infancy or it's very mature, being genuinely interested in getting to know that person and kind of understanding their life story and understanding things that they made them happy, things that they struggled with, things that they pushed through. All of those things that person brings to that briefing with you. They never leave those things outside of the room. They bring all of that with you. They bring the whole person to that interaction. And so your job, if you want to be an effective communicator and in turn I think the best leaders are also very effective communicators your job is to really try to understand that person as best you can from their vantage point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think leading the whole person is. A foreign concept to a lot of people, especially in leadership nowadays, is that they're focused solely on the metrics. And I talk about this a lot of transitional versus transformational leadership. Transitional views people as objects. To get to where you want to go, yeah. Transactional, yes, uh-huh, yeah. And then transformational.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a mere transaction. You are a necessary cog in my process to get me to my end state. So I'm going to use you in this way and I'm going to use you in that way and I'm going to use. And you see, the problem with that is, again, it's irrespective of the person's what is their real potential and what is that gold in them that you can unlock right? Sometimes the gold might fit your little cog agenda, but I would guess most of the time it probably doesn't right. Sometimes the gold might fit your little cog agenda, but I would guess most of the time it probably doesn't right.
Speaker 3:And people know instinctively again, we're animals, right, we feel it, we know if someone is just using us and that's really, in a sense I think that's a pretty flagrant word for transactional leadership but they're using us or they're genuinely interested in bringing our best to the table and part of their job as a leader is figuring out how to unlock that and how to make it a force multiplier for the organization. Now, that's not to say there aren't situations that require transactional leadership. And that's where I get back to the adaptive leader, sometimes based on the timing, the op tempo, what needs to be achieved and the urgency of it and the importance of it. Yeah, transactional leadership may be what is required, right, but a good leader would also know, again, gathering their data, using it as inputs to the next interaction. They would know when that situation was occurring and they would know what to do in that situation, right, and they would have the skill set to enact tactics that are typically endemic of a transactional leader versus a transformative type of leader.
Speaker 2:You see what I'm saying yeah, no, a hundred percent. And it kind of goes back to the same concept of I call it TNT transitional versus transformational. And then there's a middle ground there. If I'm in combat and I have to make a decision, then I'm probably going to have to be a hammer and people won't like what I have to do, but it's a decision that has to be made instantly or the consequences and likelihood is very high. So it's based on risk and if I have the time to kind of do the shaping operations, to clearly communicate, to make sure that I'm sitting empathetically with someone at least understanding like where they're coming from, but still holding them accountable. And I think a lot of people nowadays too, they view you hit the nail on the head of sympathy versus empathy. I don't think they clearly define empathy correctly, because empathy means, hey, I can view it from your standpoint, but we have a standard in the organization and if you don't hit that standard, it's my job as the leader to hold you accountable, but I also should be held accountable.
Speaker 3:Right. And if you don't have a proper gauge via empathy, as to where that person's at, you don't know how much of a delta exists between where they're at or where they see themselves at in whatever the issue is, for example, and where you need them to be for the organization's good, right. So again it all comes back. In a sense it kind of goes back to the garbage in, garbage out. When you're thinking about a traditional process or data, right, If you have flawed data from the beginning, then everything that that data touches and feeds it's almost like the flaws become more and more exacerbated as you move down the chain of interaction and logic, right. So by using empathy you're able to at least get as good a handle as any person can because you're not that person where that person's coming from, and understand where they're coming from and then determine how much of where they're coming from is really all that different from where you're trying to move the organization to go and getting a handle on if there is a delta, how much of a delta is there? And is it a bridge too far? With some folks it may be. I think that's probably more rare. Usually it isn't a bridge too far and part of the leader's job, in addition to the other things I've said, is to figure out when the bridge is too far and maybe the person would be, their attributes and their potential would fit better in another organization, or the bridge isn't too far and is gonna take the work of the leader to help that person get there, and that may be anything from assigning a mentor or putting a person with somebody that you know would work well with them and has the requisite attributes and talents to really tap into where that person is, to get them where they are In the law.
Speaker 3:It's funny we talk about in torts.
Speaker 3:They talk about the soft skull right, meaning, like if you rear end a person and they end up having catastrophic head injuries from a you know simple bumper hit, you take the plaintiff as you find them.
Speaker 3:You know too bad, hey, they had a soft skull, you know. So the same thinking I apply is like you have to take the person as you find them, not as you wish they would be or as you, in your ideal world, pictured them as being. You have to take each person in the organization as you find them right, and as the leader, your job, among other things, is to figure out what do I think this person's real potential is ideally with that person right. And then figure out, as a leader, how far you can get them down that path. Again, with the North Star being what it is, the organization is ultimately there to do, right, what it is is expected of that organization in terms of what value they are to deliver in services, goods or both right. And then figuring out where your deltas are and which people you can get there by helping them realize their full potential.
Speaker 2:Today's show sponsor comes from 10th Mountain Whiskey and Spirit Company. They are a philanthropic, award-winning craft distillery located in the heart of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. For being a listener of Tales of Leadership, you get 10% off on any order using the promo code PANDOCOMMANDO when you place an order at 10thwhiskeycom. Both of those are in the show notes, so you'll be able to find them. 10thmountainwhiskeycom Both of those are in the show notes, so you'll be able to find them. 10th Mountain Whiskey and Spirit Company honors heroes and they craft a legacy.
Speaker 2:I've commanded two organizations in the 10th Mountain and both of which are very deeply impactful to me. This is a company that I stand behind and if you're looking for a great bottle of bourbon, look no further at 10th Mountain Whiskey and Spirit Company. Back to the show. Yeah, there's definitely certain people within the organizations that I've learned, like Perino principle right, like 20% of the organization produces 80% of the results and then, opposite, 20% of your soldiers create 80% of your problems. So you can use that statistically any way you want, but I've learned that like over time.
Speaker 2:But it's taken me a hard, sometimes hard lessons to learn those concepts. But I love how you break it down from a clear methodology standpoint, and what I would like to try to take it back to is your educational background and then transitioning within the DOD. How did that go in terms of like going from college to transitioning within the the dod? How did that go, um, in terms of like going from college to transitioning within the dod and then working within the acquisitions core with senior level leaders? Was there any challenges that you found?
Speaker 3:oh, yes, man, um, so I'll just try and be as succinct as I can. So I started my career as an attorney working for a large bank. I was a contracts attorney supporting the global trading desk. I executed all the contracts that essentially memorialized very sophisticated derivatives and high value trades. It was enjoyable work. Very interesting because you had to learn how the trades work, which is sometimes complex, math and other things like that in order to understand the proper terms of the contract, what should be in the contract and what you should try to negotiate. But it was very bounded work in the sense that it's a very kind of narrowly tailored and once you master it, I found myself getting bored pretty quickly. So I started looking for other things to do. I started writing in that field and teaching classes at BU, which is where I got my law degree and master's.
