Episode 8 - Leading Through Dreams: Unlocking Purpose, Retention, and Performance

What happens when a leader flips the script and focuses on helping team members achieve their personal dreams instead of just company targets? Dane Espegard, who manages the largest division of Cutco, discovered a revolutionary approach that transformed his team culture and dramatically improved retention of top talent.

After attending a Matthew Kelly seminar years ago, Dane began exploring how connecting work to personal dreams could create a more engaged workforce. When building a new team in 2013, he asked himself: "What if I had everybody really focused on pursuing their personal dreams, and therefore, what we did at work was just the fuel to that?" This simple but powerful question changed everything.

Dane shares how this dreams-focused approach creates multiple benefits beyond motivation. Team members who actively pursue their dreams develop problem-solving skills that directly transfer to business challenges. As Dane explains, "When we have our people focused on figuring out how to accomplish dreams, that's the exact same skill set that it takes for them to handle and tackle a business problem." The result? A team of solution-finders rather than problem-dwellers.

Perhaps most surprising is how this approach transforms leadership presence. Many leaders feel they should "dim their light" around team members, hiding their successes or privileges. Dane discovered that living his dreams "out loud" while simultaneously helping his team pursue theirs created an environment of authentic inspiration rather than resentment. This transparency builds trust and shows team members what's possible through continued growth with the organization.

From dream workshops to celebration rituals to practical implementation strategies, Dane breaks down exactly how any leader can implement this philosophy. Whether you lead a small team or an entire organization, this conversation will challenge your assumptions about motivation, retention, and the true purpose of work in people's lives.

Want to transform your leadership approach and create a culture where people thrive? This episode provides the blueprint for making work meaningful by connecting it to what matters most to your team members.

Transcript

Dreams as Work Motivation

Speaker 2 0:05

What if I had everybody on my team really focused on the idea of pursuing their personal dreams, and so, therefore, what we did at work was just the fuel to that. When we have our people focused on figuring out how to accomplish dreams, that's the exact same skill set that it takes for them to handle and tackle a business problem right, and I think that's what leaders want on their team are a bunch of solution finders people that recognize a problem and immediately attack it.

Speaker 1 0:33

You're listening to the Sherpa Leadership Podcast, your guide to climbing higher in life and leadership. I'm Reid Moore and, alongside Chase Williams, we're here to help you break through obstacles, scale your potential and lead with greater clarity and purpose. Leaders, welcome back. You're here with Chase and I on the Sherpa Leadership Podcast and, as always, we'd love for you to like, subscribe, go to YouTube or go to the favorite place that you have to be able to listen to podcasts, and we're here to help you climb higher in life and leadership. To that end, we have an amazing guest today. We're so grateful to be able to share this really good friend of a really good friend with you as we work through the I serve model. Today, we're really just diving in to this idea of engaging and developing others. So, chase, what do we got?

Speaker 3 1:30

Well, we have an incredible guest for you today, mr Dane Espegard, and of course, dane is an amazing husband. A father of three girls, lives outside of Austin, texas, and Dane has kind of grew up in the Cutco world and actually manages and runs the largest division of Cutco. He's a real estate investor and he's really passionate about helping others with their dreams. And so, dane, I'll let you speak a little bit to that, but we're so excited to have you here. Thanks for joining us. Yes.

Speaker 2 1:57

Yeah, happy to be here. Yeah, we, we got connected by our mutual great friend, mr Mike Monroe. We got connected by our mutual great friend, mr Mike Monroe. Right when we talked I was like this is perfect, right, because you guys obviously align quite a bit with the idea of the dreams mentality. Oh yeah, and that's why Mike connected us.

Speaker 2 2:15

But, I had the opportunity to hear a great speaker, matthew Kelly I don't know what it was 20 years ago now or close to that speak on the concept of dreams, and I was a participant in his keynote message, but but through that was really interactive and kind of engaging the audience on you know what would light you up in the future, and so that was my first experience making my own dreams list or bucket list, and that has then evolved and been a journey for me and I implemented some of those things into my team back in 2007, and then in 2013, and then evolved it ever since then and I had the opportunity to write a book and share what we've been doing with dreams in our business and launched that back in 2021.

