Notes on Resilience
Conversations about trauma, resilience, and compassion.
How do we genuinely support individuals who have experienced trauma and build inclusive and safe environments? Trauma significantly affects the mental and physical health of those who experience it, and personal resiliency is only part of the solution. The rest lies in addressing organizational, systemic, and social determinants of health and wellness, and making the effort to genuinely understand the impact of trauma.
Here, we ask and answer the tough questions about how wellness is framed in an organizational context, what supports are available and why, what the barriers are to supporting trauma survivors, and what best practices contribute to mental wellness. These conversations provide a framework to identify areas for change and actionable steps to reshape organizations to be truly trauma sensitive.
Notes on Resilience
115: Beyond Command and Control: Reimagining Workplace Culture with Rob Ott
"If you take care of your people and projects, the clients usually come right along."
Executive coach Rob Ott takes us deep into the world of compassionate leadership, drawing from decades of experience building high-performing teams. He reveals how truly people-first organizations achieve remarkable business outcomes while nurturing fulfilling workplace cultures.
Rob co-founded a company that became what former employees describe as one of the best places they've ever worked. Through rich examples and reflections, he illustrates how organizations can measure compassion through both qualitative feedback and quantitative metrics like turnover rates and engagement patterns. He also discusses how leadership responds during crisis—those revealing moments when pressure reveals character. He shares invaluable lessons about communication cadence, transparency, and maintaining people-centered approaches even when the metaphorical house is on fire.
Whether you're leading teams through uncertainty, building organizational resilience, or simply seeking to create a more humane workplace without sacrificing results, this episode offers practical wisdom for leadership that puts humans first.
Rob is the founder of Ott Management Solutions and a consultant and executive leadership coach known for his effective and straightforward coaching style, having mentored and coached employees and executives across many disciplines. The impact Rob strives for extends beyond business success into the career and lives of those he works with.
You can find Rob on LinkedIn and learn more about his company on their website.
Go to https://betterhelp.com/resilience or click Notes on Resilience during sign up for 10% off your first month of therapy with my sponsor BetterHelp.
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Producer / Editor: Neel Panji
Invite Manya to inspire and empower your teams and position your organization as a forward-thinking leader in well-being, resilience, and trauma sensitivity.
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#trauma #resilience #compassion #MentalHealth #CompassionateLeadership #leadership #survivor
What I think is a struggle is the underlying factors that you see where, how the organization operates in times of stress, how the leaders show up, and it's real easy to revert back to like that command and control, traditional methodology.
Manya Chylinski:Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, manya Chylinski. My guest today is Rob Ott. He is an executive coach and a consultant, and we talked about compassion and leadership through the lens of dealing with a crisis, building a positive work culture and making sure you're communicating effectively. I think you're really going to enjoy this episode, rob. I am so excited to talk with you on the podcast today. Thank you for being here.
Rob Ott:And thank you for having me, Manya. It's always great to connect with you.
Manya Chylinski:Before we dive into the topic, what is one thing that you have done in any area of your life that you never thought you would do?
Rob Ott:That's really. I love this question. That's really interesting because it makes me think of things that are kind of outside my zone. This one requires a smidgen of setup. If people that know me will know that I am like a consummate planner. I have lists, I'm the kid who reads the Lego instructions, so you know I don't do things that are kind of out of um, uh, out of the ordinary.
Rob Ott:And for my 50th birthday I got a tattoo and so the but that's not the really surprising thing. What is is I just went and sat in the chair and said to the artist that I love what you do, just draw me a dragon and had no sketch, no idea, nothing. And I had. I had no idea what I was going to get, and it was kind of a liberating experience and I think that even when I came home to my wife she looked at me like are you, are you crazy? Like did you get switched? Like there was no, uh. So it was a really great experience and it helped me push a boundary that you know. I don't have to plan everything.
Manya Chylinski:Wow. So listeners cannot see the look of shock and surprise on my face when you said that. To me that doesn't feel like a thing to just throw to the wind and trust a permanent mark on your body, Wow.
Rob Ott:Yeah, it was really out of character for me.
Manya Chylinski:Wow, that's some serious trust right there, buddy.
Rob Ott:Yeah, he's a good artist and I wanted to trust this process, so gave him his, gave him free reign. I've been really happy with the outcome. It was really great.
Manya Chylinski:That's wonderful. That is definitely out there. I've not heard anything like that yet, so thank you for sharing. Yeah, you're welcome To dive into the topic of compassionate leadership. First of all, what does that term mean to you?
