Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Anyway, Steve Kerr says it was Jordan's approach that made him want to be better.

He knew that that guy was bringing everything he had to the office every single day, and he demanded that of his peers, and it made him a better player.

Steve Kerr went on to win a number of NBA championships with the Bulls, and he's widely regarded as one of the best head coaches in the NBA right now.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Robert Zandela.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

And speaking of leadership, this exciting month of April, we have a special leadership series where every single guest will be a leadership coach, a leader in their own organization, and they will be helping us become better leaders ourselves.

And to top it off, we have three episodes per week instead of the usual two.

We will be publishing three episodes per week, Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, instead of the usual two episodes a week in this special leadership series in April.

So stay tuned, become a better leader, and log on to Apple and Spotify to give us a rating and a review.

And let's get communicating.

Now, my guest today puts the word service into service leadership.

He is Kyle McDowell, who is an author of the best-selling book Begin With WE.

He's widely known for transforming bosses into leaders and reshaping corporate cultures by using his 10 WEs Framework, which we will discuss on the show today.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hey, Roberta.

It's great to be here.

Thank you for having me.

My pleasure.

Thank you for being here.

Please tell us a little bit about your background.

Well, I grew up in a very rural area of Florida.

We're proud to be the strawberry capital of the world.

We produce most of the strawberries that you would find throughout the country and the states.

Very humble beginnings, middle class at best.

I grew up playing a lot of sports, and I think that's where a lot of my vaccination and desire to really be a student of leadership was formed.

But then I set out on this journey on my professional life, where I spent right out of high school, paid my way through my undergrad, and had joined corporate America right at the age of 18, and had by most accounts a really successful run.

It was nearly 30 years, 28 years in big corporate America.

Started off in a very, very small cubicle for a regional bank here in Florida.

And my last couple of roles, I led collectively more than 30,000 people across the country.

And I'm very grateful for that opportunity and the lives that I was fortunate enough to interact with during that time.

But I tell you, Roberta, at like year 20, maybe 22, I started to become really apathetic towards the whole corporate America thing.

The bureaucracy, the toxicity and dysfunction that I saw in so many people just started to really wear on me.

I made a decision that I was going to lead differently, and I left the organization I was with at the time and told myself, if I get a chance to go back and lead another big organization, I was going to do it differently than I always had and lead in a way that I had never been led.

Part of that resulted in me finding principle-based leadership and documenting what are now known as the 10 WEEs, my principles for building and sustaining really excellent cultures.

And they happened to be my principles in my personal life as well over the last few years.

But that's kind of me in a nutshell, but you mentioned at the intro there, which was really lovely, the servant and servant leader or service leader.

And I think those two words are played out in ways that almost make them cliche because everyone says I'm a servant leader.

Everybody loves, and I love to say it for years, but I never was one probably until the last five or 10 years of my career.

So anyway, I love to get into as much of that history in the book as you'd like.

And that's exactly what we're going to do.

Now in defense of my American friends, corporate bureaucracy exists around the world.

South Africa's got the same problem.

Yeah, we're not that special.

You're not special in that regard, for sure.

And it's funny you talk about sports.

I've had several guests as well who say sports was their first introduction to leadership.

Whether you listen to your peer, who's your captain, or obviously from the coach as well, and they start to notice, yes, those leadership traits that they say that's usually their first introduction.

And then when you say that the last five to 10 years, you started this shift of servant leadership.

What brought about the change?

I wouldn't say I necessarily shifted into servant leadership.

The real profound shift for me was principle-based leadership, which I think is a component and can be a part of the recipe of being a servant-based leader.

But for me, it was really focused on the principle side.

And here's what happened.

So when I left that organization I mentioned a moment ago and just made this promise to myself I was going to lead differently, I had a really, what I would describe as a be careful what you wish for moment, because I was contacted by a headhunter and ended up landing a role where I was warned.

The dysfunction was not palpable, but it was there.

There was some toxicity in many pockets of the organization.

And in total, there were about 15,000 team members in this team.

And with that, you're going to have, obviously, we'll have drama disagreements, dysfunction in some pockets, but I was warned early on that it was pretty widespread.

The gentleman that hired me, great guy, wasn't super connected to the business he was for a long time, but he ultimately kind of pulled away and it was mine.

