The Talent Magnet: How Your Culture Attracts or Repels Top Talent | Joe Bogdan

What if the biggest driver of your organization’s success… isn’t strategy, compensation, or even leadership titles but culture?

In Episode 34, Frank Zaccari sits down with Joe Bogdan, Human Resources executive and culture strategist, to unpack what it really takes to attract, engage, and retain top-tier talent in today’s unpredictable environment.

Joe brings a candid, real-world perspective on why some organizations consistently attract high performers while others quietly push them away.

In this conversation, you’ll learn:

• Why culture not compensation is the ultimate differentiator 
• The subtle leadership behaviors that drive top talent out the door 
• How tolerating mediocrity erodes performance and morale 
• What high-performing cultures do differently to win and keep the best people 
• Practical, actionable strategies to build a workplace people want to be part of 

Because here’s the reality:

👉 Culture isn’t what you say it’s what you allow
👉 The fastest way to lose your best people is to tolerate the wrong ones
👉 High performers choose environments not just opportunities

If you’re serious about building a resilient, high-performing organization this episode delivers the blueprint.

Connect with Joe Bogdan:
📧 Email: joebogdan@gmail.com
🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jybogdan/

#Leadership #WorkplaceCulture #TalentManagement #HumanResources #EmployeeExperience #HighPerformance

Transcript

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Have you ever felt stuck in pain, loss, or failure? Wondering how to rise when life knocks you down again? Then Bounce Back is for you. So gather your resilience, hold tight to hope, and get ready to reimagine what's possible in your life. So here's your host, Frank Sakari. Welcome to Bounce Back in Business and Life, ladies and gentlemen. Let's think about something. Your culture isn't a slogan. Your culture is a singing. In the world we live in today, with all the turbulence that's going on, your culture is either attracting top talent or it's quietly pushing it out the door. In this episode today, we're going to sit down with Joe Bodden. He's a seasoned HI professional, he's an executive, and we're going to unpack what it really takes to build and sustain a workplace where people want to stay, they want to grow, and they're going to perform at their best. Because here's the truth, folks top talent has options. The word travels fast and it gets out there into the industry. And in certain times, your culture is going to become your greatest competitive advantage. So here's the question Is your organization a magnet that attracts top talent, or is it a warning sign that repels top talent? So let's meet Joe. He's an Air Force veteran, corporate HR executive, an author, and a podcast host. Joe, welcome to Bounce Back in Business and Life. Thank you so much, Frank. It's an absolute honor to share some space with you. And I know we've had some conversations in the past. And man, they've always been so enlightening. Grateful for this opportunity to be on the show. Yeah, this is going to be very interesting because everybody has an opinion about what human resources and human capital really is. But before we get into it, Joe, share with the listeners around the world a short overview on your journey. How did you get here to this position? Yeah, no, I appreciate that opportunity. As Frank mentioned, I uh am a HR business partner right now for a corporate 200 company where I advise business leaders on all things people related. But the way I got here was I started in the United States Air Force. As you mentioned, I'm a veteran 26 years ago now. Um I joined the United States Air Force, started in the engineering career field. I was literally a wrench turner. Then, you know, as we naturally grow into leadership positions, uh went from a shop foreman to an operations leader. We naturally kind of become HR business partners in the enlisted side of things, where I advised my commander on all things workforce development, workforce planning, readiness, and esprit de corps, morale, welfare, good order, and discipline. And I'm really just to ensure that our force was ready to take care of the mission and they were taking care of themselves. That was my favorite job while I was in the military. I did do some career broadening where I'm I branched out and did uh some social services. Every service has some version of social services assigned to really just approach the challenges that come with being in the profession of arms and also to help family members navigate through those challenges as well. Did not think that was a good fit for me. I really uh when I had an opportunity to kind of drop into my lap, I had an old first sergeant call me. And a first sergeant is kind of for those that might not be aware, it's also kind of an HR professional that more uh relates towards the employee relations type play area, dealing with um good order and discipline, but also advising on legal issues to the commander. I had an old first sergeant call me and ask me if I wanted to work at the Airman and Family Readiness Center. Um, now it's called a military family readiness center on Air Force bases. And I really didn't even know military work there. I was like, what am I gonna do there? And he told me, you're gonna make sure that airmen and their families are ready for deployments and everything else in between. And I was like, all right, maybe that sounds interesting. And then he told me I'd be