Speaker 3:I taught at the College of Communication and Research Methods and Statistics and did that while I did my day job as an attorney and then while I was at the bank, I actually that's where I met the boutique firm of consultants the smaller firm that I referred to earlier in this conversation of very high caliber former GE audit staff folks mostly engineers and financial folks who had transitioned into strategy consulting. But what was unique about them was they did the strategy and the execution, so they didn't just come in and detail this very high level strategy and leave the organization to figure out how to execute, which is typically the hardest part. They brought in the strategy, helped the organization build a strategy and then they were on the hook and were happy to be so, to help that organization execute that strategy. So that was kind of our guarantee was, hey, we're going to come in and roll up our sleeves and actually help you do that. And so I got very fortunate because, one, I was much younger than all the folks on the team and, two, I was the only one who didn't have an engineering or finance background. But I met the managing partner of the team who unfortunately passed away in 2005. He was a PhD in electrical engineering and he was just a phenomenal person incredibly talented person, very driven person, incredibly naturally curious person. I'd say we were probably most alike of all the folks on the team and he saw me in a.
Speaker 3:We had a working session as the attorneys one night. They were sent in to help us optimize operations and technically we really shouldn't have been there, but we were part of the team, so we were included and I wasn't invited. I was a junior attorney, but one of my attributes is I can force myself into something sometimes. So I just said, hey, I'm going. And so my senior attorney I guess he didn't want to have the argument with me, maybe he was tired that day anyway so he let me in the room and I ended up being the person who briefed out for our team on what we were doing in that working session.
Speaker 3:And then the managing partner came back to me about a year later when I was looking to probably go to another bank and do higher caliber derivatives. He came back and said I'm looking to build out the team and hire another person. Are you interested? And I thought, wow, you know, I really loved what they did that night and that resonated with me and something clicked inside of me, so he flew me out.
Speaker 3:Bank One was one of their big clients at the time.
Speaker 3:The predecessor, eventually Bank One when Jamie Dimon was the CEO and he was looking to streamline operations to either acquire or be acquired, and that was partly why we were brought into Bank One and he said come on out to one of our sites I think it was in Indiana at the time and he said I just want you to watch a couple of sessions and see if it's something that still interests you.
Speaker 3:And I knew by the end of that day, watching what they did, I thought this is really what I was made to do. It leveraged all my skills as an attorney, obviously, public speaking, being able to put arguments together quickly on your feet, critical thinking skills but it also overlapped really well with what I was doing in communication, which by then I had my master's degree, and I was always fascinated with how people in organizations communicate and what effective communication looks like in organizations and among leaders and from leaders to followers, and so this position offered me the opportunity to do all of that. Now it also was throwing me into a big pond as a very small fish, because I had never really traveled anywhere outside of Boston. I spent my whole life there, so I never really knew what it was to get on a plane, let alone get on a plane every week and go to places I had never been to and go into organizations where I had no history with them other than walking in.
Speaker 2:I will tell you, Boston is intensely different than what I grew up in Rural West Virginia. I traveled to Boston for the first time and I felt like I was completely lost.
Speaker 3:Right, and it's, relatively speaking, a small, a very metropolitan obviously, but a small city. But I had never left there. I had all my education there, my whole family was there. We didn't really travel as a family, so there I was going from, you know, a very kind of and I don't mean this in a bad way provincial life to getting on planes every week taking connecting flights, because Boston was and still is in some ways, sorry, boston out there, but it's a terrible airport to fly in and out of.
Speaker 3:And a lot of my colleagues were flying from airports in California and one was from Atlanta flying, and they would always arrive so well rested and ready to go, and they had come from GE as audit staff and they had years under their belt. And so I think this is where my stubbornness helped me, because I was so intent on mastering what they did, because I loved learning and being successful with what I was trying to do for them, that it allowed me to just plow through everything else. Like I said, well, damn it, you're going to get on this plane and you're going to sleep in that hotel room alone, you know, in your bed, and put pillows around you, because you're not comfortable sleeping in a strange place and you're going to do any, whatever it takes within reason, obviously appropriately to be successful. And I learned very, very quickly because I was thrown in the deep pond and also because those folks we were tight knit, we did very high caliber work and we were constantly going, but we would tighten it. And Kenneth, the man who ran the company to this day I still hear his words and they ring true to this day and this is now going on. You know, close to 30 years ago now, all the mentoring and the time that he spent with me and all that I learned from all the clients that I worked with all over the country, because we worked with very big clients, but we worked with everyone, from the frontline folks who were executing, for example, processing the checks in the bank to the senior level, svps and the guys running operations.
Speaker 3:So I naturally related to people at every level because I never went in thinking I'm smarter than you or I know this better than you do. I went in with a learner's mindset of you guys know this work. Now you may not know how to optimize it. Maybe you don't know the specific techniques that I've learned and I've honed, but you're the experts on what you do here. So my job first is to learn what you do and to help you do that better and to help you realize your full potential. So I worked with frontline folks who never were comfortable speaking in front of anybody about anything, and I helped them develop the courage and the knowledge to get up and do presentations in front of VPs and SVPs.
Speaker 3:And what gave me the most joy and even now thinking about it it makes my heart happy was to watch people who thought, never thought they'd do that, never thought they were the kind of person, in a sense, who deserved to be doing that. And I remember watching them you know, from the back, of course doing their briefing what we would call a briefing in our world, and I remember the feeling of happiness that came over me, watching people, watching their eyes light up, watching them that have that spark of confidence and when they were finished and then fielding questions and watching the VP clap for them and knowing that they did that, I realized in that moment, in a sense that was my calling. I was never one that liked to bask in my own light, although I'm sure some people probably would think that looking at my background or what have you, but that was never me. I was much more of an introvert, naturally, and I was never one. I never wanted the limelight. Now I would take it if it was required for me to do my job, because it was part of me doing my job, but I was never one. I'm not one to run out in front of the big group and get in front of people. It's not my natural tendency and so it solidified me in that moment. I can still see myself at Bank One in Phoenix at that meeting. I can see the room and what everyone was wearing and the woman that was briefing.
