Success Secrets and Stories
To share management leadership concepts that actually work.
You are responsible for your development as a leader. Don't expect the boss to invest the training budget in your career. Consider this podcast as an investment of time in your career, with a bit of management humor added at the same time.
Success Secrets and Stories
You Don't Need a Title to Transform Your Organization
Failure isn't just inevitable in leadership—it's essential. This eye-opening conversation tackles the myth that great leaders emerge fully formed, revealing instead how true leadership is forged through stumbles, self-reflection, and resilience.
We dive deep into Shane Wentz's fascinating journey from Army sergeant to corporate transformation specialist, exploring his three-pronged approach to leadership development. First, immerse yourself in leadership literature—become what Shane calls a "leadership nerd." Second, reflect honestly on leaders you've worked under, learning equally from the inspiring and the toxic. Finally, embrace failure as your most powerful teacher.
The most compelling revelation? Organizational transformation doesn't happen in executive boardrooms. It bubbles up from the shop floor, through frontline employees willing to adapt, listen, and drive change. As Shane discovered when turning around Summit Manufacturing, skeptical workforces become change champions when they develop ownership.
We also tackle the challenging transition from peer to leader—that awkward moment when friends become direct reports. Both hosts share personal experiences navigating this delicate boundary, offering practical wisdom on creating appropriate professional distance without sacrificing authentic connection.
For those impatient about career advancement, this episode delivers a sobering reminder: leadership mastery requires approximately 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. The journey demands patience, purpose, and preparation—whether you're climbing the HR ladder or pursuing leadership in any field.
Ready to build your leadership toolbox? Listen to Podcast hosts John Wandolowski and Greg Powell now, and discover why Churchill was right: success truly is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.
Presented by John Wandolowski and Greg Powell
Welcome to Success Secrets and Stories. I'm your host, john Wondolowski, and I'm here with my co-host and friend, greg Powell. Greg, hey, buddy, yeah. So today we are going to be talking about something that I did when I was looking at my research for today's discussion and when I'm looking for different subjects, I'm looking for things that remind me of leadership and the things that you should possibly look into, something that might be able to help you in terms of leadership. So in my research I was looking for articles that I thought were interesting and in the process of finding an article and doing the research about the person who wrote it, shane Wentz. He also did a book recently and the book is intriguing. The title, I think, was more interesting than his article Leading Without a Title how to Build, influence and Drive Change, and the book is very close to the things that we talked about in the MBR side of it how supervisors and sergeants within the army and people in frontline positions really do make a change and are really the drivers of most organizations In the book's description when they talk about it.
Speaker 1:He talks about transformation isn't about rolling out new initiatives. It's about reshaping mindsets, breaking down resistance and building a culture where change isn't just acceptable but it's embraced isn't just acceptable, but it's embraced. When Sean stepped into Summit Manufacturing the company that was on its brink, plagued by inefficiencies, low morale and a workforce that was skeptical on the things that needed to do to do a turnaround. But transformation isn't happening in the boardrooms or in executive offices. It happens on the shop floor, through the daily habits of frontline employees, through their willingness to listen, adapt and execute. I'm going to stop there and say when I read that as a description of his book, I was hooked in terms of someone who was a common spirit of what it is that we need to do in order to make a change and we all have that opportunity. And it doesn't happen from top down as much as it happens from bottom up until there's a buy-in from the people who are actually doing the work. It's nothing more than words.
Speaker 1:A little bit more into the description that I thought was intriguing In his book. It talks about the high-stake world of operational turnarounds, sharing real-world leadership lessons drawn from his experiences leading transformations in both military and global corporations around the world and global corporations around the world. Through engaging stories, actionable strategies. This book would show why most change efforts fail, and how to make yours stick, or how to be turnaround skeptics into champions to create a culture of ownership. Another element from his book is key principles of sustainable improvement from the shop floor to the C-suite. So all those things kind of rang a bell. A little bit more research about Shane, and I see an image of him in uniform, greg, maybe you can take that description from that little moment in time that I saw. It was pretty intriguing that we had talked about Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Thanks, john. So let's give you a little bit of a biography of Dr Shane Wentz PhD. So Shane Wentz joined the Army in 1991, and he spent the first eight years of his career in the military intelligence field before he became a career counselor. During his final four years in the army, shane got involved in Lean Six Sigma and earned his black belt and then master black belt certifications. During his 20 year career Shane traveled the world, living in five states as well as Germany. He also deployed twice in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. So let's talk a little bit about Shane Wendt's.