working with families quite a bit, independence. And I was like, that is not me. I was not interested, but had another mentor reach out and tell me that, hey, let's go over there, take a look. And she advised me that I really needed to do some career broadening and get out of my comfort zone, which it was an absolute blessing. It was a hinge moment in my career and really helped me align with my meaning and purpose. While I was there, I also gained some key leadership attributes, such as kindness, generosity, curiosity, and patience. I did not have a lot of those as a young engineer in the service. Really helped build my leadership skills up, returned back to the career field, led upwards of four to 600 people at different units, um, overseeing basically all of the functions that would maintain a military installation or a small city. Maybe it's your HVAC, your uh plumbing, your electrical systems, high voltage, low voltage, as well as construction management and explosive ordnance, firefighting, and all of that to just maintain an installation and keep it safe. At towards the end of my career, I was in Korea on my third tour in Korea with my wife. We were living our best life. It had all these plans to travel all of Asia. And about three months into that two-year tour, I got a cryptic Facebook message saying that the chief master served of the Air Force wants to know if you want to come to the building. I thought to myself, the building means the Pentagon, and I don't think so. But once again, I took a leap of faith. I ended up being the chief of enlisted force development, meaning I was overseeing all the workforce development for a 400 plus thousand force across the globe. And after I finished that, I decided to go ahead and retire, test myself in a corporate environment. And here I am as an HR business partner, uh advising, I think about 12 different business leaders across 15 different accounts across the country. A great job. I love it, totally fulfilling. And we really talk about culture quite a bit. So I think I'm really going to enjoy this conversation with you. Outstanding. Now, Joe, it's really interesting because human capital HR people management involves everything you just said. It's not just you didn't show up on time today or all that nonsense. When I was coming up, HR was always considered a roadblock to growth. Okay. They were the order prevention department. Anything that didn't go well, you blamed on HR if you were a line manager, right? So how do you change that perspective? I think that HR is a giant umbrella for one thing. You know, I think that we really need to educate people because when they think of HR, I think a lot of people have various perspectives. Some people might see them as roadblocks. I'll be 100% honest with you, Frank. Sometimes HR can be a roadblock. Uh, you know, they really can at times. Um, but it depends on where they are and how that person really interacts with the workforce. I often say that, you know, as HR professionals, we can either be transactional and just do those things, or that just come to us and we'd be reactive and use policy sometimes and not help solve a problem, or we can be transformational and utilize policy and leverage policy and the lines in between policy to help solve problems, whether that's for people or the business, and they should both be, you know, it's a symbiotic relationship. Um, I think changing that perspective, first, I think we need to educate people on what HR really is. And then we have to behave aligned with that. As an HR business partner, I think human resources obviously that's the beginning of my title, but business partner is also part of my title. Um, I think what value I feel like I can bring is the fact that I actually was on the line at some point. I was leading people. I know how challenging it can be to manage a workforce and also, you know, meet business objectives. In my view, I think really listening, meeting people where they're at, whether that's an employee with a pay issue and they're not getting the support they need from payroll, where the business leader who is dealing with employee issues, maybe they have trouble motivating them. They have trouble really creating an engaging environment. And those are places where I step in and I partner with them. And I think that's the other part where I think we oftentimes forget HR business partners, we forget the partnering part. You know, we're here to partner with people to help solve problems. Absolutely. I worked with a number of corporations after I got out and we sold my company, and that was a big issue was it was it was a lot of mandating. Right? Mandating doesn't work, right? We were both in the Air Force, it doesn't work, even in the military. It doesn't work right and one of the complaints that I hear a lot from executives was about recruiting and retention. Again, they want to mandate okay, but they focus on job skills which you can teach rather than character issues. So, how do you go into these executive levels of learning managers who I want this skill, this is what I want, and show maybe there's a better way. How do you show them that? Well, one thing, you know, I'm a data person, and when I can pull up people leaving our team, whether that's one specific account or the company in general, when I look at the people that we have to involuntarily separate from our team, it's rarely, Frank. I mean, it happens sometimes. We have a skills mismatch, and we can even talk about interviewing too, because sometimes I think that we have problems interviewing in