Speaker 3:But in that moment it really drove home to me that my passion was helping people dig deep inside themselves and see their potential and help them draw that out, and then seeing the satisfaction and the happiness on their face once that became real for them. And then, of course, watching them go right and watching them reach that, as I said earlier, that next Zenith, and then seeing all that was in front of them that they would have never seen prior to that, and that's why I always joke. There's that scene in Jerry Maguire I don't know if you remember where this photo is being taken and he jokes and says that's my corner of my suit, right there, that's my shoulder right there, right, because it was always the athletes out front, Right, and the agent, like he, was always in the background and you might see a corner of his suit. And I always joked with people and said that's the person that I want to be. I don't necessarily want to be the person out in front, I want to be the enabler, I want to be the person walking around with the proverbial key that unlocks the potential of everyone else.
Speaker 3:And so nothing in my career ever made me happier my accomplishments as well, personal accomplishments, a professional none of it ever made me as happy as that day that I stood there and I watched that woman brief, knowing where she started and knowing where she was in that moment, and seeing the happiness on her face and how proud she was, in an appropriate level of pride in that moment. And that's when I knew that's really what I wanted to do. And my job from that point on was to continue to gather skills and continue to educate myself, formally and informally, to make myself the best I could be at being that person that enables others to realize their full potential and, in doing so collectively, to have an organization realize its full potential. So I went from there to. I left that small consulting company after two years because I started my PhD program and after the first year we were doing so much international travel that I couldn't keep doing it.
Speaker 2:Was your PhD in London.
Speaker 3:No, no, my PhD I did at ASU, the Hugh Downs School of Communication at ASU, which is a Research One institution, and it was very highly regarded, particularly in the areas I focused in, which was mainly organizational communication for my PhD. And so I started that while I was working for the consulting company. And then by my second year it just became too much because we were doing a lot of international travel for clients and I couldn't be out of the country for like two weeks at a time and do a research one, you know, phd, a very traditional PhD program. So I transitioned. I worked as an independent consultant for some time doing a lot of the same kinds of work.
Speaker 3:I took an in-house position, very briefly, as a director of operational excellence, and that was kind of a gentle reminder to me that I was in many ways better suited to be kind of the outside person brought in, and there's many benefits to having that outsider come in because they bring views and see things that you wouldn't necessarily see being a member of the organization. But I was able to very effectively build respect and have influence without having direct authority, which is very hard to do. But critical in the roles that I play, because rarely am I going to be a person given direct authority. I have to earn my authority through respect and ideally through a combination of respect and affinity. Now I can do it with just respect, although I'd like to do it with respect and affinity, which is kind of the magic combo. So when I was a director of operational excellence, that organization was going through major changes they were just recently acquired. There was a lot of upheaval and I realized that I think they liked the idea of operational excellence but weren't yet ready for what it meant in terms of rolling up your sleeves and I didn't really want a position where I couldn't affect change because that gave me tremendous satisfaction to do so.
Speaker 3:So when I decided I would go back to consulting, I knew at the time in Phoenix there wasn't a lot of big consulting firms. The market there just wasn't at that point yet. And that's when I moved to Atlanta and I moved to Booz Allen on their organization and strategy team at the time and mostly I did commercial engagements for the first few years with big financial institutions on the commercial side of Booz Allen. And that was around the time when the commercial side was beginning to separate for a number of what I think were very good reasons. And so there was essentially the federal you know government, more public side. And then they what I think it became strategy and at some point.
Speaker 3:And so when I was finishing up a commercial engagement for a commercial client here in Georgia, they told me I'm a Lean Six Sigma master black belt as well. And so they said we have a, you know, army client that needs a Lean Six Sigma black belt for a project reducing the turnaround time for sensors, very sophisticated sensors, the turnaround time as well as the caliber of the maintenance. And so they said okay, you're the place I was consulting with, wanted to hire me internally. There was a position opening up, but I really wasn't interested in taking an internal role. So in the consulting world you go quote back on the bench. And I wasn't on the bench long. And so I said, well, this will be great. I don't really know much about the Army. I didn't come from a military family, so I was ecstatic because it was a new space, new things to learn, new people to meet. And so I went up there and brought up a small team with me and we did drastically reduce the turnaround time. I won't talk about the vendors or anything like that that were involved.
Speaker 3:But the deputy at the time, who I'm still close friends with to this day, to the colonel it was in the acquisition corps he basically, when I was finished, he basically told my boss at the time hey, you know, christina is a really smart person. We have lots of other things around here. It was at the height of, you know, fielding in Iraq and he said and this shop was doing tremendous amount of fielding because of the systems they provided. And he said, hey, you know, we need Christina for many other things. And from that point on I stayed and I very quickly became in many ways, you know, kind of the informal advisor to the colonel at the time. And once she saw my background and then, more than that, saw me, you know, as they say, in action, she realized what a pivotal role that was and it was different than an aide to camp and other things. It was kind of something in and of itself.
Speaker 3:It's oftentimes very difficult for me to explain the role. It's oftentimes very difficult for me to explain the role. So I do need to take some time out and really put pen to paper on exactly what that role entailed, because it doesn't necessarily fit neatly into typical categories and titles. It's almost more of like a like the Supreme Court always said about obscenity you know it when you see it, but it's very hard to define. And so over time, as each colonel would transition and the next would come in, they kept me on basically in that role. I mean they called me at times head of comms, which I did a lot of the comms for them, the writing and the marketing of our systems and responding to RFIs from Congress and things like that. But I also did many, many other things, some of which people would see if they weren't leadership and some of which they wouldn't see.
Speaker 3:Working very, very closely with leaders and so, because they rotate, as you know, every three years, I got the tremendous benefit of just when you get close enough to somebody, the new person comes in, and what that means is you now have to figure out. Okay, I'm still tasked with being an effective advisor to this leader, and now my job becomes what does that look like with this particular leader? Because each leader has strengths and weaknesses. Of course. Each leader has different backgrounds, different ways, they grew up different places, they came from different paths in their military careers, et cetera, and of course they often have a civilian deputy, and sometimes those folks change out as well. And of course, then you have the 05 lieutenant colonels that are changing out, oftentimes on a different pace, and so for me it was wonderful, because there was always something new, a new person, a new problem, a new dynamic, and so for someone like me, who tends to get bored easily, it was the ideal mix of I knew just enough to be able to be very effective, but I didn't know everything, and so my job became simultaneously working with what I knew to be effective and deliver value quickly, while also learning as quickly as I could about the new landscape, and again, as I said earlier, processing the inputs and the outputs, the inputs and the outputs, and confirming and denying conclusions. It was just a constant process in my brain and, in some ways, 24, seven, right Whenever I was awake, that function turned on, and especially, of course, once I hit the actual workplace, and then, of course, through COVID, adapting with.