And that gut check that came with, be careful what you wish for, was a really sentinel moment in my life, not just my career, but my life.

And here's how it went down, man.

I was about 60 days, maybe 90 days into this role, and I had requested to have a group of the, say, top 40 or 50 leaders in the organization, all come together in person.

It was going to be my opportunity to meet the team and kind of set my expectations and chart this new journey.

And I was so excited.

But the night before, I had no idea what I was going to say.

I knew it was time, the gut check was here.

So that night, I was in my hotel room in Lawrence, Kansas, sitting with my laptop in my lap, and I was still wearing the suit that I had on that day.

I opened a PowerPoint, and about two hours later, I didn't have anything voluminous, but what I had was 10 sentences.

And each of those sentences started with the word WE.

And there was no planning, there was no muse on my shoulder.

I had no idea that that evening would change the course of my life.

I didn't call them even principals at the time.

I said, these are the rules of the road.

So the next morning, I stepped out in front of those 40 or 50 folks, and I walked them through one by one.

And this part was purposeful.

The presentation, the entire presentation, was in black and white, because I felt as if these are not negotiable.

And I said, these are the rules that will first govern how we treat each other, because I just happened to believe, and I think anyone would be hard pressed to convince me otherwise, if we're high functioning behind the scenes, our customers feel that we are so much better off and better positioned to be excellent and successful externally.

So I said, that's the rule.

That's the order.

They govern who we are, how we treat each other, one, and then how we treat those we serve externally, two.

And I walked the team through these 10 principles.

I remember it to this day.

Half the audience was really energized.

I would say a quarter of the audience was skeptical, but open-minded.

And then there was this faction that was, you could see it in their eyes.

They were just like, this guy's full of it.

He's full of it.

They were very skeptical.

And one gentleman who I might end up telling another story about a little bit later was so bold as to admit that during the conversation, my speech, he Googled the 10 wheeze because he thought I'd plagiarized them or stolen them from somewhere in the same gentleman.

By the way, the next day, he asked for the PowerPoint.

He said, man, I want to show this to my team.

This is really cool stuff.

I want to show it.

Can you send me the file?

I sent him my file, but he admitted a bit later that he only wanted the file so he could check the properties of PowerPoint to see if I was indeed the creator of the document.

So talk about skepticism, detective FBI.

Yeah, that was Nick.

But so I had these sentences, I shared them with the team.

And what followed in the next handful of years was so profound.

The impact I watched on bosses who started to transform into leaders, because you know better than anybody that they're not the same thing.

But in addition to that, the business results turned around.

The 10 WEs became the cultural manifesto for this organization.

They based their performance evaluations off of the WEs.

They've got the 10 WE awards a couple of times a year.

It is in their DNA now, and I'm so proud of that.

I took that to another organization and then just came to a crossroad where I felt like, man, I'm really on to something and it's my obligation to share it.

And that's why I wrote the book.

And that's how you and I came to be together today.

Right, which I'm so glad you are here because that last part where you said it turned even the financial results, because as we and I were talking earlier, there's sometimes the sphere from leaders.

If I treat people a certain way and worry about wellness, we're not going to meet the numbers, Kyle.

And then I must report to my boss and explain to him why I didn't meet the numbers.

Why I didn't hit the targets.

That is usually the concern.

And therefore, it's good to highlight that it actually has financial benefits.

Yeah, in this case, it was irrefutable.

So our biggest client, the way our deal was structured with this client is a couple of times a year, they would do a performance evaluation.

And it was very, very black and white.

And a significant portion of our revenue was driven off of how that evaluation read, how well we performed in their eyes.

After the Ten Wees became part of our lifeblood at this organization, we went on a run unprecedented scores and results on those evaluations.

Never before seen run of consistent, good or very good, how they quantify those evaluations.

You know, it's easy to sit here and say the principles had a lot to do with it, and it sounds a bit arrogant.

But as I managed to stay in touch with so many leaders of that team, many of them are still with that organization, have been promoted or doing the same thing.

They are the ones that tell me the principles changed not only their personal journey, but also the business results.

And they're paying it forward now.

Still to this day, some five or six years later.

Excellent stuff.

So all the listeners are wondering, what are these 10 principles?

What are these WEEs that you guys keep talking about?

So let's get started.