general. I say us as people, right? Not just uh any specific company. But I would say that the majority of reasons why we involuntarily terminate somebody out of our organization is not necessarily a skills mismatch. It happens every now and then, but it's not a competency issue, it's a character issue, whether that's misconduct or it's like just not being able to like managers not able to manage other people and work with people and work on cross-functional teams and have initiative and tenacity. You know, they're more character issues than they are competence issues. And what drives me insane, and I love you that you brought this up, is when managers create job requisitions and they create a job description, and they don't even address any of the behaviors we want people to exude, right? We have our own values and we have our own specific behaviors in my company that we're looking for, yet we don't often put those things in a job description. You know, we can't even point back to a job description that somebody applied to to say, hey, this is what we expected from you, because we didn't even put it in there. Interpersonal skills, respectful uh conversations, you know, being able to be client-facing and present information in a way. We focus on whether or not they're a great engineer, whether or not they're great at Excel spreadsheets, you know. Exactly. Yeah, these things. And then we don't really focus on those other things. Um, one way I can show executives how important that is is I can pull the data and show we've terminated 40 people in the last year, and 38 of them have some type of misconduct type issue. A lot of times you'll see that if you're terminating people more for competence issues, then you have a different problem. You probably have not either not identified what skills you're looking for, or you have a hard time identifying whether or not people have those skills because usually that part we get right. We get the competency part. We tend to fail on the character part. I agree. I agree. Another reason I hear Joe is a lot of turnover, very high turnover rates is that onboarding new employees or promoting people into managing. All right, I worked with some companies and they basically walk in and say, here's manual, read this. And they expect you to hit the ground running after you're reading a book and there's not very little interaction. We used to call that fire hose training. How do you suggest you make that a valuable experience where people want to stay? I would say that onboarding is such a critical factor on whether or not people want to stay, especially that first year, right? I mean, we measure how much turnover we're having, how many people are voluntarily leaving, that attrition rate, that volunteer attrition rate within that first year. And that's a direct result of your onboarding. And I actually say onboarding starts at creating the job requisition. Like, let's be clear about the expectations that this role has. I've seen so many copy and paste job descriptions just because they want to get somebody's butt in the seat, and they haven't really thought through whether or not that really represents what the person will be doing. So I really think that that's critical because I am a full believer that the root of disappointment and suffering comes from unmet expectations. And we don't clearly articulate the expectations, then the employee experience is bad. And so is the business experience from the person hiring. I think that's vitally important. But focusing on onboarding not just as a check-to-block, but making it an experience. I think that's so important. There's a book by um Chip and Dan Heath called The Power of Moments. And I remember in that book, it really changed my view on what onboarding really is. I'll just share this, Frank. When I was in the military, I remember coming to a base and just getting dropped off off the plane. And then nobody came to get me. And I was trying to figure out where my work was. And if you're overseas, that can be challenging, right? You're just trying to figure out where you are. And then you get there and they're like, oh, I didn't know you were supposed to be here today. I didn't realize you were coming today. You know, so that's one like extreme of just showing up to work on your first day. Terrible experience. That's gonna leave a taste in your mouth, right? For a while. The other piece is I remember showing up to an installation. Somebody came to pick me up at the airport. They took me to my hotel room while I was looking for housing. When I got into my hotel room, there was a basket of goodies. There was even a sign that said beers in the fridge. You know, I mean, whatever it is. Like this experience, I felt like they actually not only knew I was coming, they were waiting for me to come. And they're happy that I'm here. You know, and they really went that extra mile. Now, I'm not expecting all of that every time I return somewhere, but I think having the mindset of when someone shows up to work their first day, what kind of experience are you creating for them? Are they gonna feel seen, heard, valued, you know, when they when they show up? In that book, Power of Moments, I remember they talked about the John Deere experience. And I don't know if the John Deere experience is like that now. I really don't. But in the book, they represented it that what if you show up to work and your name's on the marquee and it says welcome on your first day. What if we bring you up to your cubicle or wherever your office or whatever that is, and then we have like