Rob Ott:When I think of compassionate leadership, I think people, of putting people first and, you know, human focus on your processes. I think I can define it also by what I wouldn't call it. I mean, you know there's a lot of associations with psychological safety, but it's not. It's not just being nice, it's really thinking about do your policies, does your leadership style, does your focus really focus on the person and the and being compassionate about their situation in the pursuit of your objectives in your business? So there's a balance of it all that I think is really important.
Manya Chylinski:Yes, balance being a key word. I feel sometimes that when we talk about the concept of compassion in the workplace or accepting the whole human who shows up as our employee, that there's a fear that that means becoming this touchy feely workforce, or we're all going to sit around in circles and share our feelings with each other, and that couldn't be further from the truth.
Rob Ott:No, I agree, I am, at my heart, an entrepreneur, and so that goes with a lot of long hours hard work and, you know, drive, that you have to have to be successful, and what I found in my career is that you can do that, and do it successfully, while still focusing on your people first.
Rob Ott:You know, we always used to have a mantra at my, the company that I co-founded with a couple of colleagues of mine, in that you know, if you take care of your people and you take care of your projects, the clients usually come right along after that and everybody served and your whole operation elevates. So, while we always wanted to calibrate and be able to keep the lights on tomorrow and come back and do this again, we wanted to do it in a way that was as humane and, you know, focused on people as we possibly could, and because that was really what made a difference for us. So we built a culture that I love to talk about. I was actually just talking to someone the other day who I used to work with and, by and large, they say it was one of the best places they ever worked in their career, and that's something I'm really proud of.
Manya Chylinski:Yes, that is something to be proud of. So many of us have the experience of being in a work environment that we wanted to or were able to run from and would not recommend somebody work for that company for various reasons. One question I get asked a lot is how do you measure this? And, especially if you're having some initiatives or you're having some training, how do you show that you're actually making a difference when these are things that are, in some ways, fundamentally unmeasurable?
Rob Ott:Yeah, it's hard, because what I've found is it's a measure of qualitative and quantitative. You can't just throw up a KPI that will give you the exact answer that you're looking for, so there's not one answer to it, but there are ways to look at it. I mean, on the subjective side, there's always the employee satisfaction surveys. If you structure them well, you can get a lot of the signals that are going on in your organization to see what's happening. So we would take that not just at a surface level, we would really dig into that and look for trends. On the other side we would also look at is some of our turnover rates. You know, I mean there's, there's a degree of turnover that's good, I mean that's a healthy churn, but there's also, you know, trends that could be happening, and so you know the turnover may not be effective for the people that are leaving, but if you're picking up on reasons why people are leaving or certain areas of a company that seems to have a higher turnover than others, that tells you how you know that could be a signal.
Rob Ott:It's not the end-all, be-all always. And then you know the other things that you can look at are the decision making practices in the company. How are they made? How are they made and like what are their outcomes? Another one that I think was useful and again this falls on the subjective side, but we would do after action exercises when either a project was successful or ended or whatever it may be, and in the instances where it wasn't successful or something failed, you know you can always pick up if there's somebody, if you've got a culture of blame or a culture of learning and growth, and almost the tone of that meeting will tell you if you've got, if you're on the right track or not when it comes to compassion, psychological safety and you know what I would consider much more positive growth environment.
Manya Chylinski:Right, that's interesting. You mentioned the culture of blame and that, I think, is a clear indicator. I'm thinking, as you were saying these, that a lot of these metrics, whether they're subjective or objective, are lagging indicators. They show what you did and they're not giving you a clue to whether or not you're headed in the right direction. Is there anything for leaders to be looking at that can say we are headed in the right direction?
Rob Ott:Yeah, that one's a really tough one because you're dealing with theoreticals.
Rob Ott:I would think that the types of questions that you get in, if you have a good feedback loop, this may not be a totally leading indicator, but if you've got a good feedback loop that gets you answers either not so much in a survey but you know in maybe a town hall meeting or you know a strategy session they'll those types of questions will, but it's not so much in a survey but you know in maybe a town hall meeting or you know a strategy session those types of questions will allow.
Rob Ott:But it's not so much the questions themselves, it's how the questions are asked. So if you're seeing the same questions from the same group of people, that might be an indicator that you don't have a wide open receiving. You know loop, and so you know. What I would say is that if you're getting questions from a diversified group of people and I'm not speaking just purely you know racial gender but if it's, if it's like you know, from all parts of the organization and everybody seems to be engaged, that is a good indicator that you're on the right track. You know, I don't know if you can do predictive indicator metrics, but it's, but you don't have to rely completely on things that lag and that may be too late to fix.