Speaker 2:Phd Started off US Army Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt. Then he worked for Siemens as Senior Director of Business Excellence. He did that for three years. He didn't stop there. He went on to Nike. He was a director of lean and quality for NA distribution for two years. Then he went to Radio Inc. He was head of operational excellence and business transformation and he did that for four years. Then he went academic, university of Louisville adjunct faculty member for three years and more recently, the last six years, coo and lead consultant at a change in latitude consultancy.
Speaker 1:And all those things he did after the Army, and it was interesting how he brought the quality and tried to change organizations. And then I guess this was all my buildup to get to his article that really intrigued me. It was LinkedIn post on June 20th of 2018. And it started off. Failure, it must be an option if you want to be a good leader. It just rings in my head, winston Churchill, success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm. And if anybody understood how to lead, winston Churchill is one of my examples of someone who was a wonderful leader in the hardest of times. Shane goes on in his very first paragraph Leadership, like life, is a journey no-transcript, and I thought this was so dead on in terms of understanding that life doesn't give you all the answers. You kind of develop them as they go along. Greg, why don't you start us off?
Speaker 2:with his overview. So first step to becoming a leader, and I'm going to speak in terms of Shane. As my journey to become a better leader has evolved, I have focused on three different approaches to improving my leadership abilities. First, I like to read books and articles on leadership. Call me a leadership nerd, but I love books about leadership. There are plenty of them out there and some are better than others. But give me an autobiographical book on a leader I admire and I am consumed for days.
Speaker 1:And that was one of the things when I was reading this article. I mean, my book is telling you you should read about leadership to build your toolbox, and this is something that he said from his very get-go of his first point it's up to you to do the research. I thought it was amazing. Anyway, Thanks, John.
Speaker 2:So, secondly, shane said I spent a lot of time thinking about leaders I have had in the past. I've been fortunate to work for some great leaders in my career with such organizations as the US Army, siemens and Nike career with such organizations as the US Army, siemens and Nike. Reflecting on what I consider them to be good leaders, how they acted and responded as leaders, and internalizing that as a sort of comparison of how I believe I respond as a leader, really helps me grow personally and professionally. It isn't always a great image I see of myself when I do this personal reflection, but I really believe that self-reflection helps me become a better leader.
Speaker 2:Observations of leadership that Shane's worked for, of course, over the last several years in those same companies mentioned, he had some, let's just say, not so great leaders. I'm sure you know the type. At the end of the day, you go home, sit down, just shake your head and wonder how in the world did that person ever get into a leadership position? I truly believe that you learn not just from the good examples, but you learn from the bad ones as well. Sometimes you learn more from the bad leaders than you do from the good ones. So he was talking to his current boss the other day, had a great conversation about some not so great leaders they had over the years. He shared with me three bad leaders he worked with over the years and how he learned something from each of them.
Speaker 2:I'll never forget a leader I had several years ago. He was all about himself. He created a climate where nobody on the leadership team trusted each other. I tried to coach him and leverage every trick I knew to try and make him realize what was happening was just not good, but the guy was just plain toxic. I then found out he was sleeping with some of his employees and doing things that are just plain unacceptable for any leader, especially one at his level. I stay awake many nights thinking about that very valuable but hard lesson I learned from him, yeah.
Speaker 1:And some of our experiences. We're not going to find people that we want to emulate the element of self-awareness and the ability to understand that there's broken people that are in leadership. There's opportunities sometimes to make that change, to manage up and help change out that management team. And then there's times where you have to leave because that's the inevitable part of making a decision about your career.