a little John Deere little truck on your desk welcoming you, you have a welcome card and you're logging in. Now, most of the times what happens is we take you around to all the people that you're gonna work with. It's disrupting them while they're doing something. You feel awkward, they feel awkward, you're having a conversation, they're checking the block that they met you, and then you move to the next person. And that whole first morning, you're just walking around, learning where the coffee maker is, and you're interrupting people while they're working. But what if the scenario was instead you're at your office getting your computer set up and doing all that stuff, and then people are coming in 15, 20 minute blocks to come see you. You don't even have a work set up yet, so you're not being interrupted, and they're actually scheduled to come see you. So it was built into their schedule. Now you have a meaningful conversation. And then, you know, that onboarding process is just so much more thoughtful. And I really think that when we see that onboarding process as a critical retention tool from the beginning, if we really value it like that and we treat it like this experience, then that is going to set the tone for that person's entire career. Or we can set that tone like, oh, we forgot you were coming, or oh, it's a pain that you're here. We really need you, but uh, we got all this stuff going on, and then we don't really train you well enough and all that. And by the way, we're gonna expect you to like right out the box be performing right away, which nobody does. I don't care how skilled you are, that's not happening, right? So I just think it's so important. I agree with you. My first duty station in the Air Force, I came to the base and you take the bus and you get to the base, and then uh you're in the BAQ, right? Because you just got there, you don't know where you're going. And then the country went on on an alert of some sort. I don't remember what the crisis was at the time, but it was during the Vietnam War. And everybody reports your duty station. I just got there. I don't even know where I'm supposed to go. So I walk up and say, Where am I supposed to go? And I said, And they said, Your duty station. What's that? It said, now you're lost. Does anybody know what the hell's going on here? One of those issues, and and it has an impact on you. I also see it with people being promoted, somebody moving into a manager role that wasn't a manager before. They're already in a company, right? So you're not onboarding with the company, but how do you move them into that new type of a role? Yeah, that's so important. And before we even get into the onboarding piece, I think we have to promote the right people. And you know what frustrates me quite a bit is we talk about it quite a bit, you know. I think about the bumper sticker versus the behavior, right? Like, what are we actually, what's on the wall, the values that we share? And then what are we actually doing in actual execution of the business objectives? And this is like probably universal to most companies, at least big companies. You know, we promote people too often for their past performance and not enough on their future potential. And what I mean by that is, you know, we sit there and we're like, all right, you are an awesome technician, clearly. And then also you want to raise, we're kind of running up against, you know, a barrier here. So the next logical step for you is to promote you to become a people manager. And going from a wrench turner or a technical expert to a people manager isn't a smooth transition for most people unless they've shown already, you know, that potential. But we get scared of looking at potential because people are like, well, that's kind of subjective. And I was like, Yeah, that's why you're in the seat. You have experience, you have intuition that's developed from that experience and exposure to things. So you need to like actually embrace some of that subjectivity and identify the potential. Now, does this person have mental agility? Do they have the adaptability and flexibility to take on more capacity? Do they actually have interpersonal skills? Do they have some of those leadership traits that are responsible? And then looking at the job description they're going to walk into versus the job description they were in, are these skills that they have the potential to have if we train them? Or are we just literally going off of their performance reviews on their past job description? And we call it the Peter principle, you know, you we promote people to incompetence all the time. And then they're miserable and they affect the entire organization. So I think really that manager onboarding once again starts at is this even the right person for that role? Right? Is it just a natural next step and they don't have the skills? Or is it like are they really the right person to be? Exactly. I interviewed Dr. uh Edward Hess, so PhD at the Darden School of Virginia. He's a futurist. And one of the things he said is almost exactly what you said, we're promoting the wrong people. Now he said we need a track for those individual performers where we're not capping them at a salary level. That's got to be adjusted. But he said the managers are gonna have to be facilitators and collaborators, and not every individual performer has that skill. