How to Lead Inside a Large Organization

What does it take to lead effectively when you're caught between executive decisions and the needs of your team? 

In this episode of Commander's Intent, Derek Oaks sits down with leadership consultant, author, and former financial executive  Douglas Scherer to explore the realities of leading inside large organizations. Drawing from more than 20 years in a global financial institution, Douglas shares powerful lessons on navigating organizational change, managing different leadership styles, building trust, developing future leaders, and staying true to your values when priorities don't always align. 

Whether you're a manager, executive, military leader, or aspiring leader, you'll gain practical insights on leading through uncertainty, empowering your team, handling workplace politics, and creating impact without losing sight of your own vision and purpose.

Visit his website: https://www.douglasscherer.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Have you ever frozen in the key moment of making a critical decision? Whether it's in business or in life, it can cost you everything. Commander's Intent will teach and inspire you how to lead with clarity, courage, and purpose. So here's your host, retired Air Force Colonel, fighter pilot, and your leadership mentor, Derek Oaks.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

Hello, I'm Derek Oaks, and welcome back to another episode of Commander's Intent. I'm here with my co-host, Rob. And as our special guest today, we have Douglas Shearer and he's a longtime leadership consultant and a leadership expert who spent over 20 years with a large financial institution. And he is a speaker and author in the leadership realm and worked with Columbia University. And I'll let him give a little bit of an introduction of himself, and then we're going to talk about his experiences working in a large organization and how you manage your leadership techniques or your leadership approach when they don't always sync up with those above you or with the direction of your team. How do you manage that? And how do you still shoot for success when that's the case? Doug, so I'm going to turn it over to you to give an introduction to yourself and we'll start talking from there, okay?

SPEAKER_01 1:15

Oh, thanks. Well, I mean, you did a great job, and I'm all into short and sweet. So I'll just add that, yeah. So more recently I've been doing more research on leadership as enhancing my experience, but also to consult better. The interesting part about that background is when I did my doctorate in organizational leadership at Columbia, my focus was on how the life journey of executive leaders, so I interviewed C-suite leaders, intersected with the way they led and the way they gave back to the next generation through mentoring. So, how did their life experience developing into leaders affect the next generation, which I think is really important now in terms of all the questions we have about working with Gen Z and now, you know, people growing up with devices. So it's just a great topic. I and I love being involved with it. And thanks for having me on.

SPEAKER_02 2:04

Thanks so much. So talk me through your career at this particular organization, you know, where you started, what your degrees were to get you to the job in the first place, where you started, some of the leadership responsibilities that you had, and then talk about some of the challenges you had managing and maneuvering within the company.

SPEAKER_01 2:21

Yeah, so it's a great question because when you're at an organization for 20 years, there's a lot of movement. And what was interesting is before I joined this financial firm, I had a boutique consultancy. So that was like during the dot-com era. And so I was building that up, but I always kept it small just because I didn't want to run a big organization. Um problems with that are while you're having to do marketing for your next gig, you're having to do the gig. That's when I brought on a few more people. Then an interesting thing happened, which is we had a kid. And I thought, let me not be in a situation where I'm constantly looking for my next gig, let me join a large company. And an opportunity at that financial firm came up like almost immediately. So, and I thought, this is it. I'm in a big financial firm. This thing is gonna be, you know, it's like instead of being on a speedboat, I'm on a battleship. And I thought, this is gonna be great. And three months later, they were selling the portion of the company I'm in to another company. There was an MA activity, and I almost lost my job. So what I learned pretty quickly, even though I knew it intellectually already, but is that even if you're in a large company, you're really in a business and you're really a consultant. And you have to make your worth known and you have to be worthy. You have to have some reason to be there. It's a little easier to hide in a large company, you know, in a large organization, but that's not gonna last forever. And you're never gonna make it up the scale unless you make yourself known. So that has to do with a little bit more of the politics part of it. So I'll leave it there. I forgot your essential question, but it is a very interesting maneuver. And I will say, oh, I was gonna say is that I think in the 20 years I was there, I probably had 10 bosses. So, and every one of them has their own personalities and their own desires. Some of them are intense micromanagers, and some of them are, hey, as long as I don't hear a complaint, you're good. Just make it happen, you know? So, which is my favorite kind, because then I can make it happen. And that kind of speaks back to your question, and I'll kind of hand it back to you for the main question, which is like, how do you deal with you know strategies that are coming down and commands coming down? And the first thing I would say is part of it is a like what's the command, what's your team look like? And B, is who are the people asking and how are they treating you as well?