Let's do it.

Now, I must give this caveat.

I do this every time I walk through them for your audience.

I'm going to be as bold to say there are members of the audience that as I walk through a couple of these, they're going to say, no shit, Kyle, of course, right?

Like, there's no book here, but bear with me because they build off of one another.

One builds the two and the tenuum of principles here.

And we should remember a principle is nothing more than a fundamental truth.

By definition, it's a fundamental truth.

It's something we hold to be true.

It's a system of beliefs, right?

Not Kyle's work.

That's the definition.

When these principles are combined into a cohesive set of principles, like we have this as kind of our road map, they become much more impactful than any one of them on their own.

And here's the best example.

The first we is, we number one, we do the right thing.

Always.

No one in your audience is going to say, boy, he's down on a limb on that one.

Of course, we're going to do the right thing.

But not a lot of leaders are purposeful.

And certainly not a lot of organizations are purposeful or conspicuous to say the most important principle, number one, how we treat each other first, but also how we treat those we serve, is we're going to do the right thing.

And it can be subjective, obviously, and we can disagree on what the right thing is.

In the book, I walked through this process to help people find what the right thing is.

But of course, it's always situational.

Now, if I'm a leader and a leader is not someone that necessarily has a bunch of direct reports, they could have none.

And you could still be considered a leader, as you know.

To me, the best way to do the right thing is to lead by example.

And again, your audience is like, of course, we're going to lead by example.

But here's the thing.

We're already leading by example.

And the question to ask is, is it an example that I'm proud to see replicated?

Is it an example that if my behavior were blast in the company newsletter or all over the Internet, would I be proud of my behavior?

So we got to lead by example.

Now, I think the best way to lead by example is to follow through on your commitments.

In a culture of excellence that is focused on WE, that means number three, we say what we're going to do, and then we do it.

A team is a team for a reason.

No one's doing everything alone.

So when you make a commitment to someone on the team that you're going to deliver XYZ report, you owe them an answer on whatever, you must deliver on that.

You must, or else we have no team.

And there need to be repercussions for that.

This is, I think, the first entree into trust of the 10 WEs.

Like if you make a commitment to me, Roberta, I trust you're going to deliver it.

If you don't deliver it, how can I trust that you'll do it next time?

Which means my word is null and void.

That's right.

Oftentimes, there's this domino effect, right?

So if one person doesn't deliver on their piece, none of the remaining dominoes will fall.

You got it.

You got it, right?

So if we're going to make this commitment to make good on our promises, and we say what we're going to do, and then we do it, that means we have to take action.

So WE number four is we take action.

And this is kind of like the TSA says, if you see something, say something.

In our world, I like to say, if you see something, do something.

That's not a license to be a cowboy and go take over some function or area for which you're not responsible.

But what it is, though, is when you recognize an opportunity to do something better, and by better, I mean maybe it saves us money internally, maybe it improves the customer experience, maybe it improves the employee experience, something benefits from this.

If you see that, you've got to identify that and share it with others, take it to the right people, or just take it on yourself.

Again, with boundaries, obviously, that's important.

But my point is, so many times, we walk through our business lives and we see things that are ripe for improvement, but we don't raise our hand because when you do that, typically, you're gonna get more work and probably not paid for it, or you're gonna be tasked with owning this thing, whatever the thing you identify.

So nobody's incented to do that.

And why would you?

And this is going on to WE number five now.

If we expect our team members to take action and we want them to be innovative and find new solutions, we have to be comfortable with mistakes.

People are going to make mistakes, and we've got to be very tough on mistakes, just not tough on the people that make those mistakes.

And there's no way anyone's gonna raise their hand and say, hey, I made a mistake, I blew it.

If they know, they're not gonna be picked up.

So we've got to create the environment where folks wanna take action.

They see something, they go to do something because they know if they stumble, their leader's gonna be there to pick them up, which is WE number six.

We pick each other up.

And that is peer to peer, that's human to human, man.

So if somebody's struggling, and you don't even have to know the details of why they're struggling because we all bring baggage to work.

As a human, let alone a team member, but as a human, I think it's our responsibility to say, hey, Robert, are you doing okay?

I noticed you used to be this fast at X, Y, and Z, now you're just, you're okay.

Just wanna make sure, tell me, are you okay?

