CHRO Calendar Audit: Your Calendar Is Your Strategy

Send Jackson 90 days of your calendar and he'll tell you your real strategy — the one you fund with your hours, not the one in the board deck. Almost no CHRO has ever run a calendar audit on herself, and the gap between those two strategies is where enterprise contribution quietly disappears.

Jackson and Scott build the full method: four buckets, an outcome tagged to every meeting, and the two loops that make run work beat change work every time. Then they hand you a free tool to run it one meeting at a time.

Download the free Meeting X-Ray tool here.

What You'll Learn

• How to sort 90 days of blocks into four buckets — executing, managing and aligning, changing the work, unscheduled — and read the distribution honestly.
• Why a full calendar is a mandate problem, not a time management problem, and why those need different fixes.
• Why freed capacity refills with the same work: capacity isn't capability, and neither one is a mandate.
• The question to ask your CEO before you grade your own calendar — and what an operational answer tells you about your altitude.
• Why the avoided work gets scheduled first and protected like a board meeting.

Key Quotes

"Your strategy deck records intention. The calendar records behavior."

"When I get three unscheduled hours, I don't pick up the phone. I rebuild a workflow... it's avoidance that's wearing a productivity costume."

"Indispensable down there often makes you invisible up where you need to be."

Sources for Statistics Cited

• Interrupted every 2 minutes, 275 times a day; 60% of meetings ad hoc — Microsoft Work Trend Index: Breaking Down the Infinite Workday
• Only 9% of executives satisfied with their time; barely half say it matches priorities — McKinsey: Making Time Management the Organization's Priority

Listen Next

If this hit, listen next: The CEO Calls Them Indispensable. I Call Them Trapped (E115) Then: Your Work System Has No Owner (E134)

Transcript

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Send me 90 days of your calendar, and I'll tell you what your actual strategy is. The one you fund with your hours, not whatever your board deck says. Very few leaders ever look at that film, and today you're going to get to see it here.

Hey there, senior leader, and welcome to the Talent Sherpa Podcast. This is where senior leaders come to rethink how human capital really works. I'm your host, Jackson Lynch, and today I'm joined by my co-host, Scott Morris. He's a former CHRO with all this cardish deployment, the only executive I have ever met whose calendar includes a color-coded bathroom schedule. It's like Sheldon Cooper in real life. And he is the founder of Propulsion AI.

You know, Scott, over the last year we have circled one truth from about five different directions. The calendar episode, the trapped CHRO episode, we had Phil Kirschner on kind of talking about the run versus change work, and the episode on mandate clarity. And today we're going to try to pull all of it into one discipline: the calendar audit. I know. Keep listening. It's actually better than it sounds. Because for the first time in 154 episodes, we're going to leave a listener with a coworker instead of homework. More on that before we finish.

Yeah, I'm excited for what we're going to give to our audience today. And, you know, let me tell you, Jackson, why I think that this one is harder from the inside than it is from the outside. Because every block on your calendar got there for some kind of reason that felt legitimate at the time. Nobody schedules waste on purpose, and nobody is thoughtless when it comes to how they want to spend their day, or at least we don't believe so. But that's exactly why you can't see the pattern from inside the week. You need, as we call it, the film.

Now, hey, before we get going, let me do a shout-out. And this week's shout-out is for Kaleem in Pakistan. Kaleem, you're proof that this community runs well past our own borders and our own time zones. And we're grateful that you're in it. And that goes the same for anybody who is listening, whether you're from Asheville, North Carolina, or Dubai in the UAE. We're really glad that you showed up today.

You know what? While I've got you, just 30 seconds more, because I want you to think for a second about how you spent your time last week. How much of it was at the level that your title actually demands? Now, Jackson's created this thing called the CHRO Ascent Academy, and one of the graduates of that program recently put it, "I applied the thinking almost immediately after the close of the session." That's what Jackson's striving for. And this is what the Academy is really built for. It's closing the altitude gap session by session. Seats are limited. You should check it out. Everything you need is at mytalentsherpa.com.