SPEAKER_02 4:32

As you were talking, I thought of you know, you talked about 10 bosses, some were extreme micromanagers, some were very hands-off, let you do your thing. I was thinking about something my dad said to me many years ago. The job that I always wanted in the Air Force was to be a squadron commander, in particular a fighter squadron commander, because he said squadron commander is the greatest job in the Air Force, but it's the most difficult job in the Air Force. That's manifest by the fact that most squadron commanders are not very good. And I think that's a pretty big indictment of a large portion of the community, and of those ones who are bad, a lot of them go on to be colonels and generals, and yet you're telling me that most of them are not very good. And uh he said, Yeah, because it's it's such a difficult job. But as you look at those 10 leaders, was it just their personality? They were just terrible bosses because of who they were, or because the position they were put in was also very challenging or a combination.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

Yeah, and I would give an umbrella statement to that, which is the better bosses are the ones who trust their staff. And when they trust their staff, they're not in their face all the time. And I will say that I don't really understand micromanagement in terms of a way to manage, because all it is is exemplifying your own fear, number one. And number two is if all you're there to do is constantly be checking in on every minutia of every little thing someone's doing, I'm not really sure why you're there because you've hired folks to do that. So why are you in their face all the time? You know, go make strategy, go do something bigger. But it's never made sense to me as a management style.

SPEAKER_03 6:03

Well, but let me ask you this because based on what you said earlier, skipped into my mind. And you said that in a big corporation, one of the things you need to do in order to show your worth and to continue to move is to show you know that you do something, that you have done something for the company. Do you think that this might be part of what leads to that style of people who have done it? If you're a you know, if you're a small fish in this big pond and you're doing whatever you can to try to make your name, once you've made your name, is it difficult then to switch over? And do some managers then just continue to try to make their name through their subordinates, whether it's claiming credit for it or micromanaging, does that have anything to do with maybe that style?

SPEAKER_01 6:43

Yeah, yeah. And that's the big fear. And part of the mentoring research kind of brought that out as well, which is that mentoring someone to be a leader requires you to allow them to take risks, right? Because leaders they fail, they get up, they change their minds. I mean, they have to be able to adjust to the situation. So if you're someone who is trying to teach someone to be a leader, but you're responsible for their outcome, and that reflects on your own growth, right? Then you're gonna be micromanaging them because you're not really allowing them to grow as a leader. You're more worried, exactly what you're saying, Rob, is you're more worried about their outcome and how it's gonna affect you and your progression up the scale, right? So I completely agree with you with that, is that you cannot help someone change if you're worried so much about how their outcome is gonna affect your outcome.

SPEAKER_02 7:32

That's a great way to put it. And as you were speaking, I was thinking about flight instruction. When you're a supervisor and your growth and your potential and your climbing the ladder is dependent on how your people under you do, there's a level of stress there. And you were talking earlier about the security of a big corporation, how it's you're never really secure. You have to always be producing, always be moved uh moving forward. And sometimes we reach a certain point and go, that I reached my goal. Well, as a minimum, I don't want somebody to take away where I am right now. I don't want to go back to where I was before. And the only thing stopping me from or keeping me from going back is making sure the people underneath me don't screw it up. And that's a poor way to look at it, but I think that's where a lot of people kind of fall back into. And it's like flight instruction. I'm sitting next to somebody and I'm letting them land the aircraft, and I'm the one with wings on my chest. I'm the one who's the certified pilot, and yet they can totally bend the aircraft, hurt us, and cause a big insurance claim, and it's on me because I'm the flight instructor. I'm the qualified pilot on the aircraft. So yeah, I can let them do that, and I need to trust them to do that. And what in doing so, I'm putting my life, I'm putting my livelihood, I'm putting my forward progress in their hands. And that's a very tough thing to do for leaders.