Speaker 1 3:03

Awesome and so you can get that book. It's called Dream Machine and I saw it on Amazon and got it on order and when we first connected and just started talking about this, it really piqued my interest, because this whole idea of leadership right is, I'm leading somebody somewhere and maybe one of the ways that you can think about leadership is people are hiring you to help them get somewhere in their life. So walk us through, kind of how you landed on this idea of dreams and how you now think about this as a leader.

Speaker 2 3:34

Yeah, so it started. It's interesting, you know, when I went and had the experience of going through the dream stuff, to begin with it was like most things at a personal growth seminar, where it was, like you know, really exciting for two weeks, and then I settled back into doing the exact same stuff that I'd done before, and then I introduced it to my team, but we didn't really do a lot with it other than just talk about dreams for, you know, a couple of weeks, and then it went on my shelf. And then, back in 2013, really at the end of 2012, I had the opportunity to move again within the business and start a team from scratch for the third time. And at that point, that's when I really tried to get intentional with the culture aspect and said you know, I've now started a business from scratch twice. What were the wins, what were the losses of that? What did I love about my team? What would I have had different? What were the wins, what were the losses of that? What did I love about my team? What would I have had different?

Speaker 2 4:31

And so, moving in 2012, I moved from Omaha, nebraska, up to the Twin Cities in Minneapolis and I approached the build, if you will, from the standpoint of, if this is the last team that I ever build and I'm excited to be not just on the team but leading the team for the rest of my professional career what would I want that culture to be? And that's where I settled back on. I went through all my notes from the past, seminars and books and all that, and I settled back on the concept of dreams, and so that's the thing that had always excited me the most if it was in front of me, but often it wasn't. And so I got to the idea of what if I had everybody on my team really focused on the idea of pursuing their personal dreams. And so, therefore, what we did at work was just the fuel to that. And you know, being in the business that I was in and still am with Cutco, you know nobody comes to us and says, oh I'm so glad I found you. For the last 10 years I've been looking for a job in cutlery, right, so nobody ends up on our team because it's a passion.

Building a Dream-Focused Culture

Speaker 2 5:35

And so, with a role where my job was recruiting, training and developing and then hopefully retaining people from 18 to 22 into their 30s, the challenge was always a lot of times we'd lose our best people. Like a lot of businesses, right, your best person gets poached or they get sold a better, bigger vision somewhere else. And so for me it was hey, if it's not about the knives, what can it be about? And what I found with Dreams for me was that, look, if I'm constantly focused on whatever the next exciting thing is in my life, that brings a lot of purpose to what I'm doing at Cutco, because in order for me to pursue these things, I either need more time, autonomy, more finances, better health, right, something in that ballpark, and so then work then becomes my vehicle to achieve the life of my dreams instead of my purpose in life. And I think that that discernment for me as a leader was key.

Speaker 2 6:29

And so that's what we kind of seeded our new organization with at the beginning of 2013. And then from there, I didn't know what I was doing in 2013. I was just like I'm going to live my dreams out loud in front of my team and help them make their list and just kind of hope that that that works. And and that started. That was our, you know, 1.0 version, and then we've pivoted and added 2.0, 3.0 ever since then. That's awesome.

Speaker 3 6:54

So, dane, I'm curious, right, like as you share this, it seems like on the nose, it seems so obvious. Right From a leadership perspective, it would seem like, okay, well, you know, part of our job as a leader is to help people accomplish their dreams, and yet my hallucination is that's not actually common for leaders to connect to or to build an organization around. Why do you think that is? And how did like tell me a little bit about how you connected all the dots to say, okay, this is actually something that people will care enough about, that creates the attractiveness and recruiting, the retention of your best people? Because, gosh, it sounds obvious. But I look around and I don't see a lot of organizations that are as intentional as you are about this topic.