Yeah, kicking off another cohort in early September for the fall. And Kaleem, thank you so much for joining us. This community is stretching farther than either of us ever expected, and it keeps growing because of listeners like you.

Okay, let's dive into this. Here's where I want everyone to start. Pull your last 90 days of your calendar and sort every block into one of four buckets. Executing, which is doing the work yourself. Managing execution and aligning the execution of others. Changing the work, which means redesigning how the work itself is being delivered or the different mandate across the organization. And then unscheduled time. Then tag every meeting with the outcome it was supposed to produce. And two flags will fall out almost immediately: meetings with no outcome attached to them at all, and outcomes eating a disproportionate share of your time while mapping to nothing that your boss is actually aligned with you on.

You know, Jackson, before you go any further on the calendar and on the specifics that we want to cover, go back a couple of steps and talk about the environment that the calendar lives in. How bad's the raw material?

Well, Microsoft's Work Trend Index analyzed telemetry from millions of Microsoft 365 users. And assuming they didn't use Cowork, they found the average employee is interrupted every two minutes during core hours, 275 times a day. Sixty percent of the meetings that they saw are ad hoc. They have no agenda, no lead time, which tells you how much of the average calendar was designed versus how much simply happened.

Now, then translate that for a CHRO. The default state of a senior calendar is accumulation, not allocation. Nobody's picking what goes on it intentionally. It just kind of piles up. And McKinsey's research on executive time found that only 9% of executives were satisfied with how they spend their time, and barely half said that their time matched their organization's priorities. So that research is a little older now, but I've run this audit with dozens of senior leaders in my own practice, and I can report that the number has not improved one bit.

I mean, I can personally testify to it. And you've seen what I do with my calendar. And the reason I started to do it was that I wanted an independent check. I know that just like everybody else, I'm prone to telling myself stories about what I've done and why it's important and justifying and all the things that we do because we're human beings and we're all subject to them. And so when you look at my calendar — and I know, because you make fun of me for the way I do it — but every block is color-coded, including the bathroom breaks, which I'm not going to talk to you about what color they are, but I'm assuming one is brown and one is yellow.

Is that well —

Like I said, I refuse to either confirm or deny. But, you know, when I look at it, it helps me make the case visually. I can just scan the week and I can see how I've laid out my time, where I'm spending my time, and that lets me course correct. So, you know, if we're making the case to the person who thinks that that level of planning is kind of deranged, or Sheldon Cooper, as you said in the open, the artifact here really does matter.

Well, I think it matters because it's the only leadership team artifact that doesn't lie to you, or at least try to spin you. Your strategy deck records intention. Your town hall records aspiration and maybe even inspiration occasionally. The calendar records behavior. When I say your calendar is your strategy, I mean the calendar reflects the strategy that you're actually running. Whether you choose to run it or not is inconsequential. It's an x-ray. And an x-ray has no bias. It has no interest in what you meant to do.

You hinted at this a second ago, and I want you to talk a little bit more about it for the audience. You built an agent that actually runs the audit on your calendar. In fact, it's one that I want you to give me, because I do it on my own visually. You've got an agent, which I think even adds an additional layer of truth because it's like having a third-party confirmation. You know, we call it watching the film. What did the film show you when you pointed it at yourself?

Nothing good. It shows that I might be a bit hypocritical in how I'm spending my time with my clients, which is why I built the agent itself. And that embarrassment is how I knew that it was working. So I ran it recently on my own calendar, and it wasn't fancy. It was just, hey, Claude, tell me what you think these meetings were. Look at my Fathom records, tell me what I accomplished during the time periods, and then give me a readout relative to my desired state of where I'm spending my time.

And what I found is I had real gaps in client engagement and business development. These are, by the way, two activities that most directly grow my business. Because when I get three unscheduled hours, I don't pick up the phone. I rebuild a workflow. And it feels like work, it is work, and it's also avoidance that's wearing a productivity costume. So the mirror told me something I did not want to hear, and it told me that I need to be more planful.