Just having that conversation.

But the leader's obligation doesn't end there.

The leader not only needs to pick someone up when they've stumbled or made a mistake, we also need to pick them up and propel them to new heights.

So that means when someone is looking for a new position, that means if someone wants to be trained or learn a new kind of skill set within their role, it's incumbent on that leader to make that happen.

We've gotta pick each other up and we gotta move them forward.

That's being a leader.

Now, this is the point of the 10 we's where we transition from the, yeah, shit Kyle, no shit Kyle, all the way to a little more actionable in ways that make people uncomfortable.

And that's we number seven.

And that is we measure ourselves by outcomes, not activity.

Activity is very important.

It leads to outcomes.

But I have found too many times people are engaged in what I would just call busy work.

That doesn't contribute to an agreed upon outcome.

Certainly if a client or customer were to know that you spent 13 hours in meetings on a Tuesday and it didn't drive a better experience for them or the product that they purchased, they don't want you to do that.

You know, activity is important.

I'm glad my Uber driver puts gas in the car or charges the Tesla before they pick me up.

That's an activity.

I'm not paying for that.

We pay for outcomes.

The best example in the corporate world, as you know, is meeting overload.

You know, let's have a meeting to talk about the meeting.

Especially in the pandemic.

Bosses want to check, is Kyle napping or is he doing this work?

Let's rather get him on Zoom to make sure.

Let's get a meeting together.

Yep, and then invariably these meetings, there's some scope creep in those meetings, and then people schedule another meeting to address that one.

So outcomes versus activity, I boil it down to say this, if you cannot connect something you're doing with an outcome that has been agreed upon between you and your boss, you and a client, whoever, something you know you must deliver, that activity, you can't draw a straight line to the outcome, it should be questioned.

You should be skeptical.

And part of being skeptical involves challenging each other.

Challenges in general.

WE number eight, and that's my favorite WE of them all, and that's WE challenge each other.

Most organizations are great with this one, but they're only okay with it when it comes from boss to team member.

Not a lot of leaders are saying, I expect my team to challenge me.

I want my team to challenge me.

And by the way, I want members of my team to challenge one another.

When you stare at a pyramid, there's no way that that person at the top of the pyramid can be close enough to ask all the right questions and challenge everyone else in that pyramid.

Like, for example, football and the NFL.

An NFL team has 53 men on the active roster and one head coach.

That's why they're assistant coaches, because there's no way that one head coach can challenge.

So we need them coming from all directions.

Like you said earlier in your example, we must have challenges, but there is a rule.

Challenges must be grounded in either data and or experience.

Can't just walk in and say, I don't like this new policy.

But you can walk in and say, we had a similar policy at my last organization, and here was the impact it had, we should reconsider that.

That's experience.

Or the survey data from our last employee engagement says that we should do more communication.

And that's data, right?

You got to listen to those.

Those are challenges that should be made, not opinions.

But we can't have WE number eight without WE number nine, and that's WE embrace challenge.

In this culture, and I've watched it, man, it's so powerful and fun to watch, Roberta.

You watch people go from defensive to their shoulders dropping in a kind of accepting way, because they know if someone's gonna say something that is either confrontational or even inflammatory, a challenge, they know it's gonna be grounded in either data or experience.

And they know that they're obligated to listen to that challenge.

And if they can't find the data or experience in that challenge, they are more than empowered to say, I'm not listening to this one, because you got to come with data or experience.

Challenge is gonna come from everywhere, external, the boss, the boss's boss, members of the team.

So we've got to be ready to embrace those challenges.

To deny them is to deny opportunities for improvement and growth.

And that's boring, but it's also not a sustainable recipe for business.

And lastly, we number 10, this is the icing on the cake.

It's the bow on the present, if you will.

And I was conspicuous to leave this as number 10, because I feel like if we're excellent at the first nine, number 10 is a logical last one, and that is we obsess over details.

Details, as you know, as most of us know, there are two schools of thoughts on the details.

Ah, it's just the details.

That's one.

And the other is details are what make the product.

Details are what separates good from average.

It separates us from our competition.

I happen to believe that consumers recognize obsession with detail, and they equate that with the amount of care that we have for their experience.

That's a very important thing to me.

And that's down to, like, in the corporate world, it's like, is the font consistent on our presentations?