SPEAKER_01 8:45

And you know, in your situation, you're dealing with life and death, right? So you could say in an organization, you're not dealing with life and death. But what I have found is it feels like for the people that are involved in it, that aren't pilots, you know, and running missions, is it feels to them like life and death because that's what they know. So I think the what you're talking about is very similar to what goes on in organizations because folks get very worried about how is this, my boss is gonna call and yell at me, I'll be demoted, or whatever. If they're supporting their, if that's what's supporting their family, that feels to them that same stress level, right? And that's when we've talked a couple times about leadership in different ways. And I think it's what you're talking about in your experience in the military is extremely relatable to regular old organizations because people feel the same, the emotions are the same. How it affects your thinking capabilities and your ability to make decisions is very similar because of the fear and the emotions that come up.

SPEAKER_02 9:42

I think that's a great point. Even if it's, and this will sound silly, like if Douglas screws up, that's gonna affect my my camera zoomed in here. If Douglas screws up, that's gonna affect my membership in the club. I'm gonna lose my membership because I won't be able to afford it, because I'll have to go back and do his job. Or I'm gonna have to move into a smaller house, and my wife's gonna kill me, she's gonna leave me. Those are all they seem silly just sitting here, as we would say in pilot terms at zero knots and one G, but it's a real risk and it's a real concern. You are on that big battleship of that large financial corporation, and the battleship doesn't have to sink for you to sink. They can just find it, they can replace you, or they can trim the crew, they can replace you with AI. There are a lot of things they can do to your position to hurt your security and where you gain your security from in that organization. Go ahead. You're gonna say something, Rob?

SPEAKER_03 10:31

Yeah, so Douglas, let me ask you. I mean, bringing that to mind. The one thing I'm gonna say in the military, we were a large organization, but I didn't worry about necessarily getting fired because if you get fired from the military in a job, I've had three or four friends who did get fired, they didn't lose their pen check. They're in the civilian world. So I wonder how often did you see it that someone in a job made a mistake? And I'm not gonna talk catastrophically. We're not gonna say somebody lost billions of dollars for a company. Somebody made a mistake, how often did they get fired on the spot? Was that a real threat?

SPEAKER_01 11:01

On the spot, I don't think I've ever seen someone make that kind of mistake that they would get fired on the spot. I mean, in financial institutions, you wouldn't be making to be fired on the spot, you probably wouldn't be making a mistake, you'd be making a malicious decision, if you know what I mean, right?