Well, you know what? We're all human and we all gravitate toward the work that feels good to us rather than the work that is necessarily essential for what it is that we're trying to accomplish. You did a tease earlier. I'm going to do a bigger one now. We built you something that we're going to give you at the end of this episode, which is why you need to stay tuned through the whole thing.

Jackson, what's the cost to the CHRO that doesn't focus on how they're spending their time?

Well, that's the trick, because it feels good. The business gets responsiveness instead of foresight, though. And that's the foresight and the planfulness that makes it work. The business gets a highly capable person applying an enterprise judgment to work that doesn't actually require that. And the category of work that only a CHRO can produce — which is around the CEO alignment, around succession depth, around incentive structure, around talent density, around how to smartly separate those things that can be done now from what can be improved later. The ability for us to look at the business through a talent lens and identify what we think is going to happen, why we think it's going to happen, and then do something about it. All of the constraint-based HR that we talked about a lot — it doesn't happen. And nobody notices because everything visible is getting done and everyone feels busy. The income statement, however, eventually notices. And the mandate that we bring to the table, it absolutely notices.

Well, you know, you and I have talked before, and I think it's relevant here, even though it populates our episodes. The head of HR is not the top HR person. It's a different job. It's a business job. And there's actually neuroscience behind why checking things off a list or having a busy calendar feels good to us. But the fact is we deliver value by having a steady hand on the tiller and making sure that the ship is directed in the right way.

Now, there are two assumptions that are holding this pattern in place. And the first one feels like a virtue, which is why I think it's so dangerous. And it's what I said a second ago: the assumption that a full calendar is proof of contribution that we're making. Every block on it is real. Somebody needed us, right? The issue was urgent. The meeting mattered. The CEO tells you that you're indispensable, and the positive reinforcement is actually the constraint. That's the false assumption. But being needed at the operating level and being consequential at the strategic level are two very, very different jobs. Indispensable down there often makes you invisible up where you need to be. And like I said, we did an entire episode on this. I think it was titled, correct me here, "The CEO Calls Them Indispensable. I Call Them Trapped." I think that's what we called it. And it hits a nerve with a lot of our listeners for a reason.

Yeah. What is the moment a leader actually feels that assumption crack, from your experience, Scott?

Well, I think it's a quiet one. You know, the strategy review where they realized that they contributed logistics, but not ideas. And you don't say that out loud, but many of us can say it to ourselves privately. Or a board session where succession comes up and we're presenting a slide instead of a point of view. You know, the work got done all year, but the influence never showed up. I think that's the moment the calendar stops feeling like proof and starts feeling like evidence.

I think that's exactly right. And let's talk about the second assumption, because I hear a version of this thing from leader after leader I coach. It doesn't matter where you are in the organization — HR, CEO, other C-suite member, someone lower in the organization. It's the same pattern. What is it?

Yeah, well, and it's a pattern that again comes from we are human. And it's not just happening in HR. It happens across the board, happens at the top level, at the bottom level. And it's deferral. I'll get to the important thing when things calm down a little bit. I'll do the strategic work when the tactical work cools off. I just have to get through this crisis. That feels responsible. You know, handle the urgent, earn the right to think.

Phil Kirschner, who you mentioned earlier, when we had him on, he really dismantled that on the show. And it's kind of stuck with me ever since, right? When capacity frees up, it doesn't always convert into different work. You know, it fills up with more of the same work a lot of times, unless we're very thoughtful about directing it someplace else. If a tool cuts your email time in half, then you wind up writing twice as many emails. That's not strategically different work, it's just more of the same. Freed capacity isn't capability, and neither one of those, by the way, is mandate. You know, the calendar opens up and the job stays the same unless you're being really thoughtful about it.