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, that's exactly true. And I've found that the most effective organizations have tracks, that individual contributor track that can continue to grow, you know, with those skills and maybe those special certifications. Uh, and in my company, we call it the professional track. And then typically those are going to be your people that are individual contributors that have certifications and maybe finance, human resources, maybe even a legal, and it makes sense. And they may manage like a small team, one or two people, but and you know, as they progress. And then we have a management track where you're advancing, but they overlap when it comes to pay scales and it makes sense. Where eventually the individual contributor track is going to cap out versus a management track because you know, if you're gonna be the CEO, you're gonna be like managing large groups of people, right? So it makes sense, but it's not gonna be capped so low that you would never want to stay in a professional track. So we got to understand how that works out. And to your point, once you become a manager though, like to your original question, how do you onboard them? Well, I would say that what I've seen typically in organizations is even the ones that have a great learning and development team, is that we create what I call the uh the Cheesecake Factory menu of learning options out there. And there's so many things you're like, I don't know what I'm supposed to take. There's like, and they're good courses, you know, if you take them. There's some of them are like, you know, you're actually being taught by somebody like Frank, or you're actually doing some self-paced courses. But there's so many things out there that looks like the Cheesecake Factory menu, and you're like, I don't even know what to pick, you know, and you're just picking random stuff. You're often disappointed because maybe you picked a course that you weren't ready for yet, but there's not a pathway. Now, when we were in the military, we had typically, depending on what iteration it was, we had to go to some type of leadership school before we were responsible for another human being. That could range from anywhere, depending on when you were in the service, between three to six weeks where you're going through this course. Now, I wouldn't say any corporate environment is going to be able to give you a five-week course before you manage somebody, but there should at least be some connective tissue in the courses that they take. Because what happens is if Frank takes a leadership course because it's a Cheesecake Factory menu, and then I take a handful of other courses, the company is getting a choose your own adventure when it comes to management styles and management approaches, right? And even within the same business line, one person may have a total different management experience than somebody else because they were taught different things as they were addressed. So I know I'm working. Pretty hard with my team and my learning and development team to develop that pathway. And that comes from understanding, hey, what's the biggest need? What are you seeing on the ground where your managers are needing help on? A lot of times it's going to be performance management issues, hiring and firing, change management, you know, these things that we really need them to understand and have a baseline of understanding across the management team. And then you can give them the Cheesecake Factory menu to grow on that, you know, some of that professionalism to continue to develop. But most places, I would say, don't have anything. They just give you a person and say, figure it out. Exactly. Exactly. And a lot of the complaints that I hear, particularly in union shops, is they're not following their own rules. So part of the education process to me would appear making sure people understand these are the guys you have to do these things. You can't let this slip. Right. Is that part of the education if somebody moves into a manager's role that you have to spend time with? Yeah, I would say that absolutely. There's got to be some policy. There's another piece that I would say that, you know, is critical to any leadership and management position is yeah, understand the policy and also understanding what risk mitigation looks like. You know, those type of things, because when you're working in an environment, and Frank, we we live in a litigious world right now. And I've seen it where managers, because they just didn't know what they didn't know, made a decision and it ended up costing $90,000 on a sale because they didn't know that they couldn't tell somebody they couldn't have a reasonable accommodation. You know, they didn't know that the person was eligible for a leave of absence and you shut it down without any authority to do so and you didn't reach out to HR to find out. I think that, you know, there's got to be a baseline of understanding of laws, rules, employee laws for the state that you're in. And I'm not expecting that you're gonna be the subject matter expert on that stuff because that's what HR is there for, right? To be able to help walk you through that. But you have to have a baseline that that's a thing. Like, I mean, I'm sure there's managers out there that don't even know what reasonable accommodation means or leave of absence really is. So you need to know that it's a thing. Because if you don't even know it's a thing, you don't know what you don't know and you don't know what to ask. And you don't know that you got to reach out to somebody if something, you know, a flag comes up. I would say that you know, there's got to be some type of baseline knowledge of policies and and how to execute those things. And then on the other side of that is after you're not sure, call somebody. You know who you need to call, right? Exactly. Let me check. Yeah. Let me see how this works. Let's shift gears a little bit, Joe. You work in uh in major real estate organizations, there's a lot of mergers and acquisitions that are going on here. I was with uh one of the worst acquisition mergers in the history of mergers, which was ATT when they bought NCR disaster. 