Speaker 2:So Shane said the final approach he used in his journey to become a better leader is to always learn from failure. We've talked before about learning from mistakes. To me, one of the best ways we learn is to fail. If you are afraid of failing, then you are afraid of improving. When you talk to successful business people, they are normally more than willing to tell you stories of how they have failed many times in their career. If it wasn't for those failures, they wouldn't be where they are today. Same thing with athletes. In one of his favorite quotes by Michael Jordan, he says I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 basketball games. 26 times I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and I missed. I failed over and over and over again in my life. Unless you buy into the belief that great leaders were just born that way, it wouldn't make some sense that you're going to fail many times in your career as you learn to become a better leader. Here's the conclusion Shane says.
Speaker 2:When I look at my personal leadership journey, I can honestly say that I've failed a lot. My first leadership position was as a young man in the army probably 20 or 21 years old, and I was responsible for a team of five people. It was in Germany and I was fortunate enough to work with a great group of guys and we had a lot of fun together. When you're in your early 20s and you can legally drink and you're in a foreign country with nightclubs, tourist destinations are surrounded by a great group of friends. There's something you will never forget when I got promoted, that group of friends suddenly became my team and overnight things changed. Looking back, I did a horrible job of separating being their boss from being their leader. I can think of many examples over the years of where I failed as a leader. The important thing is that I believe I've learned from most of those failures.
Speaker 1:John, and you know that just reminds me of my experience when I started off my first position as a supervisor and a second shift for a maintenance department and a second shift for a maintenance department. They were actually coaching me and saying that that kind of relationship between the employees and the supervisor can be compromised and you have to create a distance. I didn't understand what that meant at the beginning. It didn't take long before I realized that wisdom of creating that separation because it would be easier to lead them. Realize that wisdom of creating that separation because it'd be easier to lead them, especially when at times, you'd have to correct them. Unfortunately, on those occasions where you had to fire someone, it is so hard to fire a friend and it's really the toughest part of being a leader Harding advice from shame. So I guess, to sum it up, what I am recommending to all leaders out there is don't be afraid to fail. Actually, embrace failure and make sure you learn from it. And as I concluded his article, it just rang the bell that this is exactly what I wrote my book about building your leadership toolbox. It's exactly the element of investing in yourself to develop your leadership style from either reading or questioning your leaders or observing your leaders, you will find that path of what you need to take in terms of being a leader. My book is called Building your Leadership Toolbox, and the whole idea is what do you put into that toolbox? Shane's book is one of those things that you should be putting into your toolbox. This is actually a management style I picked up from a gentleman by the name of Michael Durst who did a thing called MBR Management by Responsibility and its goal is to share key lessons that I gleaned in the course of my life applying the MBR concepts. So to give you not only the opportunity to see what it looked like in terms of my observations and the environment, but some of the leaders that I would simply talk about in terms of following, or some of them in terms of how they basically were angry with the world or walking over their peers in order to be successful. That whole thing about being self-aware is the key that I think we're both trying to talk about. Shane was a sergeant in the army. I was a second shift supervisor in a manufacturing plant.
Speaker 1:Leaders are developed over time. There is always a learning curve in terms of understanding your environment, your assets, your skills in order to be prepared for advancement to your next position, your next career. No one comes out of college and starts off as a CEO unless your family owns the company. It's just that simple. You have to go through that learning curve, that learning process. The vast majority of us will earn our advancements through the world of working. We'll put in the time we'll prepare for the work that we need to do and what it takes to be advanced. But remember, it takes over 10,000 hours to be an expert in a specific field. Leadership is a field. It talks about 10,000 hours before you're going to be considered a true expert within the field of leadership. It's all the time that you invest into it is the key of whether you're going to be successful or not. So, greg, maybe you can put into context how leadership happens in an HR environment.
Speaker 2:Sure, john, it kind of depends on what path you go, if you want to be the specialist or you want to be the generalist. Specialist means labor relations. That's all I'm doing. I want to work my way up in labor relations, work with contracts, union stewards, or I want to be a generalist. I want to have a variety of things under my control, things like staffing, learning and development, total rewards, culture, diversity, inclusion. So it depends on what path you want to go.