Speaker 3:Now, I've always been remote, although at times I would travel up to DC more than others, depending on the op tempo and what we were working on, but, of course, being very effective in a remote fashion as well. And so not only did I have to build, did I have to kind of secure authority through influence to a degree. Oftentimes I had to do that in a remote fashion. So when I was on site I knew those moments and those interactions had to be even more impactful because I didn't have the luxury. So in some ways it's a luxury to be around every day, but in some ways it's also a tremendous burden, right? Because in some ways you kind of fade into the background. You in some ways can go native, as they call it, and so you put on blinders without even recognizing that you have.
Speaker 3:So I think there was a benefit to being present, but not being present, especially in the role that I was enacting. And so over time I just continued to hone that, and I was always a person I'm generally an introvert in many ways, but I have a tremendous interest in people and why they do what they do, why they think what they think, and so I was always excited to meet new people and get to know them and get to know their life story. So I tried to spend as much time with leaders and their people. I always joked and said if you really want to know how an organization operates, don't go to the formal meetings. Go to the bathroom, go to the break room, stand by the copier, go and sit with the secretary who, by the way, I believe, the secretaries and the admins those folks play pivotal roles in many ways, right? So go to those places. That's where you'll observe people and maybe I'll make up a word here in their realist moments, right, and that's what I wanted.
Speaker 3:I wanted to deal with the genuine data, not the transformed variables in structured meetings. I wanted to see people raw, right, because that's where I needed to start, so oftentimes, and because I was sometimes a newcomer, if someone saw me in the bathroom, you could see they were wondering who is she and what is she doing here, and then they'd strike up a conversation and I'd talk with them. And again, two reasons Genuinely, I wanted to get to know that person because I'm genuinely interested in people and I care about what they're thinking and their life story and what they bring to the table. And then, also, I was doing my data gathering because that was part of what I needed to do to be effective in my job, and so it was funny. You know, I built very strong relationships with many clients from the front line to senior levels, and I think part of it was I came from a background where my parents were not very formally educated.
Speaker 3:They were very successful people in their personal lives, with my family, and they were very successful professionally as they went through life. But they always instilled in us that it's about a person's character. It doesn't matter what degrees they have, it doesn't matter how much they've accomplished career-wise in their life or not. It's about who they are as a person. Are they a good person, are they a person of character? And so they didn't see color, they didn't see rank, they didn't see degrees, and so that's how we were raised, and all of my siblings very much take that approach.
Speaker 3:And so the benefit of that, among others, was you can relate to all kinds of people. Right, and I think that's another important attribute in a leader is the ability to relate to all kinds of people and to be able to see the spark in all kinds of people. Right, and that potential that for some people is deeply buried beneath many other things and for some people is right at the surface and all the way in between that continuum right. But if you're not able to relate to them because you carry with you a significant baggage. And this is not to say we all have biases of course we do but if you're the type of person that thinks that the only person who can say something smart is a person who has a degree and oh, by the way, in a certain area, then you're going to find it very hard to relate to many different people, right, and it's going to come through in how you interact your verbals, your non-verbals. People feel that they may not understand what they're feeling, which makes it dangerous, but they'll have a reaction to it, right, and then that subconscious reaction that's the most dangerous one, in a sense, for a leader, because you people won't even know where it came from, but you'll feel the effects of it.
Speaker 3:So I never judged people on paper, what they did or didn't do I again I'll go back to my joke about the soft skull and the plaintiff I tried to take people as they came and to interact with them in a way that they could relate to. And this isn't to say being a phony, because I could never. Like when I worked in the South, I didn't do what I saw other people do. I didn't put on a fake Southern accent because I'd said you know what? No one is going to believe. I'm from Boston, I'm from the North, my demeanor says it, my aura says it. I wouldn't insult people by pretending that I have a drawl. I don't have a drawl, I never will have a drawl, but I certainly can respect people and I can relate to them and I can learn about their background and I'm sure, being human beings both of us, we will have things in common by the fact that we share the fact that we're human beings.
Speaker 3:So this isn't to say that someone should be disingenuous. I mean genuine relating to others. And again, you can't really do that without communicating right, non-verbally or verbally, and it's typically verbally complemented by non-verbals. You're not going to do that unless you are a willing and open communicator in terms of sharing and in terms of listening, right. That's how you start to relate to people and find commonality and find common ground. And I found that with everyone from. You know folks who are lifelong enlisted soldiers, from different parts of the country, different educational backgrounds, some from very nuclear families, some from very disconnected families and all the way in between, because I genuinely found all of those people interesting and I knew they all had potential, real and unrealized, that they brought to the table. And part of my job for the leader and for the organization was to find that potential and provide them with the skills and the environment to unlock it and to apply it.
Speaker 2:I learned a lot of those same lessons from my father, not necessarily like spoken, but just through his deeds, and I always kind of go back to this concept of deeds, not words. I think that a great leader aligns both you can communicate clearly and then your actions align with what you're saying. But I think the most important thing is, even someone who can't necessarily communicate clearly, but they can still hit the mark your actions speak way louder than your words. And then my father, same way. He had no real lens, he was just a selfless leader who works in the coal mines.
Speaker 2:I'm from rural West Virginia about as rural as you can get and he would get off late at night, probably six o'clock in the evening. He would go to work at three in the morning they called it the Houdow shift and would work all night, come home and go mow other people's grass and we're talking about like 70, 80 year old people. That just couldn't do it. And he did it freely because he wanted to go serve the community and people. And I was raised in that and I saw the hard work ethic that he did. And a lot of who I am today, especially as a leader, is instilled from just the actions that I saw my father doing as a young man growing up, which it's funny that we share the same thing but two different cultures in a way Boston and West Virginia, I would say are totally opposite in terms of just how we probably grew up, but some of the same principles align.
Speaker 3:Exactly, and that's, I think, a great point. When you talk about principles, right, because action sometimes, you know we all act inconsistent sometimes, but I think that the bedrock of a good leader is consistency and values. Right, I think people are more forgiving than we probably give them credit for. So I think followers, the workforce, for example, they can forgive inconsistencies, certainly mistakes. But I think when you start becoming, or you demonstrate inconsistency in your values, I think that's when you because the values of the bedrock and once folks start to see the bedrock becoming eroded, it's like they have no left and right parameters, right, they have no azimuth to track to. And I think, like I said, actions that were taken that shouldn't have been, or mistakes that were made as leaders.
Speaker 3:I think a good leader always admits their mistakes, of course, and perhaps even goes further to characterize them.