70 to 90 percent of mergers don't deliver on promise, right? And it wasn't because the strategy was wrong, a lot of it was the culture. You've got a number of mergers. How do you determine should we even do this merger? You know, that's a critical step that I think is skipped pretty often is thinking about whether or not the merger makes sense. You know, usually we see the dollar signs that could potentially arise from a merger. I think that understanding what the values are and really understanding, even like, okay, so is this a merger or is this a takeover? You know, because there's a difference, right? I mean, mergers are probably way more difficult. So mislabeling something is a little it can could be disastrous right from the beginning. Because if you say something's a merger, in reality, one company is just completely taking over the other one and is saying that, hey, you have to align with our values, right? Then I think that's not really a merger. That's uh like we're taking over and we're buying you out, right? And if you're doing that, then I think that it's very important that when you have incumbents in the role that you want to keep because there's so much tacit knowledge in the positions there, right? You want to try to find them, right? But you have to take the time to, you know, really interview and explain to people what the culture in which they're going into, what are the values of the organization that they're choosing to stay on with. And then also getting to know them to see if they really align with that. Now that's really difficult and basically what we'd consider an expansion transition type role because people are like you're speeding to get people into C's. You're trying to speed to get this uh merger or takeover completed as quick as possible. And a lot of times you're gonna find out, you know, later on that 30% of your force really isn't aligned with your, you know, I'm just throwing an arbitrary number out there, right? There's gonna be a percentage of your force that you just took on that just doesn't align. And I think you have to account for that because you're speeding to get there and you kind of need to at times that you're gonna have some retention issues, you know, as you go on. You're definitely gonna have some attrition. And that's something that you know you can have as an acceptable number, but I think if you have an acceptable number of what that would look like, then you're gonna try to do your best to really align to make sure that these people are fitting. If you're doing a merger merger, uh, this is like I think of it like a marriage. Like if you think that you're gonna behave the same way you were before you got married, after you're married, then you're gonna have an unsuccessful marriage, right? If either of the people just like, hey, I'm just gonna be exactly who I am before the marriage, except now I'm married, good luck. You know, that's not a recipe for success. But when you see it as I'm no longer myself, I have my values and my, you know, my being, but now I am with somebody and I am a new person together. We are a new together relationship. And almost you have to die to yourself and become somebody new in that relationship. I think that those tend to succeed more. And I think I would say the same in mergers. It's like, hey, we have to figure out what our new company's merge uh values are, you know, we have to merge some of those values and culture together to become this new thing. But I rarely see that happen, Frank. I see like one not wanting to give, the other one not wanting to give. And a lot of times that's why the disasters come with mergers. Yeah, exactly. I saw that in spades. It was just one of the worst things I've ever seen. And then it's if it in the merger, then there's an overlap in staff, right? Now, how do you go about determining who should stay, who should go? You have a process to do that to evaluate. I've got six people for a job that only requires two now. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, in those cases, I'll go kind of what I've seen versus what I think is the right way to go about it, right? What I've seen is the easiest thing, especially if you're risk averse, is whoever had seniority and they're just into positions, right? You can justify that in a court of law when litigation starts, you're like, oh, well, this per these people have seniority. But what I've actually seen play out when we do that is not always the best. A lot of times it's not the best, right? Because your most talented person might have been the person started two years ago or last year. Right. Right. So really aligning first, I would say the most important thing is okay, these positions, are they even the positions that we originally said they were? Or are they some new type of position? What are the attributes we're looking for? Whether those are skill competencies, experience, exposure, and also, of course, those interpersonal um emotional intelligence, all this stuff, all those skills. And then you start interviewing those people, each of them, to determine who's the right culture fit for where you want to go as a team. I