Is the color consistent?

Are we using the same grammar and approach to a document that's going to our client?

You know, just being really, really, really detail-oriented.

Because it shows that you care about my experience, like you said, I used to be an English teacher in South Korea.

And let me tell you, I've had to hold myself back from being judgmental about people's grammar.

You know, the mix the they and the they.

But maybe that's because I started working in the 90s and things have changed and things are more acceptable now.

But the detail gives such a perception that you really took the time to...

Because here's the funny part about being human.

They will remember the mistake, they won't remember all the other grammar stuff I have correct.

Of course.

And by the way, to make that even worse, you could have written the best thing you've ever written.

You could have written War and Peace.

But if there's grammar or punctuation or issues at the beginning of that, I wouldn't even make it past that.

And a lot of people wouldn't.

They're like, why should I trust everything else in this document?

Because the first page is full of errors.

I think that's a sign that you didn't care.

You didn't put enough energy into your work product.

I think that's a problem.

Right.

Those ten wheeze.

I know you like the expression, rainbows and sunshine.

But here's the thing.

Anybody listening would be thinking, like you said, oh, yeah, right.

But it's really practical applications.

You did give examples of organizations that apply these principles, and we've seen the results.

First of all, the first one is we do the right thing, and you talk about the culture of excellence, and you use Trader Joe's as an example.

I didn't grow up here, so anything I hear between the comparison of somebody working at Trader Joe's and somebody working at Walmart, I hear from my American friends, and I've heard the stuff about Trader Joe's, about how they take care of their corporate employees compared to others.

Would you like to take us through that?

The example I use in the book is during the pandemic, Trader Joe's, they received a fair amount of flak.

They got some negative press and some criticism that they were not available for online grocery pickup, like all the grocery stores you see on Instacart or even some that had their own delivery engine and infrastructure built.

I guess it got to the point where Trader Joe's was aware of this criticism.

They kind of got tired of it because they went public to say, we are purposeful to not be in that space.

We're not going to go into that space anytime soon, and here's why.

The expense required for us to build that infrastructure is astronomical.

We would rather spend that money on our company's most precious resource, and that is our people.

So they gave bonuses throughout the entire pandemic and raised comp for, I think, the entire workforce, which is a really beautiful example of not just doing the right thing as a company, which is obviously important.

They did the right thing as humans for other humans.

In the book, I also talk about kind of a filter that I would recommend people to use when trying to find the right thing, because again, you and I could see the same problem and really disagree on what the right thing is.

So I try to frame it this way.

Three C's.

If I'm facing a tough decision or how to handle a certain thing, the first question I ask myself, is it good for the company?

Now, before people say, oh, OK, here's a corporate guy saying, look out for the company, we should remind ourselves if there's no company, there's no client.

So my second filter is, is it good for the client?

OK, now you might say, well, where's the employee come in?

Well, that's the C number three, the crew.

If we can land on a solution that touches all three of those, fantastic.

Home run, no question, it's the right thing.

If I have to settle for two of those three, I will.

And if I have to settle for one of those three, I will.

I don't like it, but it is business, so I have to make some tough decisions.

But you'll notice what is missing from those three Cs is there's no me.

There's no filter in there in which I say, OK, I got a tough decision.

Company, client, crew.

Where do I put Kyle in that?

Because it's impossible that we're not biased and we're going to make a decision that discounts somebody else's priorities when we choose our own.

So I say, if I got to make tough decision, tough call, choose a path, I go my company, my client, my crew.

You said these WEs are now being used in performance reviews.

How often do they have them?

Yearly or semi-annually?

So the organization I was talking about, they do it annually.

But since I wrote the book, and now I'm just evangelizing these things all over the world, I'm working with other companies on them doing them both annually at more frequency as well.

So I think the most frequent I've seen, at least one of my clients, is quarterly.

Yeah.

So what they do is they incorporate, you know, what are the examples of you picking someone up?

Like include an example in your review, where you led by example.

And they similarly, by the way, throughout the year, they had those awards I mentioned.

They do that twice a year.

But this portfolio that I ran had 11 locations.

In each location, the person that ran that location was responsible for kind of dreaming up their own way of evangelizing and embracing the principles.

One of the leaders in their office, they had a bulletin board covered with post-its.