Yeah, and you do all that work up front. I think I saw something a long time ago, and it makes me smile every time I think about it: being human is the ability to say, "I'm going to work on that once this calms down next week," over and over until you die. And that makes me laugh because I think, honestly, I've probably felt that way at different points in my professional career as well. So let me push this to you then. What is the deferral cost when a leader is waiting for that calm that is unlikely to ever really come?

Time. Quarters. Right? Mostly, I think, that the change work — redesigning how the organization delivers outcomes — it's slow and it's ambiguous and it's frequently recursive. You don't just get there in a straight line, and it's structurally unrewarded. You know, a leader can defer the important work for maybe even a couple of years and collect nothing but praise, because you're getting things done and you're checking things off the list. But the organization is paying the price in a currency that never appears on anybody's review: the operating model that they never built.

Look, I know we want to talk about what we do about it. Before we do, I want us to talk a little bit about the thing behind the thing behind the thing, because I think there are two loops that keep this pattern running, no matter how self-aware the leader really is.

The first is the evaluation default loop. A capable leader assesses, and that assessment surfaces risk. Risk produces urgency. Urgency produces involvement, and involvement produces more assessment. And it feels like rigor and it functions like management, but the function exerts a gravitational pull on your time. And that pull is structural. It's a black hole, it is gravity, it's hard to get out. It's not doing it maliciously, it is doing it nonetheless.

Yeah. I mean, and I know you've been subject to it, so have I. What's the second loop?

It's pretty simple, Scott. Run work and change work, they live on the same calendar. They compete for the same hours. And the contest is rigged. Run work is visible, urgent, and consequential. Change work is, as you mentioned before, slow, ambiguous, and underrewarded. So when the two of them are competing, the system doesn't deliberate. It defaults. And nobody inside the loop is doing anything wrong, which is exactly why that loop persists. It goes to the urgent.

And just for clarity's sake with the audience, we're not saying don't do anything tactical, right? We're saying you have to — the first step is you have to be aware that these loops are running. And willpower alone doesn't always fix it. Why?

Well, because a promise isn't an appropriate counterweight. The pull, I think, is structural. So the interruption has to be structural as well. So it has to be something outside your own intentions, your own self-discipline. Something that shows you the pattern and then forces a decision. And that's why I think the audit is really helpful.

So, Scott, we have the buckets, we have the assumptions, we even have the loops. So you are — and I mean this with all of love in my heart — the most planful human being I know. And I audit my calendar after the fact, like a coroner, and you do it well in advance. So what's the frame that changes how a leader can see their own calendar?

Well, first of all, thanks for the compliment. And I try to be, but you know, you and I are both systems thinkers, and I think that's why we have similar perspectives on some of these things. I think that the frame is that there are two legitimate operating systems for a calendar, and the real failure mode is running neither of them, right?

The first is prospective, and you said that a second ago, and that one's kind of mine. I like to plan the week out because in part what I'm looking for is: how often do I make changes? How often am I allowing things to creep in where I have to move blocks on the calendar? That tells me something. It's signal about my own behavior, my own willpower, et cetera. But it's coded now into a system. Nothing gets on my calendar without a named outcome. And I'm thinking about that against the buckets where I have to produce a result. And the color coding, which people love to — including you — make fun of, is just an enforcement mechanism for me. Because I plan out my personal time, I plan out the things that I know are going to be interruptions, like getting up to get food or whatever, and I can see where those are visually by color coding the calendar. So my calendar doesn't reflect my strategy. It is an attempt on my part to employ my strategy and to ensure that I'm focused on the right things. And so before the week starts, the strategy has already made scheduling decisions for me based on what I have to achieve, or what I want to tell myself that I accomplished at the end of the week.

And the great news is your 173-pound Great Dane, Coffee Bean — which might be the most awesome dog I've ever come across in my life — they have been able to learn your scheduling technique, too. When they can go out on the back porch and when they have to go downstairs and where they can drink water. It's amazing how well you have that dog kind of learned discipline.