Manya Chylinski:You work now as a consultant and an executive coach, the folks that you're talking with, the leaders. Are you hearing concern about employee engagement, about compassion, something that would give you an idea that this is something they're actively thinking about these days?
Rob Ott:It comes to me in two different ways, you know some, and it really is dependent upon the level of self-awareness of the leader to themselves and to their organization. Because, you know, I don't think it's hard for leaders to make the connection between generally happy employees and a good culture and a good environment, with increased productivity, and are like maybe a little bit further along on the chain versus people have no idea, and they really need to be, you know, they really need to surface those issues and then see the impact that they're having on their organization or their team's culture or whatever it may be that they're dealing with.
Manya Chylinski:Yes, you said something I want to dive into a little bit. You mentioned how teams, how leaders, behave in a crisis, and it takes me back to I've heard different versions of this back to. I've heard different versions of this. In a crisis, when we're tested, we don't rise to the level of our goals or our dreams or our aspirations. We fall to the level of our training or our habits, and to me, that talks about how important it is to train and prepare and work on this ahead of time, but I don't think companies see the imperative to working on this ahead of time until they're tested.
Rob Ott:Well, I mean, the test is a wake-up call for sure I mean. So that'll do that. My father used to say pressure reveals character, and so you have this in two different aspects and I think that you know, as I think of what you had just said, you know you have the effect on the leader when you're under stress, and then you have the effect on the organization and their systems aren't designed to either flex or, you know, absorb the stress and continue to deliver. Then that's a systemic problem and you know that has a remedy that you have to start looking at and, to you know, put a plan in place for that. But the other part of it is the leader, because if the leader tenses up and reverts, like I said to you know, command and control, that may not be the best answer.
Rob Ott:One of the other things that I live by is it's always situational. I mean, you know you got the classic example of the house is on fire. I don't need to get a committee together, I need somebody to take command, get everybody out of the building and then you know, deal with it. But how you look at that situation after that will also reveal a lot about your leadership. You know, are you going to blame somebody for knocking over a lamp or a candle or are you going to say how do we make sure this never happens again and build the organization to be stronger?
Manya Chylinski:Right. Well, what do you think are the policies or structures that are necessary to support that compassionate decision making and forward looking? What can we learn from this? Versus who do we blame for this?
Rob Ott:I think that there's a lot to be said about the emotional intelligence. There's so many different ways to answer this question. This is a really good one the emotional intelligence of your leadership team, starting with empathy and looking at where things may have broken down, not in a blame way, but examining your systems, but understanding there are people in those systems and taking that human approach to it to say you could design a perfect system and it still could have human error incorporated into it. So, looking at that, saying all right, let's look at it from the lens of the system and then let's add the lens of people. Is it flexible enough to accommodate all the different people that are going to touch the system? Is it going to serve its purpose when you start to add a little bit of variation in there?
Rob Ott:And I struggle to think of a specific system that would apply to this but I think that, looking at flexibility, at how are we treating our people under stress? Are they stressed out all the time? People under stress make mistakes. So if you don't have good support mental health aspects, if you're overworking your teams, if your culture is one of continuous burnout or crisis, we lurched from crisis to crisis and you never got a chance to even do a really good after action exercise because you were onto the next big thing and that will burn you out in ways that you can't imagine. So you have to take those pauses and look at what is it doing to my people, what is it doing to my culture, and that has to be more like one of the first things you think about, not the last.
Manya Chylinski:Yes, and you said something about people's inability to focus when they're under stress. In fact, when we're under stress or we're dealing with heightened emotions, it is more difficult it is biologically more difficult to hear information and to retain it. And even if you want that information and you're looking for it and you're asking somebody for it, when you've got certain levels of stress and burnout and you're dealing with that, no matter how much you want, you're not going to be able to retain a lot of that information, which goes into what you were talking about how that's going to impact productivity. And if you're lurching from crisis to crisis, are you ever able to communicate effectively?
Rob Ott:Well, and I think that's one of the absolute keys. You know and I am thinking about a specific time in my career where we were in a crisis for probably a good six months we had you know, there's some proprietary stuff so I don't want to go into all the details of it but operations were interrupted across the organization and we really focused primarily on communication. And I was on that crisis management team and part of my job was to debrief all the department heads twice a day on what happened last night, because we were working around the clock, what happened by the end of the day and then rinse and repeat. But everybody got to a point where we were keeping them looped in on just whatever progress we were able to make to resolve the situation, because they had constituents that they needed to address.