SPEAKER_03 11:15

I do, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:16

So, but I never saw that, luckily enough. But I mean, what I saw was, and I don't think it's specific to financial institutions, is organizational shifts that then would start people being disappeared and things like that. You know, all of a sudden you're seeing the guy next to you's not there, and then the person two doors down is not there, and then um you know, you can see there's some sort of effort going on to reduce size and those kinds of things, especially after an hour. I think it's a testament to my ability to kind of work with different kinds of people that I was there for that long. As things are constantly shifting, you know, you could be booted out at any time, but usually not for that kind of mistake. But also, I don't know if the military has this, but or the Air Force has this, but you know, there's a process, you know, you have HR and there's grievances and there's documentation and there's multiple warnings, and then you go through. I mean, you know, if you have someone who's really not working out, you have to give them a lot of times you give them um you write about like a contract on how they're gonna improve, and then they can work their way back in. So we've done that kind of thing too. So yeah, so luckily I didn't see that too much. But you know what I wanted to kind of harp back to is uh like working with different folks. And I what I was thinking is about taking risks. So you kind of have to know who you're working with. And when you're given this an assignment, I guess, and this given the strategy, this is the strategy, this is the assignment, you know, you've still got to make it your own somehow because you're an individual and you're building the team, right? And at one point, one of my favorites examples of this is I had a very well-running team doing at that time. We were I've had a lot of different roles there. In this role, I was the head of a global group that was in charge of what they call application support. So that means like making sure data transfers are happening and the quantitative analytic things are up during the day. And it's global, so it's all, you know, there were a lot of regions involved in this. And they decided to create an organizational change where they were gonna hire like a big consulting firm and take all of this effort for all the groups and turn it into that. But they looked at my group and said, You're handling this so well, we're not gonna touch your group. So it was a year-long effort. All these people had nine months, and in the ninth month, they came to me and said, No, we've decided we're gonna roll you in, we're gonna fire your entire team. Everyone else had nine months, you get three months to like shift over your entire thing. And they brought in a new application stack on top of it and the whole thing. And this is where I think having like a learning and creative mindset and being able to risk a little bit is important because I said, you know what? They put me in this situation. This is I'm totally behind the eight-ball. I guess I see he's right, right? I mean, like in the red position, bad position. And what I did is I thought, you know, I studied, you know, organizational learning, organizational leadership. I was like, let's put that into practice. So I didn't hire for technical skills. I mean, they had to have technical. I mean, that's like to me level one. You have to have the technical skill, unless it's a position where you're saying, we'll accept something where you're gonna grow into it, right? So that happens too. So I'm like, yeah, okay, everyone's and the other groups had just taken whoever they got. The consultant company said, Here's your people. And so I talked to my consultant company, rep, and I said, you know, I want to interview everybody that's coming onto this team. And I didn't interview them for the technical stuff because I knew that someone was going to check them out already before me. And most of the people, you know, I was in management leadership, so I didn't probably even have as good technical skills as they did anyway. But what I interviewed them for is how do they handle situations that they haven't seen before, and how do they handle the people? Because when you're in application support, someone's calling you, ah, well, this thing, this system's down. It's like we need this up immediately. And I hired them for how well they could tell their story, how they could talk about overcoming failure, right? And I was looking for people that could be people skills, knowing they already had the technical skills and their creativity skills and how well they could learn. And because I took that learning capability in the three months, not only did we onboard the whole team, but we went live and the metrics they had set out for the teams, we met and beat the metrics so much that they put me in charge of creating metrics for the entire organization. So, I mean, yay for us, but you know, the thing is it's you have to know when you can take risks, right? You have to know to be able to take risks because it was a risk for me to go, I was going outside the model, right? The model was go freaking hire those guys, they're gonna give you people, you know. And I was like, no, you gave me three months, and no, but I had to come up with that. But I was using skills that no one else had, which is these learning and creativity skills, and it worked out so well.

SPEAKER_02 15:56

That's awesome. You know, Rob and I have talked about this before. How many times have we heard, well, that's not my job? And it's you need it a lot in a small company, but you just your proof that it can happen in a large company where all of a sudden there's a shift in the culture, a shift in the organization, and the job descriptions and the skills that you hire people for don't quite fill the seams. And so, how do I fill those seams? You fill it with creativity, you fill it with going, all right, we have to solve for X. What is X? And then how do we get there? What are the skills that get us to X? And so in the Air Force, we saw it all the time. We didn't get trained, I'd say, for 90% of the tasks that I did. If you count flying as like a singular task, kind of 90% of the overall tasks that I did were not flying tasks. And I was never trained to do them. You're like, all right, you're gonna do a scheduler now. Now you're gonna be a training officer, now you're gonna do this, now you're gonna be a force programmer. I mean, on and on and on. Skills that I had no training, but I had to solve for X. And so what was X and what is my path to get there? And what skills do I need to develop me personally in order to get there? Because you try and encapsulate everything on a job description and encapsulate everything in what the contract is between the company and the individual, and that's near impossible to do.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