Speaker 2:Education-wise, a lot of folks just get a degree in like sociology, psychology or what's better is, human resources management Fantastic education. And then you need to get some certifications. I recommend SPHR, which is a senior professional in human resources. That will help you because broad-based on the HR activities you learn about, but someday you want to lead these, so you need to know a little bit about them individually. And then the years of experience it's kind of what we like to say depends. If you're in a small company, you might move up that ladder very quickly if you're accomplishing things and they have a need. In a larger company it may take you a little longer because of competition and just time.
Speaker 2:We like to say if you're going to be a recruiter, get a couple of years in. First, follow yourself, do a year, see what you can do better. The next year I'd say the same thing in training and development, the same thing in comp and benefits. Of the next year I'd say the same thing in training and development, same thing in comp and benefits. Learning and development, all of those. It's better to have a good year, do another year and go from there. There's not really rigid lines of you must be in this job five years. You must be in this job eight years. It used to be that way.
Speaker 1:But I think the five years, the eight years to that, 10,000 hours. So you figure 2,000 hours per year. And let's face it, in a given year you're not doing HR things every minute of every day, but to learn your craft for people who are getting in and expecting promotions within a year, within a year and a half, within two years, you may not have experienced enough to understand what's involved, all the nuances of the position and, more than likely, when you take that next jump you're still going to have to have time to learn the craft, learn that next level of management. So I guess in my head there should be some patience to be able to come up with some good groundwork.
Speaker 2:So I have an example of me. Years ago I became an officer for a company, became a vice president. I remember when the individual that promoted me gave me the promotion, he looked at me right in the eye and said Greg, I'm making you vice president of human resources for this part of our business, for this section of our business, but you're not really a vice president yet. I'm giving you the title. You're going to have to earn that and learn that along the way.
Speaker 1:So take the title, pay your dues learn dig in and then it'll happen. When did you feel really effective in terms of being a vice president? How long after that did you really feel like you were affecting change?
Speaker 2:I would say at least a year, probably a little longer before I felt really you know, really really good in the job, but at least a year. And again, part of that is that cycle. You know, go through a cycle of budgets, go through a cycle of reduction in force, sadly, go through a cycle of human resource, information systems kind of thing You've got. You just can't get in there for a couple of months and then you learn and know it all. You got to follow yourself, make sure things work that you're putting into place.
Speaker 1:And I will challenge you to say that that first year was understanding the basics and you hit your stride in the second year because now you were able to make changes from the observations that you made the first year.
Speaker 2:From the observations and from the mistakes.
Speaker 1:Okay, yes, from the failures, from the mistakes Exactly my point. So everybody that gets into different positions and are talking about when am I ready for leadership? When am I ready to take that next step? Failure is part of it. Time is part of it. Having purpose and doing your homework.
Speaker 1:Understand, if you're going to make a change, invest in the time to understand. When you say I want a career, those are not just words. You're serious about what that means five years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now. Understand you're making a decision on how you want to leave your work life, your professional life, even your home life, your professional life, even your home life. Have some pre-thought rather than waking up 15 years down the road going how did I get here? I thought I would have been able to be advanced a long time ago. It really does mean that you have to have some pre-thought and hopefully this podcast helps try to rattle that cage of helping you to take a look and see what other opportunities are and whether you're prepared or not.
Speaker 1:So, if you like what we talk about on this podcast, I have a book called Building your Leadership Toolbox. I've already talked about that enough. It's available on Amazon and Barnes Noble. The podcast which you're listening to, thank you, available in other formats like Apple and Google and Spotify. We talked about Dr Durst, and his material in terms of MBR is available on successgrowthacademycom. If you want to get a hold of me, my email address is wando75.jw at gmailcom and Greg.
Speaker 2:I can be reached at gpowell374 at gmailcom.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the music is brought to you by my grandson, so we want to hear from you. Send us a line. We have learned a lot and we have modified our program to try to accommodate some of your quests. And, um, yeah, it's been fun.
Speaker 2:So thanks Greg, thanks John, as always, next time yeah.