I wish that was true. But it's not, and that's one of those things. But then I would see, like, if I'm constantly moving the calendar, I know I better get out of working at my house, right? I better be figuring out something else. And for those of you who don't know, Jackson and I have had the opportunity to work in person a couple of times. We're in different cities, but Jackson came to the house and he got to see the dog, the 177-pound dog, for the first time, and that was pretty comical.

But hey, look, I want to point out something here for everybody, and that is that the color coding is not the discipline, right? The outcome gate is the discipline. You can't — or I guess I should say, if you don't name what a meeting produces, you know.

Yeah. Look, the color coding allows you to see it in a tapestry and a mosaic way of where you're spending your time towards those things. For me, that's how I use it. Again, I do it as an autopsy after the fact. But if I can learn it, and if Coffee Bean can learn it — because a 173-pound Great Dane does whatever they decide they want to go do, and he seems to have gotten in with this — the question is, can we all learn this? Is it a learned discipline? Because I know plenty of people who try color coding and abandon it within weeks. And I think it could be because of the colors, not the where you're trying to define the outcomes that are from what part of the calendar. So just talk to me about kind of how you think about that.

Well, so first of all, like again, I think I would downplay the color coding. The real discipline — and it does take a couple of weeks of effort — is getting everything on the calendar. And I put everything on the calendar because once you have it, that's like saying, you know, I want the complete data set versus I want partial data, right? I don't let blocks be empty on the calendar, because then when I do look retrospectively — and I do — I know how I used the time. So I plan prospectively, but I ensure that if I get up, and we'll use the dog again, if I get up to take him out, I put that on the calendar. Because then when I look retrospectively, I can see that's how I used the time. And then I can make decisions about: am I allocating correctly? And if I'm not getting the results I want, what do I need to change in my own behavior to make that happen?

But let me push back on that. Because I guess my question is, what makes either system honest? Because I can imagine auditing my own calendar and grading myself on a curve if I do reasonably well. So how do you know you're winning?

Well, I mean, the first test is the outcome, right? That's the test for anything. Are you getting the outcomes that you want? So that presupposes: have you taken the time to think about what those outcomes are? That goes back to other episodes that you and I have done, right? Are you operating at the altitude that you need to operate with your principal constituent, who is the CEO? And if you are, then you should be able to define the outcomes that are critically important. And then you can evaluate: are you getting those outcomes or not?

And then you can do two things. And honestly, I don't think, Jackson, that it matters whether you're operating prospectively or retrospectively. You can look in both of those lenses. You can still look and say, prospectively, what do I need to do in order to get those outcomes? And then retrospectively, what have I done, and did it deliver on those outcomes? But you're using a fixed point in space, which is: what do you need to produce for the business?

So what I'm hearing is the sequence is mandate, then audit, then force scheduling — whether you do it in advance or after the fact, it's up to kind of your individual peccadilloes. So to me, that sounds like a coaching engagement. Can a leader actually run it by themselves?

Yes, probably. How well do they do it? I think poorly, because we're all human. And that's what I mean — you and I are big fans of coaches. I think a part of this is about the calendar, but a part of it's about your mandate, too. And having somebody who can sit outside and be what I call productively skeptical, sitting across from you, looking and pushing on: hey, is that a priority? Hey, wait a minute. Yes, you can schedule it. Yes, you can put it on the calendar. That doesn't fix anything. Is it worth your time? That's a harder question to answer on your own. And I think that brings us to kind of what we built and that we're going to hand to you in a moment.

Yeah. So here's how I think we move on this, starting as early as Monday morning. So play one: I think you pull the film. You export your last 90 days of your calendar and you sort every block into those four buckets I mentioned before — executing, managing and aligning, changing the work, and unscheduled. Tag each meeting with the outcome that it produced, and then flag every meeting where you can't name one. And this is going to take probably about an hour. And it's the highest information hour available to you this quarter, because it converts a feeling of busyness into a distribution that you can evaluate. It can reinforce you doing all the right things, or it can give you a distribution that you argue with.