And when someone caught someone or watched or observed someone else living one of the WEs, they would write a post-it for this person's name and walk into the big boss's office and stick it on his wall.

And that's the beauty of this whole thing, Roberta.

When I talk about when you combine them and you have one set of beliefs, the impact they have is beautiful to watch.

And it works because everyone is obligated to live them, but they are also empowered to recognize and call someone out when they're not, including the boss.

And that, I think, was the big transition for how I led.

And it was the big transition for this organization when I first discovered them.

Including the boss, which means, as we always say, no leader should have this expectation that they should be perceived to have all the answers, can do no wrong.

And sometimes they feel they need to live up to this mass, this pressure of acting like because they're the leader, their team must perceive them that way.

Yeah, I did.

For many years of my career, I felt like I had to have all the answers.

And what a mistake.

Because when you don't have the answers, what do you do?

You ask for help from others.

And how good does it feel to participate in our team's journey?

How good does it feel to play a role and know that your opinion, your input is valued and you matter?

It's all any of us want.

We just want to feel valued and feel like we're adding value.

And you can't get that value from someone if you don't allow them to voice their concerns or their opinions.

You shared a story where I don't know if it was you or you were giving an example of someone who the leader was speaking to them on the phone, and they could actually hear the boss typing, which means they're not listening to you when you're on the other side of the line.

I do.

I do remember that.

That was me, actually.

That was me telling a story about I had a boss for a while, and I absolutely refer to him as a boss, not a leader, who was really adamant and very disciplined about us having our weekly one-on-one sessions.

And in the role I was in at the time, most of my career, actually, I was on the road, so I was never in the same office with him.

But yet, you know, religiously, we would meet at this scheduled date and time.

And at first, when I heard the clickety clack of the keyboard, I was like, wow, this guy's taking notes.

He'll remain nameless, but this guy's taking notes.

This is pretty cool.

And then I started to realize, well, it happened when I would hear typing as I was going through my updates.

And at the end of my updates, the typing would stop and he would ask about an update that I just mentioned.

He wanted me to, hey, Kyle, what about XYZ?

But I just spent five minutes talking about XYZ.

Yeah.

And then the worst, Roberta, it was all capped for me when I and that's when he lost whatever little bit of respect I had at the time.

I walked through an update during one of our one on ones.

And during the one on one, I got an email from him asking for an update on what I was just talking about.

And that's when it was it for me.

Very good with his listening skills, I see.

Or just faking it skills, right?

I mean, at least wait till you're off the phone before you hit send.

I'll never forget it.

Glad you don't work with him anymore.

You said that we live by example, meaning something that you would like to see repeated.

You told the story of Steve Kerr and Michael Jordan, lessons you learned from Michael Jordan.

Gosh, you are quite the reader.

Thank you for this.

That makes me very happy.

I can't put your book down.

Anyone listening, get Kyle's book.

It makes me thank you, Roberta.

That's very kind.

Yeah, so Steve Kerr, a lot of people know Steve Kerr now as the head coach of the Golden State Warriors.

And for those that are not basketball fans in your audience, so Steve Kerr played for a team other than the Bulls for the first several handful-ish years of his career.

And it was by no one's opinion, but the data, his stats would say he was a below average player, an inconsequential player.

I think he averaged four points a game or something.

He was just not noteworthy.

He was traded to the Bulls, obviously where Michael Jordan was, and almost overnight, Steve's personal statistics started to improve, but he was very vocal and open about how it was mostly Michael Jordan and his kind of maniacal approach to leadership.

Now, I'm not at Michael Jordan by most accounts was incredibly difficult leader.

It was very, very hard on his teammates.

That was his style, right?

And probably a lot more prevalent in those times.

But anyway, Steve Kerr says it was Jordan's approach that made him want to be better.

He knew that that guy was bringing everything he had to the office every single day, and he demanded that of his peers, and it made him a better player.

Steve Kerr went on to win a number of NBA championships with the Bulls, and he's widely regarded as one of the best head coaches in the NBA right now.

I don't think any of that happens without that transition from underachieving player to work with a leader like Michael Jordan.

Isn't that the same Jim Rohn principle of who you surround yourself with?

Absolutely, absolutely.

But we don't have choices, though, and we don't always have the choice of who we surround ourselves with.