Speaker 2 7:38

Yeah, I think, great question. And I think that the biggest challenge of why aren't you know, why is this not the thing in every business? Is it's really difficult for this to be the main thing, right? So when we're running a business, most businesses in my experience are operating more likely in reactive mode than proactive mode, and so if we're in reactive mode, it's impossible for us to be focused on dreams and all that, because we've got to be focused on what has to get done today, you know, putting out the fires, handling the situations that arise, and so I think with this, it's such a forward thing to say you know, hey, pretend the business is humming, what's going to keep our people here? And that's where I think that this comes in. For me it was. I just knew. So Matthew Kelly, when he talks about you know, in his book the Dream Manager in that book they have a salaried position for somebody to do just this, and I think that's an answer for a lot of businesses. If somebody has the funding to say we're going to pay somebody a nice salary and this is all they're going to do, you can write a check and have this be the case.

Speaker 2 8:43

That wasn't the situation for me. I was young, I was in my mid-20s, I was bootstrapping my business, and so I had to figure out well, how can I still have this be the culture and not shell out big dollars for this? And the only answer and really I would say this is the answer even if somebody has a big budget, which is the leader, has to live it. And so I had to be committed to saying, which is right, in line with what I read with your guys' leadership model, which is I had to be the living, breathing example of pursuing the life of your dreams. And what was interesting with that concept is there's this thing within leadership that I've noticed that I was attracted in my business, to stay in my business, by other individuals that were three, four, five, 10 years ahead of me. Right, they appeared as though they were living a great life, making good money. They had awesome, vibrant teams. I didn't really know, right, but that's what it appeared to me to be the case and that's what attracted me to stay and build a business post-college here.

Speaker 2 9:48

And then, as I started experiencing that same success, I started dimming my light around the people on my team. In other words, if I was going to take an epic vacation. I wouldn't share it necessarily, because in my mind there's this element of like. Well, I know that maybe the people on my team can't afford the same trip or they don't have the same time autonomy that I do, and so there is a part of me that would want to yield a little bit of that. And what I wasn't recognizing that I was doing is I was dimming the light that would attract my best people to stay with me for a while.

Living Dreams Out Loud as a Leader

Speaker 2 10:18

Once I had the framework of dreams. It gave me permission to live my life authentically out loud, because I would hey, I'm helping you live. You know, try and pursue your dreams. I'm taking a trip. It's on my dreams list. And what happened is the team would be really excited about me going out of town and doing these things, because there was that reciprocity, because they knew if I was talking to them about a sales goal, it wasn't because, hey, we need you to sell this. It was, hey, when you accomplish this, what's the dream on your list that you're pursuing? Is it a down payment on a house? Is it a vacation? Is it something else that you're looking to do? And so, by me, living it out loud also enabled my people to pursue some of those things as well, and in turn, you know, I was able to start retaining some of that top talent that I'd lost in previous years. Man, I love that.

Speaker 1 11:01

That's a big aha. What? So let me ask you this question when it comes to people writing down their dreams and using your product to do that which is fantastic, by the way how do you navigate as a leader? Dreams that may be, how would you say this? Maybe somebody else's dream right Like they. They see the yacht, they see the airplane. They're maybe not mature enough to actually realize that they literally don't care about that or don't want that. How do you coach them into thinking about dreams that are actually important to them?

Speaker 2 11:32

There's part of that that I think they have to come to that on their own. There's part of that that I think they have to come to that on their own and through the exercise, like when we take a team through this. It's an abundance exercise. So I want those things on their dreams list right. I think the more things that are on their list, the better.

Speaker 2 11:47

The way that we describe somebody's dreams list is that all the things on there, if they were to ever happen through the course of your life, you'd get energy from it right. So that could be a yacht, that could be. And I think people's lists change. My first list I was 22 when I made it. It absolutely had yacht. It had every luxury car that you could think of, because I was 22 and ambitious and I thought those were all of the things right. My list today as a 40-year-old is very different than it was as a 22-year-old and I always describe the list as it's a living document. So it's it's okay to look at your list and say I don't remember putting that on there. That doesn't interest me anymore. I'm going to get that rid of that thing, um and and.