Yeah, and you know what? One of the things when you do that — if you recognize that you're not very good about getting all of the details on the calendar, start now to do that. You're still making progress. You're just making progress out for a couple of weeks where you have a full data set.

Play number two: get the answer key before you grade the test, so to speak, right? Sit with your CEO and make sure that you are being direct in your question. What are the problems that I should be solving over the next 18 months in terms that matter to this business? I think go one degree better than that and bring the problems in and let your CEO push back or support, right? Write the answers down and bounce your bucket distribution against that — the four buckets that Jackson was just talking about. If the answer comes back operational, then you've figured out a mandate problem that you didn't realize before, which is more valuable than a time problem, because the mandate can be renegotiated. You can get re-centered. If the answer to bouncing your priorities against those four buckets comes back as strategic, now you know exactly what your calendar owes you.

That's right. And play three is: schedule the avoided work first. That's what I started doing. The audit is going to show you a gap, and the gap is usually the work you dislike, or you don't get as much joy of, or doesn't create that immediate dopamine hit. Time's not normally the problem. Mine was business development. I don't like asking people for business. I way prefer it when you call me and say, "I'd like to work with you." Which — hint — if you'd like to work with me, I'm available.

But if you just did business —

I think I just did. But look, I think the right way to go about it is: block that work before the week starts filling up with everything else. And put it in the hours that you do your best work. Like, I do some things better in the morning, I do other things better in the afternoon. It's really important that I match my day to the kind of work where I do my best work. And then you have to protect it the way you protect a board meeting. Because boards don't get rescheduled because somebody else wants 15 minutes, or because you've thought about, you know, I can rewrite that LinkedIn post because it's a B-plus, I want to move it to an A-minus. You wouldn't skip the board meeting for that. Don't do that to yourself. You should have the same self-discipline, because ultimately your mandate depends on it.

So here's play four, and it involves the thing that we've built for the audience, which we're calling a coworker. It's a skill that you can load into your chosen artificial intelligence platform. Everything that you just heard is the calendar x-ray, the full method that we think you should be executing to ensure that you're directing your time to the highest order priorities, right? And that calendar x-ray works over the whole 90 days. But the whole 90 days is made up of individual choices, right? The 90 days is the big picture, and honestly, we thought it was a lot to take on at once. So consistent with our focus on small things that you can start to do right now, we built you something that starts small.

It's a free skill. It's called Meeting X-Ray, and it runs this exact same discipline, one meeting at a time. And the next meeting that you know warrants an hour of time, you can try it with. It's going to interview you first. It's going to ask you a couple of quick questions about what you're actually on the hook for and what you and your boss are aligned on, and it may push back on you if your answers get vague — that's a pattern straight out of a book that Jackson and I both like called The AI-Enabled Leader. And then it's going to put that one meeting on the table and it's going to ask the only question that matters: does this meeting earn its place, or is it costing you time to work on what your mandate depends on?

And here's the honest part. Sometimes it finds the problem isn't the meeting at all — or at least that's our intention. It's that there really isn't a defined strategy or set of outcomes underneath it. That one is bigger than a calendar. And it's exactly the kind of work that Jackson does with leaders, and that I'm always happy to — I don't do consulting work, Jackson does do consulting work — but we're always happy to comment on. You can drop us an email at mytalentsherpa.com. You can download the Meeting X-Ray for Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini, and we hope you get some value out of it. It's a good tool, and we hope it reveals some stuff to you.

Yeah, and to be real clear, we're going to set up a landing page on mytalentsherpa.com and it'll have the Meeting X-Ray on it. You put in your email, and we'll take that, we'll send you a copy of the skill that you can play with. And the neat thing is, my friend Scott built this. He's an AI guy. He's created several different layers to it. I've played with it, I've applied it to a couple things that I've worked on. It's like, well, I hadn't thought about that in quite that way. And it allows me, even if I keep the meeting, I now am much sharper in what I'm doing in that meeting. And I think that was an unintended benefit that I hadn't really thought about when we came up with this idea. And when I say we came up with the idea, of course, I mean when Scott came up with the idea.