Certainly he didn't.

In a corporate environment, we don't, which puts the emphasis on being an authentic and trustworthy leader and just person.

It makes it so much more important because you can't just get away, you know?

Right.

He is what Tom Brady says, you bring out the best in other people.

I think, first of all, don't be the smartest person in the room.

You know, don't want to do an Enron.

But you want...

Great movie, too, by the way.

I loved it.

I think my brother and I watched it a few times back in the day.

It was the 90s, right?

Yeah, yeah.

When you are surrounding yourself with people who strive for excellence, it motivates you to also bring out the best out of you.

So if you have a corporate team like that, and you have the trust you were talking about, it will also bring out the best in you.

Man, not only does it bring out the best in you, and you get better as a result, the team collectively delivers results never before seen.

They can conquer new heights.

They can deliver on better, faster, whatever, business results.

But they also deal much better with conflict and rough waters.

You and I were talking about this before we started recording.

I tell a story in the book about how this team, same team as I mentioned earlier, that I was talking about earlier with the principals when I introduced them, one of our locations was just decimated by one of the strongest hurricanes to ever hit Panhandle of Florida.

I'm talking devastation, man.

I'm talking homeless.

I'm talking houses just gone.

And I say that so passionately because I saw it.

I was there within two days of landfall of the hurricane.

But the point of bringing the story up is my team of five or six, maybe seven people and I were on the phone nonstop trying to determine what the right thing to do for our people was.

And we were so united in that effort and those conversations, and we were galvanized because I hate to say this, but it is true.

The organization where we work at the time, they were not supportive of any type of go fund me or creating new policies or allowing exceptions on attendance type things that the president of the division was not open to any of that.

And my team did not care.

And I told them, guys, if this ends badly, I will take it all.

I will be the one to hand my badge over.

But I believe us doing the right thing is the right thing.

Not just because it benefits the company, but we got to do what's right for our people.

And the reason I share all that is when there's a high performer on the team or when there's just an energy or a vibe that we all need to be our best, when you're faced with a diversity like that, there's no conversation about what we're going to do.

The question is, how much of it are we going to do?

Not if we're going to do something, but how much are we going to do?

And that's what we did.

Which makes sense, because think about it.

And I come from a country where we don't have these, the hurricanes and the tornadoes and all that.

But if your employees are experiencing this and the home is totally gone, not doing anything, how are they going to show up for work on Monday?

I remember the other day, there's a video of, you know, how there's this debate of, do we go back to the office?

I mean, in the last three years, we've proven we can work at home with our computers.

Do we go back to the office?

And there's a lady who sadly, this is so heartbreaking, Kyle.

She said, I want half the week to go to the office because I sleep in my car.

When they say work from home, I don't have a home to put my computer on.

This is so heartbreaking.

And when you have companies and corporations who say don't help, like they said to you guys back then, you have people like that on the other side of that equation.

Yeah, yeah.

And we had some of that.

We had employees that literally lost their home.

Here's what I recall most from that experience.

So my team and I, we elected a couple of our little group to go to Lynnhaven.

It's a very small city in the panhandle of Florida called Lynnhaven, Florida.

A fellow by the name of John Hess and I, we could get there the quickest.

As you can imagine, the airport was shut down.

It's hard to get rental cars.

There's no hotel rooms because everybody who was displaced went to a hotel room, those that could afford it.

So John and I landed maybe 36, 48 hours after the hurricane had come and gone.

And I walked into that facility expecting to see, and it was not devastated.

There was damage, but it wasn't horrific.

Walked into that building, and Roberta, on a good day, there's probably 800 people there.

This day, there were probably 30 people there.

And I just called them all into a room, and we all just kind of hugged each other and talked through what they were witnessing.

These people, they were in tears and happy just to see us.

And it's not about me or John.

It's the fact that they knew someone cared.

There was so much devastation around them, and I was moved with tears because their smiles lit up the room.

I'll never forget.

One lady said, she'll never forget the way that John and I hugged her when we first got there.

And it's like, are you kidding me?

By the way, of that 30 or 40 people, there were people in that group that had no home.

One fellow in particular, I'll never forget, has a disabled child in a wheelchair.

So they're on the bottom floor of this apartment complex, and the roof had completely caved in, and it flooded.