Speaker 3:As you know, if we don't take risks and make mistakes, we don't really ever get anywhere. But I think when you become inconsistent with your values, or you're unclear on your values, or your values are case by case, and what I mean by that is is you have certain values when it comes to this person, but with others they're markedly different. I think that's when a leader, all else in a sense goes by the by good, bad, success or failure, and you have a crisis of confidence at that point. And the crisis of confidence is typically in the values, if you really think about it, because everyone knows human beings make mistakes, whether we like to admit it or not. Right, and we make our own mistakes and we would like forgiveness when we do. But I think when someone is inconsistent or has an agenda with regard to their values, I think that's when people there's a real schism between the leader and the followers, when that becomes evident, and then you run into real deep-seated problems that go well beyond the fixing, goes well beyond tactics.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think if you have that consistency of values throughout your career, you'll continue to grow. But at a certain point, if your actions don't align with your words, you're going grow, but at a certain point, if your actions don't align with your words, you're going to tap out at a certain point because people just can't respect or trust you, because you've eroded that, especially over time. I'd love to kind of take it to you said working as a consultant, all these different companies, what inspired you to break that mold and create your own consulting company?
Speaker 3:Well, in some ways I'm an unconventional thinker, right. And so when I came into the government paradigm, I saw that there wasn't as much familiarity with the kinds of consulting I had been accustomed to doing and the way I executed it right. And so it took time. I always say to people I went block by block, each block representing a person, kind of word of mouth, and it was say and show. Say and show right. So over time I would say, hey, I think this is what we should be doing, or I think this is what I'm seeing, and then it would be show the fruits of that, show the deliverable, show the change in the person or organization or persons, right. And so over time the clients I worked with closely kind of got used to that, that way of delivering, that way of thinking, that way of delivering. You know, in a space where in the acquisition core it's a lot of, you know, staffing of folks Right, and rightfully so you need people to perform certain functions Right. There was less of what I was accustomed to doing, which was coming in and simultaneously being serving in an advisory role but also executing and generating tangible value.
Speaker 3:Now, now I caution. You know, advising is, is, is, value? Oh, it's very much, especially if you have a good advisor and you know how to use an advisor. A good advisor and you know how to use an advisor, it's gold. But it's not doesn't necessarily always manifest itself in a way that someone can hold and touch and feel.
Speaker 3:Right, a lot of interactions don't. But they're certainly very meaningful and you certainly never forget a lot of them, especially if they weren't particularly good, right. But there's no way you can necessarily memorialize that unless you've audio and video recorded it, like we're doing right. But even if we had this conversation as a sidebar and the only two that ever knew we had it was the two of us, it would still be impactful, it would still have meaning, it would still deliver value. So I think what I was bringing was somewhat not as common, and so I had to break down a lot of barriers in thought, in culture, with other contracting entities that weren't necessarily familiar with what I was doing. And some folks are drawn to something that's not familiar. They're excited by it and they want to understand it, and some folks are scared of it and they don't want to understand it, or they understand it and what they see they don't like.
Speaker 3:So it ran the gamut, right, I was bringing, in some ways, a different paradigm, albeit all in one person, but a somewhat different paradigm, and I liken it to with what some of the defense tech disruptors are doing. Right, they're coming in with a very different approach and a very different paradigm, and they're delivering value in compelling ways, but in somewhat different ways, right, and so there's a learning curve that goes along with that. And so you have to be very good at doing two things in parallel executing and generating value in ways that the organization can understand and in ways that they will label as value added and good. But at the same time, almost directly in parallel, you're changing mindsets, right, and I'll give you an example that deputy I referred to earlier that we became very good friends and we're still very good friends this day. It took him time and he later on admitted to me that it took him time to understand how to use me, where to use me and the real value that I brought, because it was very different than what he was accustomed to and again, it didn't make it good or bad, it was just different, and so it was working with folks over time and again, taking them as they come right.
Speaker 3:So as I got him to a certain point in that evolution, I kind of knew when he was at the point to hear the next thing I was going to say. And I knew if I had said that thing two or three weeks earlier, in five or six meetings prior, at best he wouldn't have understood it, at worst he wouldn't have agreed with it. So I had to kind of read where he was and know when he would reach kind of the next point where he could hear the next thing I needed to say and it would resonate with him and it would fit within the process he was kind of building in his mind along with me Right, and so I had to time that. And of course where he was in his timeline was different than the colonel. He was the deputy for right. That person's timeline was different. So my interactions with that person had to be gauged by where they were along that continuum and that was at times very different than where the deputy was. So imagine you're juggling all these things and you're juggling people that work closely together and yet they're in two different places with regard to you and your presence and what you're trying to do. And so again I go back to the radar example. Right, I had to read these folks constantly and I had to know well the deputies at this point in the evolution of that thinking. So now I can share with him this particular thing and I'm fairly confident that he's going to hear it as I intend, he's going to mull on it and he's going to come to the conclusions, ideally, that I would like him to come to. And so I had to constantly be reading that because, as I said, it's like shooting right If you shoot too soon, you warn people. If you shoot too late, they're already gone right. So the timing becomes absolutely the timing. The content becomes absolutely critical.
Speaker 3:And in my role because it wasn't a traditional role that fit in any one particular peg that the ability to do that well was basically life or death for me in a sense right, because I was in a role that wasn't terribly common, that people do very quickly had access to leadership. So you're, for some people you're a threat. For some people you're a threat For some people, you're a hero. For some people you're in between, a role that people typically understand is probably better paid than some of the other positions by what you know of the role and what you know of the person in the role, right. So for many reasons you're right in the proverbial crosshairs for good and for bad, right. And so you need to.
Speaker 3:I liken it to, like you know, in the matrix with the laser lines and they had to navigate through that thing. In a sense that's what I was doing. It was mostly mental work, right In my mind and trying to get in the minds of others to know, at what given point in time, where those lasers were, because they constantly moved and I had to get through them right and in doing so, get the people through them to the other side. And then, when we got to the other side, there was yet another field of lasers right that we had to conquer. So I actually it was the best thing that could have ever happened to me, because as you go through that, you pick up battle scars, you run into folks who just simply don't want you there.
Speaker 3:And now you're battling against a disingenuous agenda and then, of course, you're battling against genuine agendas and then you've got folks who are completely on board and they recognize the value and they know what you're trying to do and so you constantly are managing those dynamics as well. So you're operating on many planes right, horizontally and vertically, and they're all interconnected in some way and so there are levers and interdependencies that you're also trying to monitor. Right, because you have to have a grasp of that at any given moment, because oftentimes in my role, like I said, in some ways you're always on the precipice. Right, because everything around you is swirling and in some ways uniquely to you, and I was ever aware of that from my earliest days in consulting, because in many ways we experienced that when I was thrown in the big pond right and I had to figure that out early and in many ways the hard way.