Speaker 2 12:27

So we ask people to through the brainstorming process to try and get a hundred 200,. I have people on my team that have over a thousand dreams on their list, so we really get into the weeds with them. And then the last part, though, is okay, well, let's find a dream or two that you think is attainable within the next three to six months, but they're not going to pick the yacht, so that might live on. You know, that might live on their list for years.

Speaker 2 12:50

But what I do notice is, first time, somebody does this just like goal setting, right, they're choosing something that's maybe much smaller, and as they achieve more, they reach a little bit bigger. They get, you know, the whole Sherpa idea, right. It's like they get to this summit and then they can see the next and say, oh, okay, well, maybe now I can do those things, and so I think that it's. There's a natural filtering process to it that I don't. I haven't found myself ever needing to, you know, say hey, I haven't found myself ever needing to, you know, say hey, I don't know if that should be on the list, or is that really yours. So I think people kind of figure it out on their own as they go through it.

Speaker 3 13:29

Awesome. Love that because I think, like the deeper value to me seems to be it's not the yacht that is most important. I mean it may be to them, but it's most important that they know you care about helping them achieve whatever's on their list, whatever their dreams are and whatever time frame. Helping them achieve whatever's on their list, whatever their dreams are and whatever time frame. So I'd love to ask you, dana I have to imagine the culture that comes from this and tell us about how it permeates other powerful parts of a culture, like celebrating someone's wins or you know this collaboration or even just personal relationships of people celebrating each other and their progress. How does that actually show up?

Speaker 2 13:59

The connections that are made through a team that has this at the core is exceptional, and it's because they're no longer just working next to somebody and doing the normal hey, how was the weekend right, like those conversations. And I've had the opportunity now to take different companies and teams through this, and it's even in the initial workshop. We do the brainstorming portion, which is very individual. You know, head down they're cranking out all their, all their things. But then in that we have them do what's called sharing and stealing, and so we'll have, you know, small groups of four or five people, and it's neat because sometimes they're in the same department, they work next to each other, sometimes it's someone that's hey, this person's in accounting, this person's in sales, they don't. You know, maybe they don't talk to each other regularly, but they're not just saying, hey, hello, what they're doing is they're sharing three, four, five dreams from a health category, three, four, five dreams from travel, from family, from legacy, and so it's one of those things where it forces it's maybe a bad word, but invites them to go deep really quickly, and it's not one of those cheesy icebreakers or those kinds of things. They get to choose what they want to share and it's really comfortable. But then that also gives everybody in the team the invitation to be vulnerable and to be themselves in the workplace.

Speaker 2 15:20

And then when people on our team are accomplishing dreams, if it's a private one, you know, I'll ask hey, are you okay with me sharing this and recognizing you're on the team? And on our team it's almost always yes, like yeah, I'd love that, and we love celebrating people's dreams, because that's also one of the easiest ways for somebody to experience joyful accountability. Right, and it's not. You know, if Chase accomplishes a dream, it's not Reed. Get back to your dreams, man.

Problem-Solving Through Dream Pursuit

Speaker 2 15:47

What are you doing but me recognizing Chase, to say, hey, guys, before we get started on our quarterly meeting or our monthly sales meeting or whatever, I just want to go through and recognize all the people on our team that have accomplished a dream within the last couple of months. And we recognize them because, as we mentioned before, our business motto is living the life of our dreams and inspiring others to do the same. So, before we get into the sales numbers, let's talk about the most important thing, which is our team advancing, and so we'll recognize Chase for something. And then read over here is like oh, I got to look back at my dreams list, right? So it's just the friendly nudge to say, oh, I've been off my game a little bit, or what's the next one I'm going to do?

Speaker 1 16:24

Man, I love that so good.

Speaker 2 16:25

The other one, I will add, is problem solving. So I don't. I would love to say that I knew that was going to be the case when I started doing this, but that that'd be a lie. But what I have noticed is that when we have our people focused on figuring out how to accomplish dreams, that's the exact same skill set that it takes for them to handle and tackle a business problem, and I think that's what leaders want on their team are a bunch of solution finders, people that recognize a problem and immediately attack it, instead of the person that gets stuck with it or waits for somebody else to solve it.