They had no place to go.

People were staying on each other's couches.

One of our leaders there, Annette, shout out Annette, if you're out there, she made dinners, lunches, and basically said to the entire 800-person staff, if you want to come stay at my house, you can.

Complete strangers were staying at her house.

It brought out the best of a lot of people, man.

Bringing out the best in other people.

If any leaders are listening and they say, this all sounds fantastic, but there's so much toxicity in our culture, we don't even know how to get started, what would you say to them?

It starts with understanding this is not easy.

It is very challenging.

And I give this caveat because my first inclination is to say, just do something, do something different, have some self-reflection, be introspective.

Am I someone I would want to report to?

That's my first reaction.

But even before you go there, you have to understand if you want to see results that you've never seen before, find fulfillment that you may have lost earlier in your career, find some optimism and maybe even some passion for your role, you have to make the decision that this is not an initiative.

It's a way of leading.

It's a way of life, and you have to do it every single day, and it's hard.

Here's what I mean by hard.

You will be encountered with scenarios.

In my case, I was encountered with scenarios that I wanted to flex and use my title and bang my fist on a desk and say, no, this is how we're doing it.

Case closed, decision, move on.

But if I did that, I'm not embracing challenge, and now I'm a hypocrite, and you can't trust a hypocrite.

So I knew I had to live it every single day, and that's the caution I give is, when you want to drive a big transformation, which I think so many people are hesitant to do because they're like, why?

Why bother?

Because at some point, it's just going to get squashed, or my boss won't like it, or that's not who we are, whatever.

You have to live it every single day.

So be ready for that challenge.

Be ready to have to kind of pick yourself up from time to time.

Because trust me, man, there are days where I didn't have that juice, I didn't have a smile.

I wasn't the person that I portrayed myself as, but it's a job, and you have to make that choice every single day.

But do something, and don't accept the status quo just because it's always been that way.

That's a recipe for mediocrity.

Yeah, which is sometimes the come back for a while.

That's how we've always done it.

Yeah, right, it's terrible.

Right.

Here's the thing, when you were talking earlier about the posted notes, and that you actually noticed your teammate, and that they do something from the 10 we's, and you write it down, unheard of.

That we actually noticed the good things that our teammates are doing.

But that's the difference between a boss and a leader.

A boss is looking to catch someone doing something wrong.

A leader is looking to identify where someone's doing something right, and also help them get past the things that they're doing wrong.

It's like a gotcha mentality versus a growth and development mentality.

You know, that's the difference, I would say, why that caught on so well with the posted notes, is people realized it feels good to be recognized.

And if I'm going to be a leader in this organization, I need to recognize others.

That gives me the ability to also be critical and coach others because they know I'm trying to help.

I'm not just trying to catch.

Right.

Which means you're creating leaders for the future, but leaders-

That's right.

Leaders in training, basically, if they apply the peonies.

Love it, that's right.

That's absolutely fantastic.

If I didn't have to let you go to the top of the hour, Kyle, we would have stayed longer.

But thank you very much.

This has been an awesome conversation, hasn't it?

Yeah, I loved it.

I loved it, Roberta.

You're doing great work, man.

I appreciate you having me on.

Thank you.

I appreciate your kind words.

My pleasure, Kyle.

Thank you very much.

Before you go, please tell us where we can find you on the web, the socials, and the way we can find the book as well.

Yeah, you bet.

And I'd love to hear from your audience.

The website is kylemcdowellinc.com.

I'm on pretty much all social platforms at Kyle McDowell Inc.

The book, as we've talked a lot about, is called Begin With WE.

It's available worldwide.

The easiest place to grab is probably Amazon, but it's at Target, Barnes & Noble.

I'm a big fan of the audio version myself.

I narrated it.

And I don't say that to point the light at me.

I just think when you can hear an author in his own words or her own words talk about a passion project or something that they're very connected to, to me, it resonates.

But anyway, it's out there, ebook as well.

And with your deep voice sounds like a radio DJ.

I'm sure it's really fun to listen to.

I'll fall back on that if this doesn't work out.

That's your Plan B.

kylemcdowellinc.com.

Thank you very much, Kyle, for being here today.

My pleasure.

Thank you for joining us on the Speaking and Communicating Podcast once again.

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