don't think we spend enough time. So there's a book called The Ideal Team Player by uh Patrick Lencioni. Fantastic book. And actually, he writes his books and um fables. And in the story, the company is going through a leadership change and they're trying to figure out why they have so many retention issues. They have high attrition and uh also a lot of employee issues, personnel type problems. And they're trying to figure out what it is. And then during that process, they decide that, you know, it's important for us to determine who are we? What are the values that we hold? And that way, once you figure that out, you can look at the team that you have and see if they align with your values and explain to them and see, you know, if they want to align or not, or maybe they're no longer part of your team. And then also when you're hiring people to ensure that you're looking for some of those attributes. I think that's really important because we too often we we're hiring for skills that we can teach and we're eliminating people that probably have the attributes that there's no way we could teach. Right. Exactly. I agree with you. So tell us about your book. Give us a little bit about the book you wrote. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, my book is called uh Better Has No Finish Line, and that is my life mantra. And the subtitle of the book is Waypoints on the Lifelong Pursuit of Self-Mastery and Leadership. And I wrote that subtitle exactly in that way because I feel like leadership, in order to get to be an effective leader, you have to go on the pursuit of self-mastery. It's on the way, you know. Um, it's not to say that, and I say lifelong pursuit because we're always growing, we're always learning, we should be, and we're continuously evolving and developing. I think that self-mastery is one of those things that you don't arrive to. It's something that you continuously pursue. The book is called that, but it's really a series of chapters that you could read standalone and perspectives on either self-mastery or leadership. It bounces back. One chapter will be a self-mastery leadership chapter that's going to be more related to dealing with life's challenges, also, you know, developing your own personal values. And then on the leadership side, we'll talk about leadership philosophy, navigating through dealing with difficult people, what the providence of a leader is, all of those different topics when it comes to leadership. And it bounces back and forth. And in the end, I would say, you know, the some of the best feedback I got about the book was that it really made me think. And the other piece is that it's not prescriptive, it's really more about telling you the truth about this journey. And what I want people to walk away from after they read the book is encouragement. Because a lot of times, you know, people read a leadership book and it's like, oh, that's the prescription to do it. And then they go out and try it and then they get face punched because that's not how it really works. And my book really talks about, and it's not absent on me that you know the book is a leadership book, but it's not that type of leadership book. And the book's actually gonna talk about you can do all of the things that are prescriptive in a book or a workshop and go try all of those things, and it still may not work. And it doesn't mean because you're not a good leader, it just means that that's part of the whole leadership journey. Exactly. That's wild. So a lot of people get a hold of you, Jill. They're gonna want to talk to you after this. Yeah, they can definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn. Um, it'll be LinkedIn for slash JY Bogden. Or the easiest way is going to my website, which links to everything, and that's waypointbetter.com. It's waypointbetter.com. You'll have access to uh finding uh ways to purchase the book if you're interested. Also comes with a companion workbook that can walk you through some of the exercises that are that's throughout the book. But also um you can learn about my podcast there. If you sign up for my mailing list, you'll get free resources. Everything on my website is free except for a purchase in the book. If you sign up for my mailing list, you'll also get early access to all of my uh newsletters as well as when new episodes drop on the podcast. So waypointbetter.com is the best way, but I'd love for people to connect with me on LinkedIn as well. Absolutely. Well, folks, we're just about out of time. I'm gonna thank my guest again, Joe Bogdan, who showed us that culture can be really a competitive advantage. And top performers want to work for and stay with a culture that is human-centered, human-centered leadership, which is Joe talked about for the last 35 minutes outstanding. Now, let me leave you with this none of us are in this alone. And the secret to walking on water is to know where the rocks are. And today, Joe showed us where many of those rocks are. And through this podcast, we're going to identify more rocks and we're going to bounce back better than ever. So share this message with a friend. Please subscribe. And Joe, again, thank you so much. So that's it for today's episode of Bounce Back. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week who posts a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes will win a chance the grand prize drawing to win a ten thousand dollar private VIP day with Frank himself. Be sure to head on over to bouncebackpodcast.com and pick up a free copy of Frank's gift. And join us on the next episode.