Speaker 2 16:59

Well, if I'm coaching somebody on my team, separate of what their role is, but just saying, hey, let's talk about how to accomplish that dream, that's the exact same process that we would go through to talk about, hey, how can we handle this business problem? And so the flip of this is it's getting our people really focused on being solution finders because they benefit in their personal lives, and then they're just used to how do I do this, instead of oh, I don't think we can do this, right, because that's the dreams conversation. When somebody says I want to do this dream it's. That's a big one. Let's, let's figure out how we can do that Right. That's always going to be the go to.

Speaker 3 17:34

So, dan, I love you. You said earlier that like this initial process is kind of like this write everything down, abundance style kind of thinking, which I love. I love this, this idea of adding gasoline to abundance thinking inside of an organization period. And occasionally you run into these people that maybe have a hard time dreaming, maybe haven't like given themselves permission to to dream the way that you're talking about in abundance. How do you, how do you guide someone through that process if they're getting a little stuck or you feel them holding back, and then what value does that bring? An organization and you as a leader and your influence with someone?

Speaker 2 18:13

It. I mean, that is spot on and I wouldn't have known that. Or, you know, you kind of just assume we look through life on our own lens, that everybody's similar to us. Um, man, there are absolute gaps and differences in people's ability to dream and, um, I've had the opportunity again to do these workshops and I can tell who this person's, you know they're. They're stuck in the mud a little bit here.

Speaker 2 18:36

I did one with my mom and this is before I kind of as I was getting ready to launch the book and so I sat down with my mom and said, hey, mom, I'd love to do this dreams, you know, take you through some dream storming stuff that I do with teams. Would you be open to it? Oh, okay, yeah, I guess so. And I mean, we were in a coffee shop and yet the first like 30 minutes was pulling teeth. And you know, when I look back it's like, well, it makes total sense. Like she, you know, she was a teacher at that point, divorced, fixed income for the most part. She didn't see, you know, she's in her 60s, she didn't see this big windfall of finances or any life movement changing, and so, through that it was like, well, I don't know, and she was very stuck on.

Speaker 2 19:22

I don't want to write it down because I don't know how that would happen. And so, yeah, it was my mom, so I could use a little bit more stern language and it was one-on-one, but it was very much like I need you to forget about how, when, how much money. I just want you to say, if I could have a second I wouldn't say this to most people but if you could have a second shot at life, what would be the things that you'd want to do? And then it was okay, she got some stuff down, she got more down and then she started cruising some stuff down. She got more down and then she started cruising.

Speaker 2 19:51

If I'm talking to a team, it's just you kind of know, hey, this person on the team, they're a go-getter, they're a big thing, they're going to have no problem with the dreaming exercise.

Speaker 2 19:59

Then you have the person that's maybe wired a little bit more pessimistic or realistic We'll call it that to be a little more generous, and that person does struggle a little bit with this and what I find is that there's the whole thing should, in my opinion, should feel invitational and there shouldn't be an obligation Anytime. There's an obligation on the dream stuff, I think we lose it. I think we lose what we're after when it comes to that. So there's no right amount that somebody has on the list, but at the end of the process there are for sure people that only have 20, 30, 40 things down. But when I started doing this a bunch with my team, I did it once and then I was like well, I'm going to do it again for the new people that are on my team, but what about the people that have already been here? I guess they could sit through it again and I thought it would be repetitive to them.

Speaker 2 20:52

And what I found is, the second time they went through it they added more than the first time. And it makes sense to me now when I look back, where it's like, oh well, it's just like any other skill, the more often we do it, the better we get at it. And so now I'll use the example, often with people where it's like, if you haven't been to the gym in five to ten years, the first time you go, everything is hard. Yeah, right, the person who goes to the gym five times a week, nothing's hard, right, it's just they don't even think about it. They're like this is easy, I'm going, and obviously their workouts, hopefully, are hard, but the idea of that concept and it's the same thing. So if you haven't dreamt in 10 years or 15 years, this may be a little challenging for you, um, but it doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to get 20, 30 things down on paper.