Which is that you know, the skills you're trained in, you know, you have to bring your life skills into it, right? I mean, that's how you bring that creativity to it is like what is inside me that I'm bringing to this new? Either it's a thought process, you know, that no one's ever used before, or I have the ability to go out and like find something new to do, even though I don't know what it is yet. I mean, that's to me like the key leadership thing is dealing with ambiguity, right? And then making that transformative change to handle like a new situation. My guess is in combat, Derek and Rob, you guys, that's exactly what you face is and I know Derek, you told me this thing a long time ago, like a year ago, that like no plan survives first contact. I love that saying. That's one of my favorite things now. It's true. It's like you have to be able to adjust. And you know where this comes out also in business quite a bit is in entrepreneurship, right? Because almost any entrepreneur you're gonna talk to, the thing they came and started selling eventually and manufacturing getting out there is not the idea they had originally. And as they come in, they come in with an idea, they start processing it, and they have to adjust to the market and and they have to adjust to speed because if they wait too long, their whole brilliant idea is already, if it's three years old these days, it's like way too old, you know. So this idea that you have to adjust and transform is to me like leaders have to be able to transform and arise to the moment.

SPEAKER_03 18:40

No, I was gonna say, so Doug, let's let's take this because I I think this is all perfect. I'm glad to see that a lot of the experiences you had in a larger corporation, they do translate pretty well over to the military because it's the same kind of thing. You're solving all these problems. The biggest thing I solved for me, living inside a bigger organization, was trying to make sure I could, as you put it earlier, you know, how do you lead as yourself and make sure you bring your life skills to the table? How do you nest out inside the larger organizations' strategic goals? Or maybe I should ask it this way were the goals of your financial corporation were they well enough known by you or by your managers and leaders that you knew how to nest yourself under them? Or was that just something you had to kind of figure out?

SPEAKER_01 19:24

Well, you know, again, there was a lot of movement within that. So I would say it was a little different depending on what group I was working in. Overall, I mean, the financial picture and the goals are usually pretty well known. Usually have uh, this is the organization I was in, they're very good at communicating through town halls, you know, what the goals were. How well that trickles down to you actually doing your work. Sometimes your work, it depends exactly. Again, I had multiple roles, but if let's say you uh you're just a tech developer kind of person, which I I wasn't, but you know, what's really shifting is really just like what's the project you're working on. And so at that level, I'm not sure, you know, unless they're saying, oh, here's AI, go figure it out, and that's a brand new thing, right? But if you're using, you know, MATLAB or SAS or something, you know, and you're given a problem, I mean, it's usually just learning a new library or something. And I clearly that's where like leadership, but of course, I can mean a lot of those guys were brilliant and they would come up with their own ideas and add into it. So it's not to say nothing, but I'm just saying that kind of work to me is a little bit more isolated. And you know, you see a lot of times, I know a lot of those folks don't want to rise. They just like sitting at the cube. That's what they love to do. So it's where the leadership stuff starts happening is you start having to adjust. And it's really again, it's just you have to know there's this thing called political savvy. I don't know if you know this book, Political Savvy. It's by this guy named Joel DeLuca. It was written in the late 90s, but it's I don't know, I think it's like perfectly appropriate today. And he talks about what part of it is, and I taught it in some of my classes at Columbia, the understanding your political network, right? So whose agenda is aligned with yours, who's the decision makers, who are they friends with, and understanding that, and there's actually a process to map it out, which you would never show anyone except yourself, but it's about knowing how to work with folks and what you're and knowing your own agenda and then working with them to figure it out how to get there.

SPEAKER_03 21:22

Yeah, I had forgotten about that book. The one I don't know if you use it in your class you've ever used, but I used a lot was the bureaucratic entrepreneur. I don't know if you ever know that one.

SPEAKER_01 21:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 21:31

Well that one's it's very similar to political savvy. It was actually written by government employees, but it's applicable to pretty much everywhere. But it basically lays out on compass your uh customers, you know, your noy's your bosses, you've got your peers and your colleagues on one side, you've got your suppliers and your you know partners on the other side, you've got all your subordinates on the bottom. It was excellent. So if you get a chance, that's probably a good one to check out.

SPEAKER_01 21:54

I'm gonna check it out. Yeah, thanks. Derek has to read two books.

SPEAKER_02 22:00

I'm the slow reader of the group, so now I've got to find both these books and lock myself away to read for a little bit here.

SPEAKER_03 22:05

Well, I gave away my copy of Democratic Entrepreneur to somebody years ago and lost it. So I'm still looking for another copy, but you know, I'll get there.