Rob Ott:And one of the things that someone said to me after that was they stopped coming because of two things One, they knew they could get the information anytime they needed it because our communication was so good. And two, they trusted us because they saw the cadence of you're doing something every day, every. You know all day long that they knew progress was being made, so they would stop checking in every twice a day and they'd come once or they'd come, you know, because we would also post minutes and you know like we had multiple channels of communication and that was gratifying, I mean, after we were able to kind of catch our breath and stop and think, you know, we realized that we had a good plan, you know was focused on the people, and we executed it the way we needed to. And it wasn't a fun experience, but it could have been a lot worse, I think, if we didn't do the things that we did.
Manya Chylinski:Yes, you said some interesting words crisis plan you had a plan in place at whatever depth or detail that helped shape how you responded. It sounds like, and I think it can be easy to believe, you don't necessarily need a crisis plan, and I think more and more companies are. This is part of the process, but I think it's easy to just assume that everything's fine and going to basically be fine.
Rob Ott:Yeah, and it's dangerous.
Manya Chylinski:And not think you have to put that time into plan for it.
Rob Ott:Yeah, and, and you know, one of the things that I walked away as a lesson learned from that there's it's that old maxim a plan is only good until either the first shot is fired or Mike Tyson had this great line about somebody punches you. You have a great time playing until you get punched in the face. And that's true because the plans have to be so flexible that you don't know what you're actually going to be running into in a crisis. But, fundamentally, there's a professor that I used to take classes from, paul Argenti from Dartmouth, and he's a crisis communicator.
Rob Ott:Take classes from Paul Argenti from Dartmouth, and he's a crisis communicator. He's brilliant and he was always key on the fundamentals. Keep that communication flowing because, yeah, you don't know what you're going to be communicating, you don't know what the events of the day are going to be. But building that cadence and that's the stuff that stuck with me when we were navigating that situation. And I think the good crisis management people know that and that's what they implement. They have a plan, they know what they want to do, but then they're able to adjust and flex as they go through their resolutions.
Manya Chylinski:Thank you for sharing that, Rob. What do you think is the biggest risk organizations face if they don't embrace at least some elements of the concept of compassionate leadership?
Rob Ott:I think the biggest one really focuses on the people. When you think about the economy and where we're heading and where we've been heading for the last 25, 30 years, america, at least in the States and I'm going to speak centrally from my experience we're a knowledge economy, so really we're not making, we're not manufacturing the majority of things we're. We're, we're working with our employees and their knowledge. So if they leave and if you aren't building a, to some degree, a company of choice for for the talent, the talent's going to go somewhere, and so one of the things that we, when I started, uh, act Oncology 20 years, 25 years ago, we were one of the first companies that were virtual and we had a philosophy that let's hire the talent where it is, rather than within 25 square miles of the headquarters or something like that. So we had people in California. If you had a laptop and a reliable internet connection, you were set, and so what that did was, for a long time we were like, hey, you can work from home. That was a huge benefit for us that people were attracted to and we pulled in a tremendous amount of.
Rob Ott:I used to say we assembled our dream team because we were able to find people that, like if I needed a quality, a compliance person, I was like I got to go find my friend Joe, I'm going to bring him into the company and you know we were able to. Just it was a cop. I mean it was complicated for our HR person because they had to learn a lot of different states HR rules, but at the end of the day it attracted people. And so I mean that little vignette. Their story is there's always going to be a competition for good.
Rob Ott:Good and while it will ebb and flow, depending on business cycles, there's more people probably out in the job market right now than there have been years past. That talent is going to go to places and aggregate where there are good reputations and you're not going to hold people for long. It's too easy, and especially as again, when you think about the factors that fall into this money, there's a generational switch happening. People are not going to be inclined to stay at a job where they don't feel like their needs are being met. They're more apt to move than maybe generations before.
Manya Chylinski:Yes, interesting. You bring up that you were a virtual company a couple decades ago and now we're seeing post-pandemic where companies were able to switch. Let's bring people back in the office, and I might be biased as someone who doesn't work in an office no-transcript.
Rob Ott:Yeah, and I followed this return to office pretty closely because it flies in the face of the experience that I had and I'll be honest, I mean, like these are I always like. I bring. I brought up, I think, the example of the pendulum. There is a swing, that always happens and it's almost impossible to pinpoint when the pendulum is at its equilibrium or its lowest point. So I will say this, and this I feel strongly about is there will be a swing back and there is a push for return to office and there's a lot of that.