Speaker 1 21:32

And I'll find everybody.

Speaker 2 21:34

as long as we set up that kind of invitational, there's no obligation. Have some fun with it, nobody's checking your work. I think that's kind of the feel that I always try and have when I do it Love it.

From Dreams to Action Plans

Speaker 1 21:45

So let me ask you about the other side of that coin, and that is the person that they do nothing but dream like, dreams, dreams, dreams and everything's like, and there's always a new dream and maybe it's different than last week's dream, and it never goes from dream to reality because the the level of consistency, effort, skill, all of the things that we need in the business for them to get there, don't materialize. How do you take the dream concept and distill it down into the practical elements of actually getting there?

Speaker 2 22:20

Yeah, that's, that's I. One of the things that I'll regularly say is that obviously I'm not a believer in sitting in thought with no action.

Speaker 3 22:28

Sure.

Speaker 2 22:29

Right, but in order for us to have purposeful action, we have to have that purposeful thought time. So the balance of it, I think, is important. And there are people that just you know they live up here, right, and it's a lot of fun up here when there's no reality of, oh, I got to go do the work. The last part and this was from 2013 to call it 2018, first five years I was doing this like very consistently with my team. What we didn't do at the end was the actual planning, and that's what we added in 2018. And that, to me, has kind of unlocked where it's at today. And so the last part of a dreams workshop that we do is we ask people to go through their whole list and say, hey, very intentional language, mark down, make a smaller list from that of anything that could be potentially in the cards maybe within the next 12 months. So we put a bunch of qualifiers on it to say, just, there's a shot at it. And then we give them space because most people just won't do this if you do it later. So we give them space to say I want you to actually do some research on these, right, and so let's say it's a trip Cool. Do some research on when would you go, how much are flights, who do you want to go with? If it's a health thing, do some quick research. Use chat, gpt, do whatever. Find out what the actual steps would be for you to do that. And then in that moment, moment, in a motivated state, we have everybody commit to something and take action. And so at the very end, everybody's, you know, booking something, signing up for a race, or, if it's a health one, or they're you know, signing up for music lessons or doing something like that. So the goal is, when they leave, it's already in action and they're going to accomplish their first dream because it's baked into the cake, A company that has been using our software for a while.

Speaker 2 24:11

I always love to shout them out because the CEO there does a phenomenal job organizing his team around this. The company is called Malk M-A-L-K. It's like a smaller competitor of Silk and the almond milk, oat milk type stuff, but it's a phenomenal product. They've been using our system since 2021.

Speaker 2 24:30

And the first time I went in and did a workshop, I had this idea, but I wasn't sure how he was going to take it. I said, hey, jason, it'd be really cool at the end of this If you wanted to support them with a dream and he goes. I was already thinking about it. So his team at that time, I think there was only 20 people or 15 people on the team.

Speaker 2 24:48

At the very end, everybody was looking at committing to one and right before they made the decision, I said hey, and, by the way, and we passed out envelopes uh, I don't remember what it was 200, 250 bucks, and it was basically like this is from jason malk. Uh, it is. If you take action and you book something right now, here's 200, 250 dollars towards your dream, and for a lot of people's dreams it's literally that $200 would cover a dream. Wow, right, and so he's been doing that regularly. I use dreams for sales, contests, promotions, achievements, accomplishments, christmas gifts, and so that's one of the ways that we make sure people are accomplishing dreams is, you know, we pay for them.

Episode Closing and Part Two Preview

Speaker 3 25:31

Thanks everybody for tuning in to that episode with Dane Espegard. We hope you enjoyed it. We enjoyed it so much we actually split it into two episodes, so we've got part two coming. If you want to connect with Dane, his program is called the Dreams Vault in his book. We'll have information about that in the show notes, but we hope you enjoyed it. We'll have information about that in the show notes, but we hope you enjoyed it. We sure did, and we'll see you on part two with Dane Espegard. Take care, guys.