SPEAKER_02 22:12

That's it. Yeah, you know, so we've talked about you talked around vision and you talked around, you know, your vision, organizational vision. I think when you figure out, you're sitting in a seat, I think when you figure out that your vision, your personal vision, is completely misaligned with your organizational vision, that's when it's time to move on. It's probably time to start looking for another job and go somewhere else. But the truth of the matter is that your personal vision is never going to be completely aligned with your organization's vision. And your personal vision, enacting your personal vision, sometimes you've got a market that's fighting against you. You've got external forces that are constantly fighting against you. And so how do you know when there's still wiggle room and where there's still room to maneuver for your own personal vision in that large organization that's going a different direction? I think that's a question that really for everybody to answer and personally and then in the organization am I doing any good here? Am I the right person for this job here? Am I I mean that was how I ended up getting out of the Air Force. One of the reasons I, you know what? I've reached a point in my career where what I want with my life no longer corresponds with what the Air Force is going to do with me. And some of the thoughts of how Air Force leadership and really Department of Events leadership and national leadership is going. And I'm like, you know what? I think it's time to move on. I just reached a point in my life where I'm like, you know what? My vision no longer corresponds to an extent to where I can stay sitting in the seat. So it's time for me to move on. You know, there's how do you do that in your organization?

SPEAKER_01 23:44

You, I think that's a really interesting question for you, because I know a lot of your writing is about your family history in the Air Force. So for you to make that decision must have been a huge decision.

SPEAKER_02 23:55

It really was. I mean, I loved what I was doing. You know, in fact, I was telling a flight student recently, I said, I have a tough time billing because if I love what I'm doing, I don't I you know, when somebody says, How much do you cost? I'm like, you know what? I really am loving this. Well, don't ask me that question. Just pay me what you feel good about me. And I've been bit many times because of that, because I value my time by what I'm getting out of it a lot of times, not by you know what I'm worth in the market. And so something that I've got to overcome or hire the right people to do my negotiating for me. And but I love the Air Force and I loved what we did, and I love the people that I worked with, even bosses that I disagreed with. There were very few that I'm like, this guy's an idiot. I don't want to work for them. I don't want to work for any of them. I mean, there were a couple of those, but by and large, great people. But I got to a point where my vision for my life no longer aligned, and it was time to step aside and let somebody else do it.

SPEAKER_01 24:45

Yeah. I mean, that's it's a scary thing to do for a lot of folks, especially if they don't know what's next. And I mean, for me in my career, I, you know, I'd already been lecturing at Columbia, so I'd already been speaking for, and I had already started thinking, I really want to get into this, you know, more public speaking. I had done in the 90s, I did a lot of public speaking at Oracle technology conferences around the world. Those were in the days when you actually had to publish a 30-page paper along to go along with your talk. But, you know, I had already started kind of cogitating on this and I guess planning my exit. But and I was just fortunate when I decided it was time, I already had that in place and all the materials and demoels and the website and everything in the book. But what I think kind of is important about the long-term look vision of that is that we're having 10 different bosses and different strategies, and every year there's some new strategy. I I think a lot of that new strategy is we have to show we're doing something at the upper level. So let's come up with a new strategy sometimes. But uh is that you sort of have to, I found that you have to roll with the punches. I guess that's where I'm trying to get to. Is that yeah, not every boss is going to be the perfect boss. So right now I'm working for a micromanagement boss. In a large company, I don't know if it's the same in the Air Force, you have more opportunities to move around if you want to, you know, seek other jobs. As long as you have done a year and a half, you're allowed to go look. But what I found is that some bosses are great, some bosses are medium, and some bosses are just awful. But I will tell you, a lot of it's just being able to see what that boss is about, know that this isn't forever. And I mean, as long as you want to stay at that organization and then be able to work with them until you know you move on to something else. And a couple of times it happened to me, and then other times I shifted, you know, I said I want to, you know, I went to somebody, I said I want to be in your group because I know what you're doing and I really like that. And I got pulled in. So you have to manage your career and all the way through. You don't always have complete control over it, right? But you always have to be thinking about it. And this idea of being known that I was talking about earlier is not only about making all your work known. Sometimes it's just going out and having coffee with people, you know, and just meeting them so they know who you are when career decisions start getting made, you know, and they're picking people.