Rob Ott:There's the old command and control mentality that's still in a lot of organizations. There is a huge component that's commercial real estate, that what do we do with these big empty offices that nobody knows what to do with? But I don't think we are ever going to go back to a nine to five in an office environment, five days a week. I think there will be some level of flexibility and hybrid and there will be a whole lot of workforce, people that are that you know. We may go back and you may see an uptick in return to office, but I have a feeling it'll keep swinging back and I'll give you the counterpoint. You know when I was talking to one of my senior leaders, when we were completely virtual, there were points where we were saying, hey, it would be great to be face-to-face and hang out in an office together when we had an office for meetings and like a very, not a huge space, and we would get together there maybe three, four times a month to hash out some things that were always good to be around a table for. So it's not like you can do everything remotely as well either. So I think there is an equilibrium that we'll find.
Rob Ott:There is post-pandemic. There is a huge focus on care, like family care. I think that having flexibility and one of my colleagues in coaching talks a lot about the sandwich generations, of taking care of kids and seniors and having a little bit more flexibility allows you to, you know, to handle that those life challenges and and I'll be honest, like I don't know that when I was really working that I like if I was on my free time, I was still kind of at work at times. You know I was still thinking about it. So it's a balance, you know it's. It's like we said in the beginning of this call it's a, it's a balance and in a calibration that you have to.
Manya Chylinski:You have to find your happy spot point of when you're working for yourself and you're working is also making sure that, as the employee, if you are working from home, hybrid or fully remote that you're not always thinking about work like for your own health and wellbeing to have those boundaries for work and I know people struggle with that as well kind of regulating their own schedule when they don't go into an office.
Rob Ott:Yeah, and it's funny, when I first was doing this and this is now going back to the year 2000, I had to actually trick myself so that I would put on a pair of shoes in my house and tie them, and that was the mental switch that I'm at work and I kept my shoes on all day and then I took them off when I was like, you know, when I was done work, and that was like also the mental eject button that I'm not there anymore. Because, yeah, it would be real easy to drag work all night long If you're just sitting in your office, especially for people that maybe don't have other outside interests. Like, at that time in my life I was single, I didn't have kids and I was probably a little bit of a workaholic, but it helped, yes.
Manya Chylinski:At the beginning of the pandemic, I remember people talking about oh, now I can work in my pajamas and I'm on the Zoom call, I've got the suit jacket on the top and the running shorts on the bottom or whatever the version was. But people talking about working in their pajamas because I still got up every morning and got dressed. Now I wasn't putting on a suit because I work from home, but putting on real pants and shoes and a real outfit because, like you're saying, that was my indication I am now at work.
Rob Ott:Yes, it's that little mental trick. You almost have to throw that switch.
Manya Chylinski:Well, Rob, we are almost at the end. Just to wrap us up, what is giving you hope right now?
Rob Ott:Well, there's a lot of stuff in the world that is challenging, but I look around and I always think about a quote from Mr Rogers. I mean this is going to sound really, really hokey, but his mother used to tell him, whenever there is something going wrong in the world, to look for the helpers. And you can see that terrible tragedy last night with the plane crash in DC, there were people that sprung into action, that immediately went to help that situation or those people, and so things like that really inspire me, that you know, in the dead of night, in the cold weather, there are people out there trying to help others, and that to me is really like you know, there's a lot to bring you down, but those kinds of things really are inspiring.
Manya Chylinski:I agree Absolutely. Now, before we wrap up, Rob, tell our listeners a little bit about what you do and how they can reach you and learn more about you.
Rob Ott:Thank you. So I am now a consultant and an executive coach. I run a company called Op Management Solutions. It's a solopreneuring type of organization and I focus on helping small companies set up their business operations, to help them establish infrastructure. That's the consulting side, and then I am also a leadership coach, so I will coach people that are looking to advance their careers. Everyone has a challenge, problem or opportunity in front of them and there are certain areas that I am really good at helping surface those areas and set up plans for them to improve and develop. And you can reach me at I'm on LinkedIn, rob Ott. Then you can also reach me at Ott Management Solutions. It's ottmgtcom, and there's a lot of material in there as well about my background and my services. So thank you for having me on that and thank you for that opportunity.
Manya Chylinski:Wonderful. We'll put links in the show notes to make it easier for folks to get a hold of you and Rob. Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed our conversation.
Rob Ott:Yeah, it was a true pleasure, thank you.
Manya Chylinski:Thank you for listening. I'm Manya Chylinski. I help organizations build compassionate, resilient teams that thrive by creating environments where well-being is at the core. Often, people reach out to me during times of crisis or significant change, but the truth is that building a healthier, more supportive workplace can prevent issues before they arise and empower your teams to thrive no matter what challenges come their way. If you're ready to make a meaningful change, I'd love to connect. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe, rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or your listening platform of choice. It really helps others find us, and if you'd like to continue the conversation, connect with me on LinkedIn or visit my website, www. manyachylinskicom. Thank you for being part of this journey with me.