Speaker 3:So by the time I got to working with Acquisition Corps I had already been through a lot of it. I had a lot of the battle scars, but of course this was at a whole new and different level. And so I kind of feel some affinity to some of those defense tech disruptors although they're bigger now some of them but they were trying to do a lot of what I was trying to do on an individual level. To a degree they're doing it on a grander scale right.
Speaker 3:They're coming into a paradigm that a lot of folks are very wedded to, and I don't blame them. It's what they know, it's probably what they were part of building right. So they have a lot emotionally vested in it and they're trying to bring in not a totally new approach, but an approach that's different enough that it causes everything from unrest and discomfort to yay, it's finally happened. And everything in between right. And that has to be done on a certain tempo, in a certain way, with A logically preceding B, logically preceding C although the space between A and B may be much shorter than the space between B and C and on and on right, and it's being able to accurately gauge that. That would likely be the difference between wild success, abysmal failure and just kind of hey, we're kind of going along steady state.
Speaker 2:I love where we're at within the acquisitions core right now because I cut my teeth in PO aviation Infantry officer. They decided to put me in AMSA Aviation Mission Systems and Architecture. So all the avionics that makes helicopters fly infantry officer, go do that. Then that's when I quickly learned it doesn't matter what your background is, as long as you care, prepare, you'll execute, regardless of the job. And then I go to drones and then I've been in this drone space for a while.
Speaker 2:Now I'll transition over to SOCOM and I see how SOCOM doesitions and I see how the big army does acquisitions and there's some unique authorities that allow us to do things a little bit quicker. But in a nutshell, we have the same acquisition policies that we're bounded by, but I can move so much faster because I'm willing to think outside the box. What leverages or what policies do I have that'll allow me to get to yes, versus like the old way of thinking, the status quo way of thinking, and the acquisitions core is that hey, we can't do this because of policy B. Okay, no, but how can we do that? And trying to frame that cultural mindset. I love how you talked about that Adding value in the short term, which is really like the climate, I think, because that's easy to manipulate in the short term.
Speaker 3:Like the small wins, yeah, and they have to run roughly in parallel. And people, we are very much cause and effect. Human beings right, it goes back to nature, right, you know, touch the stove, you get burned. Right, very obvious cause, very obvious effect.
Speaker 3:So I think our minds are wired for cause and effect and that's why I said I was very attuned early on to go in and make a very quick read and figure out where I could start demonstrating, you know, very near term, impactful value, while at the same time recognizing that it was all part of a continuum. Right, once someone felt that kind of value, then it was okay, that's, you've met that mark, but it's opened up another aperture, right, and so you've got to bring people along and you've got to bring them along. And you and again you have to be someone who's actively listening, right, because a lot of their feedback was very reasonable, good feedback, right, and regulations exist for reasons and things like that. So you can't be throwing baby out with bathwater, because very few things are black and white like that. Very, very few things are black and white like that. So I think it was just knowing the right balance and really the only way you can really know, that is having that desire to understand the people you're working with and for and who are following you and hearing them, taking them as you find them and recognizing that you know one of your goals is really to find that potential and figure out how to unlock it in ways that are beneficial to that person and, ideally, in ways that are beneficial to the organization's mission.
Speaker 3:And then you find that once people start to feel that cause and effect in those positive ways, it almost becomes at some point a self-fulfilling prophecy, if and until something from the environment comes in and wildly derails it, and that could be anything from a dramatic change in funding, a dramatic change in mission, a significant change in leadership.
Speaker 3:I mean, there are many, many things, but if you have a solid base, even those things can be effectively weathered and sometimes even capitalized on.
Speaker 3:If you have that strong bedrock right, and again, you probably lose less people, because if someone realizes, hey, if I'm in this organization, they are tapping into me in all the ways that matter to me and I see the fruits of that it's less likely that someone's going to jump, and if they do jump, it's typically likely that someone's going to jump, and if they do jump, it's typically for something that's even better, because maybe their potential has been tapped out and they need a new environment to unlock what remains, because that environment just doesn't have what it takes.
Speaker 3:In the environment I don't mean that in a bad way to do the unlocking right, but even that person would probably have a better handle on when that time comes, if it comes, because they would have been tapping into that Right and that would have been just what they do in that organization, so they would have been much more acutely aware of it on a conscious level, right, and be able to make the call and say, hey, I think as much potential as I have here it's been tapped and I think because of the mission and because of what we're doing, et cetera, et cetera, it was great. But I think if I go here, there's still that piece of untapped potential that that organization is looking for and needs and I have it and I think I can unlock it there and put it to good use.
Speaker 2:I love that. So, as you started this consulting company, did you start realizing certain trends that were in each one of the organizations, or were they completely different?
Speaker 3:No, I think in some ways. I mean, I think well, bottom line, I think we talk about functional organizations, but I think the norm is organizations are dysfunctional, right Because it's relationships and it's people. So to think that an organization is some finely tuned engine, I think, is in large part of fallacy. But it can be more, more, more than less finely tuned, I guess I'll put it that way. And so I saw a lot of commonality. Now, some of that is because you know the offices are structured similarly because the acquisition core has specific structures. You know you see commonality with, you see the see the struggle between do we hope? Do we keep this program, do we give it to someone who's probably it's better suited for, and then what are the implications on funding and staffing and having the talent ready to go when we get the next thing. So you do see a lot of commonalities, but I've seen significant differences, typically with leadership and obviously who our senior leaders are in a given project office, up to the PEO level. That's where I've seen more of the differences is in how people enact leadership, not as much the structural things and how you typically what are the best practices for managing a program and what are the key metrics that we should be focused on Now. I do think in the new environment, if certain things are sped up and accelerated, we'll probably see processual differences. We'll see some structural differences, all in an effort to further support the processual differences. We may see differences in the kinds of talent we think we need more of. I think those things are likely to change somewhat, but I think most of the changes I've seen in organizations was really hinged on where leadership placed emphasis right within the confines of structure and process and things that are in large part, you know, dictated because you are an acquisition organization in the army and there are certain hallmarks that if you went in and you were the man off the street who had had, you know, experience with acquisition, you'd expect to see certain things in place and certain things done a particular way.