SPEAKER_02 26:56

Yeah. So I have one last question. It's going to be kind of a left turn. We've been talking about our own vision and how we nest with our the large organization, with our bosses. So you're a manager, you're a supervisor, you're a leader. How do you continually monitor the people that are working for you to make sure that they are aligned with the team? To make sure that they are self-actualizing and doing what you need them to do.

SPEAKER_01 27:22

Yeah, a couple of things. First of all, I mean, there's always metrics. And there were so many metrics. I didn't even have to come up with my own metrics for my own team. I mean, it's just those poor people and myself, just the level of metrics that comes from on high wherever it's coming from. Somewhat stifling. But I felt like I had to be a really hands-on. That doesn't mean micromanagement. That meant that I had your back, right? So that to me is kind of like where that comes in. Because it's not so much, I mean, metrics are important. I mean, you're in a business, you have to know what you're doing, right? But as the leader, I always felt that I'm here to facilitate your guys' work, not to get in the way of it, you know. And also, again, I just have a mindset of leadership and an opening, creative, transformative like experience. So I'm always learning new stuff. I'm trying to meet other leaders, and I'm trying to clear the pathway for them. So if they were caught in some BS administrative, stupid thing that they couldn't get through, I'm trying to open the path for them so they can get their work done rather than them trying to fight those things. And I hope that they would feel the same way. But I feel like I've always tried, at least tried, to have their backs and to facilitate them without getting in their way. Again, that needs to be adjusted per the person and per the situation. But overall, I think so much of it's just about trusting your team. You're hired them. Now it's time to trust them to get their work done. And you create the strategy and clear the pathway for them.

SPEAKER_02 28:52

You know, I like the way you said it. You're present, but not micromanaging. And I think that's part of how you develop and manifest trust. You're there. They see that you're there, but you're not telling them what to do all the time. You're not saying go here, go there. You might want to adjust that. You're there. And for them to fully and trust, in order for trust to really work in an organization, it's got to be both ways. It's got to be up the chain and down the chain for it to really work. And they're not going to trust you if you're just a placard on a door. They're not going to trust you if you're just the one who writes their annual evaluation and you they see you at Christmas parties. They need to see you walking around. In the Air Force, we call that walking around leadership, and I'm sure it's the same in corporate world. They need to see you on a regular basis. They need to feel you on a regular basis, but they don't need to feel your pressure. They don't need to feel that if they do it not your way, that you're displeased with them. So I love that approach. You were going to say something, Rob?

SPEAKER_03 29:45

No, I was going to say it's interesting because you know, all the things we're talking about, it brings me about some of my experiences both in the military and then also from what I've seen in the corporate world that I worked in for a few years. It really appears to me that the pivotal layer for operations to run well, for people to feel uh trusted and to feel empowered and all these other things, is kind of like a mid-level manager. It's almost like you have to build them and grow them. Because you take somebody who's probably technically good at what they're doing, you bring them into mid-level management. If they don't leave that behind, they micromanage. And if they don't know how to manage up, or if they don't know how to manage from above, and so it seems to me that that if I were consulting with a company or trying to give company advice, I could probably look to see if they're operating well or not. Because from what I saw, at least we went to a merging acquisition in the aviation business when I was there as well. I saw the same kind of things, and I saw that the mid-level management that they had utterly failed them, and the company still continues to lose a ton of money every quarter, you know, their livelihood is in jeopardy. And I really believe it's through that mid-level manager. But I think you kind of uh reinforced that to me with what you're talking about, Douglas, because you you keep talking about the right ways to lead management. And I'm glad to hear that that those have not changed in the civilian world, that everything that we learn in the military is pretty much the same thing on the outside as well.