That's so not true. There is nothing that's one-sided in our show.

That's fair, fair enough. But you know what is really one-sided? That is the Talent Sherpa summary that Scott always does. And as you know, he always says, "I attended 41 meetings last week, produced zero decisions, and scheduled a meeting for Friday so that we can align on why there are so many meetings."

I don't know why you say this, but you do. I've literally never said it, and I don't know where you come up with them.

All right, here's my summary. One: pull the last 90 days of your calendar and sort every single block into one of four categories — executing, managing and aligning, changing the work, and your unscheduled time. Tag every meeting with its outcome. The meetings with no outcome are your first cut.

Two: a full calendar isn't proof of your contribution. And freed-up time doesn't always convert immediately into strategic work. Capacity isn't capability, neither one is a mandate. You have to be thoughtful about it.

Three: two loops keep you stuck. They're loops that we're all subject to. Assessment that hardens into management, and run work that beats change work in every scheduling contest. Willpower doesn't break that up. It's a structural loop. So you're going to have to have structure that breaks it up.

Fourth and finally: plan the film like I do, or watch it like Jackson does. Both of those work. I think they work together. Neither works without the answer key from your CEO. You have to have the altitude, you have to have the mandate. And if you don't have it, you've got to go get it. When you're ready to act on it, the Meeting X-Ray skill that you're going to find at mytalentsherpa.com is going to keep you honest about it one meeting at a time.

And we're going to do it for free, because I think it's that important. And I keep saying we need to audit our calendars — put your money where your mouth is. We built it for you. Here you go.

Exactly.

And when we say we built it, what we mean, of course, is Scott built it. But there is one thing I want you to carry out of this conversation. Here it is: the calendar already knows your strategy. And after today, and thanks to Scott, you have no excuse for not evaluating what yours is.

And that's a wrap. I want to say thank you so much for tuning into the Talent Sherpa Podcast. This is where senior leaders come to rethink how human capital really works. And as we say down in Texas, this is so much fun to do with all y'all.

You know what? If you like today's episode, do us a favor. And right now, while you're thinking about it, hit the like button. Or better yet, subscribe to the podcast. That'll give you every episode delivered to you. And it helps us spread the podcast to other senior leaders who need to hear the same content that you're finding valuable. You can leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or YouTube. We're across all of them. It benefits the community. You'd be helping us out, and it's free and it helps us reach other senior leaders. So take a second right now and do that for us.

Appreciate that. And I want to take a second to talk about Scott's company. Propulsion AI is workforce intelligence for private equity. Everything we said today about outcomes, it applies to CEOs, CHROs, and below in the organizations, too. Most value creation plans die somewhere between the board deck and the individual calendar. Propulsion is turning the plan into org strategy, cascading it into OKRs, and then reporting out progress against the plan right down to the metrics, so that every person's week is going to continue to be mapped to the thesis. It's really good stuff. You can learn more at the very cleverly named www.getpropulsion.ai.

It's all delivered by artificial intelligence teammates who feel like they are a part of the team because they're built to be a part of the team. And you know what? If today's audit is going to show you a full calendar of work that your CEO never asked for, then the fix starts with the answer key. Jackson built something called the Mandate Protocol, which is a five-day sprint that puts your authority, your scorecard, and your altitude on paper and helps you confirm it with your CEO. It's $297, uses the same system that he works with his consulting clients, worth every penny of it. You can check it out at mytalentsherpa.com/mandate-protocol. Check it out.

Yeah, and one of the neat things about this is if you go through the entire sprint and you do all the work, and within the first two weeks you're like, this wasn't worth it — no problem. I'll give you all the money back. All the risk is on me. So far, I've had zero people take me up on that offer.

So I just want to say thanks again, Scott, for today's episode and for building that really awesome skill. And thanks to everyone who's listening. Until next time, keep raising the bar. Pull 90 days and ask your calendar what it knows. And keep on climbing.