Speaker 3:I think where leaders come in is, like you said, things like where can we do this outside the box? Okay, we can't do it that way. Is there another way it can be done? Who do we need to collaborate with to get that done? Is there an opportunity for a strategic partnership? Should this be a program that is shared between two offices, because we both bring skills that are required for that program to be effective.
Speaker 3:And then how do we make that pitch? And that's where someone like me would come in right, helping them delineate the arguments, helping them determine who the proper stakeholders are, helping them figure out what the story needs to be, and I don't mean that in terms of a fiction, but how to tell that story in a way that is compelling and substantiated and resonates with the decision makers and also communicates to the decision makers in a sense what's in it for them, why it's good for them and the organization writ large that they're overseeing, right? So I think that's where I've seen differences in. You know, there were some leaders that were very much about towing the line and they thought, thought that that was critically important and that had pros and cons. And there were some leaders who were much more about encouraging out-of-the-box thinking and people kind of pushing envelopes, and they were comfortable with that, of course within reason. And then I've seen leaders who were somewhere roughly in the middle.
Speaker 3:But that's where I've seen the most differences is how the folks running the shops execute and what it is that's important to them and, of course, where they come in in the organization's life cycle, right? I think an organization I liken it to a person right, we all have times and seasons in our lives and I think organizations also have seasons and so I think you know it depends on what season that organization is in its life and when that leader comes in, they may need to emphasize maybe an organization that was operating too loosely and maybe one of their first tasks is to rein it in, and that's going to require different skill sets as a leader than if you came in and you know you were operating an organization that you know generally told the line and was operating at a very high level and successful. Well, now you're dealing with a very different kind of organization, just like if you were dealing with a very successful person and you were negotiating with them, you'd probably take a different negotiation tack than if they were kind of coming to you asking for something. So I think a lot of it is also getting a gauge on where that organization is within its lifespan, because it has a lot of the attributes as a person, right, it has things it does well. It has things it doesn't do so well. It has a history. It has people who have championed it. It has people who probably don't know anything about it and people who may hate it, right.
Speaker 3:So it's very much like a person, and that's how I've always thought of an organization is. It's not very different from a person, right? It experiences a lot of the things that an individual would, and it has its baggage and it has its successes and it has its traumas and it has its Achilles heel and the job of the leader is to kind of figure out okay, I'm coming in at this point in this organization and get a handle on where it is in its life cycle and determine what skills I bring as a leader. How do I need to apply them and when do I need to apply them, and what are my measures of success? What am I looking to achieve through the application for this organization for the time that I'm here?
Speaker 2:That's great analysis and it's taken me a while to kind of figure that out. When I first came into my very first company command I had a clear framework of what I wanted to bring in because I saw where the organization was going. We're getting ready to deploy for Syria, but we were on a be prepared to deploy for CENTCOM so we could go anywhere within the CENTCOM AO. So we're kind of planning for that. So I had a specific agenda that I went in and then I quickly learned that, hey, this agenda isn't going to be executable. I need to be more malleable. And then I transitioned to another company command and I went in there with what does the organization need? And I looked at that and I stood back and I figured out what they needed from me as a leader. And then I violently executed that towards that direction.
Speaker 2:And I've always adapted that mindset, especially in acquisitions. Now, when I come into a new role you know I'm in a senior APM level position when I come into a new portfolio, I look at it where it's at within like you said, the season and where the organization's at and what can I do? That's most value add. Do I need to completely shake up the status quo because there's a log jam, or do I need to just take the systems that are already in place and optimize them better and expand our organization? And I love that. That's critical feedback.
Speaker 3:And I think some inputs to that would be. They always do the command climate survey. I think the management by walking around is critical for that and I know I've seen a lot of leaders do that and it's funny, you know, sometimes when they're doing the command philosophy, some of the briefing is about the values of course, which I think is critical. But I think there's a right timing for that too. Right Because your command philosophy probably has a myriad of things that could potentially apply to a number of organizations. But I think if you give yourself some time to do your data analysis and your confirmations and denials and preliminary findings and you know kind of more firm findings, you can better tailor that command philosophy Because, as you said, there may be certain things that are important to you but for where this organization is, those things are not nearly as primary and as critical, especially out of the gate, as perhaps you know. Let's say there are 10, perhaps only three of them.
Speaker 3:For where this organization is are the things you really need to focus on and I think a compelling command philosophy briefing would probably do some preliminary tethering, showing how those philosophies relate to what you have gleaned from the organization, so that again, in a sense high level, of course, but cause and effect, so that folks even in that early stage can see the elements of your philosophy that you think are directly applicable to where you see the organization is and where you believe by what you've been tasked with and by what you've been told about the organization's missions and what you've learned from the people themselves is where they want to go during your tenure, right?
Speaker 3:So I think even doing something like a command philosophy would be well-informed by some of the things we talked about earlier the critical observations, the empathy so that you kind of understand the proverbial lay of the land and you know what tools to grab from your toolkit. Even though you have 100, you may find that you only need to use three at inception and then maybe halfway you change those tools out because you recognize they've done, they've served their purpose, the nails have been hammered and now you need to do the painting. So now you're working with paintbrushes and paint Doesn't mean the other tools in your toolkit weren't important. It just means that now, where you're at in the process, they're not required anymore.
Speaker 1:It's time for our final show segment that I like to call the killer bees. These are the same four questions that I ask every guest on the Tales of Leadership podcast Be brief, be brilliant, be present and be gone.
Speaker 2:Question one what do you believe separates a good leader from a great leader?
Speaker 3:Heart and mind desire to lead.
Speaker 2:I love it All right. Question two what is one recommendation of a source material that you would give to someone who's listening to this podcast to be a better leader?
Speaker 3:There is a very. It's not necessarily directly about leadership, but it's strategy and there's a lot of leadership principles overtly and covertly included in it and it's called strategy. It's a really thick book and, oh gosh, I think it's Lawrence Friedman, but I'd have to go back. I will put that in the notes to you. The author it's just escaping now. I can see the cover of the book. It's the Trojan horse is the cover of the book. It's in my study.
Speaker 3:But that book it's a long read but it goes back to strategy and leadership, starting with earliest. It starts with the Bible. It's not a particularly religious book, but it starts with the Bible and it kind of walks you through strategy, the development of the field of strategy, but a lot of it directly ties to leadership for obvious reasons. Right, those things typically go hand in hand. Strategy is typically executed or fomented by the leader, so I would highly recommend that. It's a long read but it's a really, really good read and there's a tremendous amount of references and resources that if folks want to do further reading, it has a really good references section.
Speaker 2:And then last question. In respect to your time, I'll only do three. Where can our listeners connect with you and how can they add value to your mission?