SPEAKER_01 31:05

Well, you know what also I liked about what you just said, Rob, is uh the phrase came to mind is succession planning. So you want to leave behind a functioning organization and you want people to feel comfortable that that organization can run without you. In order to do that, you have to always be elevating your folks. And I think that two things. One is, and I think it was mentioned before, that people fear, you know, their folks getting better than them. But if you have a great team, they're just gonna elevate you, right? I mean, that's good for you, not bad for you. If someone's and if they progress beyond you, then yay, for them, you know, that you're part of their journey, right? And Derek, you were speaking a little earlier about so many bad leaders, right? And I think that this is part of the problem. And again, this could just be my research and executive mentoring, you know, background. But, you know, the part of the problem is the way that folks get elevated. Sometimes you just get appointed to a leadership position. I don't know if it's the same in the military, but I know in technology, before I was like so focused on the leadership piece of it, I was, you know, running technology teams, and I kept getting elevated, and no one taught me how to run a team. They just said, oh, we can see you're organized, we can see you know your skills, you're now in charge of this team, you know. Part of it is like, let's train those people to succeed, you know, versus just throwing them out there. I mean, sometimes, you know, you may have to, depending on the situation, if it's fast moving. But I mean, a lot most of the time, I think we have time to prepare them and teach them.

SPEAKER_02 32:33

Thanks for that last comment. And what I will say is if you supervise two people, if you supervise 2,000 people, you have to be a perpetual student of leadership. And you have to be a perpetual, you have to be perpetually willing to take criticism, take feedback, and set up an environment where the lowest person can come in and say, boss, you suck that one up. You can't do it that way. And if you're not willing to take that because of the plaque on your door, then you may as well just take the plaque on your door off and let somebody else do the job because leadership is challenging and it's a perpetual learning thing. And leadership, there's no one size fits all leadership based on the people, the type of people you're supervising, the environment that you're supervising in, and why you're there in the first place and what you're bringing to the table. All those things are going to be different. And so you need to be a student of leadership on that. And so as we wrap up here, I want you to give me a plug for your book, explain it real quick, because I think the audience needs to hear it. You bet.

SPEAKER_01 33:27

Well, I just happen to have one right here. There you go. There's Forge. And uh, what I did is I interviewed, and it's stories about folks I interviewed from all the way to the top tier, someone on the board of JetBlue, down to the people who run the local food pantry and looked at similarities, but dealing specifically with high-impact situations where you don't have enough information to really make a decision and still having to do it. And how do you lead your teams into that? And uh, I just had a lot of fun doing, but it's kind of the underpinning of the public speaking piece of it is this idea of always having to deal with stuff you just never dealt before. To me, that's you know, there's a lot of writing that's they call it the cliff. The, you know, as a leader, you're leading someone and you find a cliff that you have to climb, but you've never, you know, ascended that before, and you have to figure out a way to get everybody up there. And that's the leadership piece. It's not just bringing people along, you know, it's like we have something new, it's gonna impact all these folks. Or even if I'm leading my family, you know, it could be in a small situation. Here's five people, I gotta make it work, right? So that to me is the leadership piece. And I just love the now that I'm doing the public speaking thing in the workshops, I just find a lot of joy in that, like more than the work, unfortunately, that I was doing before for 20 years. I just find that now taking that experience, taking the research, you know, the books and all that experience teaching, and then bringing it out to the world, I'm just having a blast doing that. And luckily, and I'm very happy, I should say, to get, you know, a lot of good testimonials too.

SPEAKER_02 34:53

Fantastic. All right. Well, thanks for joining us today. Thanks, Douglas, for being here with us. And thanks to everybody who joined us for this episode of Commander's Intent. If you have any questions, if you want to speak directly to me and you have questions for Douglas, I'm happy to pass them on and connect you. Go to asterisknow.com and I'll do that. Subscribe and follow the show, and together we'll become better decision makers for better results. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 35:19

So that's it for today's episode of Commander's Intent Podcast. Head on over to Apple Podcasts iTunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes will be entered in a grand prize drawing to win a $25,000 private exclusive leadership coaching package with Derek Oakes himself. So head on over to Commanders Intent Podcast.com and pick up a free copy of Derek's Leadership Guide and join us on the next episode.