Speaker 3:So listeners can connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm fairly active on LinkedIn. I think it's a great source of information and just getting to know folks. I also have a company Instagram. I'm unfortunately not as active on there that I'd like to be, but I think I'll become more active. And that's CM Bates Consulting is the handle, so it's pretty simple and they can reach out to me directly. Certainly, my company email is christinabates at cmbatesconsultingcom, and a project I'm looking at now is I'm very interested in the unique kinds of leadership that military leaders bring with them and then develop as they come from more traditional military leadership roles into what I think of as more of the business side of the Army, for example, acquisition, where they're working with a very diverse workforce of civilians, contractors, matrix personnel and others.
Speaker 3:And what are kind of some of the unique leadership skills that they've developed over time that have helped them to be particularly effective in that kind of environment?
Speaker 3:What did they bring over from classic military training and this is just me, the layperson, calling it that what did they bring over that they found that worked effective?
Speaker 3:And then, of course, what specific skills and tactics they developed purposefully by what they learned in their environment and how they applied those to be more effective. So that's something I'm looking at doing and tapping into my network of folks that I've worked with over the years, of course, as well as folks that I've ideally never worked with, who had leadership roles from very junior to very senior, to try to develop some kind of topology, if you will, of the attributes that seem to work well in that kind of environment, again, ones that have been brought over from traditional military education and practice and then ones that were developed and kind of honed, for example within the acquisition space, so that we can help to continue to prepare officers as they make that transition, whatever level they make it at. That we can better prepare them for those roles and kind of some of the unique things that occur in those kinds of environments, so that they can be more effective very early on.
Speaker 2:I love that. I'd love to help when you start doing that too. Oh, definitely, effective very early on. I love that. I'd love to help when you start doing that too. Oh, definitely, this has been an amazing episode. I could literally talk to you for three hours. So again, thank you so much for being a guest. I appreciate everything that you're doing oh, my pleasure.
Speaker 3:I loved it. Josh, have a great day and a great rest of your week. Bye-bye all right.
Speaker 2:So that was an amazing episode with Dr Bates and there's a lot of key things that I wanted to kind of round uh bound that into for our after action review. But the first one is is I'm going to talk about radar leadership and she mentioned this before and this was one of the big themes that we had is that leaders are radars. They're constantly scanning the environment and they're trying to detect what's important and then what's just white noise in the background. Right, that's something that I've always done as a leader, but I've never thought of it through the metaphor of a radar. We're constantly scanning our environment. We're constantly scanning the people that we work for and the people that we're working against to try to understand what is impactful data and what is just white noise. And that's the key there is that, as a leader think of it as your brain, as a computer we're constantly trying to gather data. The more data that we collect, the better decisions that we can make. So think of you as a leader. Regardless of what position you're in, you're trying to collect the right amount of data, but the right data, because there's data that's just noise and there's data that's purposeful and powerful, and you have to understand that and you'll learn that throughout time.
Speaker 2:The next one is communication. So I kind of wrote this one down. Is a sense making, is Dr Bates kind of defined it, and I think communication comes in three distinct variables. You have to be authentic with your communication. Meaning I'm from rural West Virginia, right, I'm not going to speak like I have an Ivy League education and I come from a more high class family, right, like, because I didn't. I grew up in rural West Virginia. My father was a coal miner, his father was a coal miner, so I have that in my, in my blood. That is who I am. I come from a blue collar family and I'm OK to put my nose to the grindstone. So when I present myself to people, I do it from a very authentic point of view of who I believe I am as not just a leader, but as a, as a father, as a person, as someone who is on this journey of life to be the best version of themselves.
Speaker 2:Number two is transparency. To be a good communicator, you have to be transparent, and we talked about this before. I call it leading with windows. Transparency is one of those buzzwords that we use in leadership all the time. Every leader probably has that in their leadership philosophy, but not everyone is willing to share that, and that's why I call about leading with windows.
Speaker 2:There's always a boundary. As a leader, you have to be able to set a boundary, but everything that you're doing should be clearly communicated and transparent as to the why we are doing those things, to your team, to your organization and even to your family, right, because, again, we're all leaders. It starts with ourselves and it extends to our family and our teams and our organizations. And the last one is clarity extends to our family and our teams and our organizations. And the last one's clarity you have to be an effective communicator, because 90% of what I do as a leader is either written or oral, meaning that how I communicate in either a written or oral context shapes the organization. If I'm a poor communicator and I can't distill down the argument correctly, then it's going to impact my organization in a negative manner. So you have to be able to be authentic, be transparent and be clear and concise, and all of those key things lead into what I want to talk about last, and that's trust. As a trust, trust is the currency that I believe that great leadership is founded on, and it comes through consistency in our actions, and Dr Bates talks about this, I think beautifully is. Consistency in our actions leads to how people view us in this world.
Speaker 2:Short term is the values that we place right. We all have values. Mine is simple, I'll call it RID respect, integrity and duty those are my three key core values that I always kind of go back to, and I have more. If you've ever heard of bad hugs, boldness, and I can keep going. Accountability, discipline, humility, understanding, gratitude, selfless service. Those are values that I have, but my core values are respect, integrity, humility, understanding, gratitude, selfless service. Those are values that I have, but my core values are respect, integrity and duty. And why? Every decision that I make is through those lenses. Am I being true to who I am? Because it's consistency and values, as Dr Bates clearly communicated, is paramount to our reputation, the respect that is earned and the trust that is given, and that takes time.
Speaker 2:If you constantly erode your core values by misaligning your deeds with your actions, then you're going to lose respect and you're never going to gain trust, and that is the currency that sets up great leaders, or what I like to call purposeful, accountable leaders.
Speaker 2:Pals, that's what I believe separates purposeful, accountable leaders or pals is that ability to be consistent with their values. And if you can be consistent with your values, you are going to be able to create extraordinary results. All right, team, those were the top three takeaways and, as always, if you enjoy this podcast, do me a favor make sure you like, subscribe and review this podcast or whatever platform you listen to. If you can go to tales of leadership backslash buzzsprout, donate and support the show. Make sure you go to McMillian leadership coachingcom, where there's tons of different articles I've written and all of the podcasts that I've recorded, to include an individual blog article that is only on MacMillian Leadership Coaching, distilling down the key concepts. You can also subscribe to the newsletter on MacMillian Leadership Coaching. When I release a new article or there is a new podcast that gets dropped, you'll automatically get notifications in your email. As always, team, I'm your host, josh McMillian, saying every day's a gift, don't waste yours. I'll see you next time you.
.png)
