The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Leadership Incompetence Index: Root Causes, Red Flags, and Remedies for Learning Leaders by Damon Wells

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

The Leadership Incompetence Index: Root Causes, Red Flags, and Remedies for Learning Leaders by Damon Wells Amazon.com Summaryleadership.com Why do so many leaders, despite their best intentions, struggle to lead effectively? In The Leadership Incompetence Index, G. Damon Wells provides a diagnostic framework for understanding and addressing the full spectrum of leadership dysfunction. This book breaks down the ten most common types of ineffective leaders, categorizing them from the merely inefficient to the dangerously malevolent. Through clear analysis, Wells reveals why certain leaders continually fail and offers actionable strategies to break these patterns. Inside this book, you’ll find: Levels of Incompetence: Learn about the Incompetence Index’s four categories, from the largely benign leaders to those whose behaviors create toxic work environments. Red Flags and Warning Signs: Identify early warning signs and prevent potential dysfunction within teams and organizations. The Science Behind Dysfunction: Using insights from evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, emotional intelligence, and game theory, Wells uncovers why these leadership failings occur and why they persist. Detailed Profiles of Each Leadership Type: Explore vivid case studies of the disorganized leader, the visionary who can’t execute, the fearful leader, the inflexible manager, and others. Mitigation Strategies: Go beyond identifying problems with practical steps to transform leadership weaknesses into strengths. This book is essential reading for leaders, HR professionals, and aspiring managers who are dedicated to self-improvement and organizational success. Whether you’re struggling with your own leadership challenges or seeking to improve team dynamics, The Leadership Incompetence Index provides a roadmap to diagnose, understand, and remedy common pitfalls in leadership. Start your journey to more effective leadership today!

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the chrisfossshow.com. Welcome to the Iron Dome. Two men enter, one man leave. No, that's not the way it works. We just leave one at a time on the stream, so we're not doing that. Guys, welcome to the Chris Foss Show. For 16 years, we've been doing the Chris Foss Show. Over 2,200 episodes, damn it.

And if you haven't gone back and listened to every single one of them, there will be a test. Make sure you listen intently to every show. Today we have an amazing young man on the show. We're going to be talking to Colonel Damon Wells. He has written the newest book that comes out or came out December 1st, 2024. I'm still in February. I'm just denying that December is existing right now at this pace and it's winning.

His newest book is called The Leadership Incompetence Index. He must have wrote about me. Root Causes, Red Flags, and Remedies for Learning Leaders. We're going to get into his insights in his books and his experience in the Army. You may have heard of it. It's a big military establishment that's been around since he may know the exact date. Beginning of time, let's just say that. Colonel Damon Wells is a lifelong student of leadership

and author of the aforementioned book with over three decades as an active duty officer. Damon has led teams in high pressure environments that has served as real world leadership laboratories for refining his theories and practices. He's commanded organizations up to the brigade level and served in iraq afghanistan kuwait korea the baltics and now in stuart stuart germany am i saying that right

stuttgart stuttgart you'd think as a third fourth generation german i would know that but i don't and he's the deputy chief of staff for the u.s africa command and now he's serving on the chris voss show no he's not serving us he's just showing up of Staff for the U.S. Africa Command. And now he's serving on the Chris Voss Show. No, he's not serving us. He's just showing up. Drawing on his extensive military experience, he created the Ballistic Leadership Framework and an innovative approach that integrates cutting-edge research in psychology, neuroscience, and complexity theory with proven battle-tested principles.

Currently, he's focused on several leadership writing research projects while making the most of his final six months in Europe. Welcome to the show. How are you, Mr. Wells? I am doing great, Chris. Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming and thank you for your service. Give us your dot coms.

Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? Yeah, so I'm on Exet. It's at some leadership, S-U-M leadership, summaryleadership.com. And of course, my book's on Amazon. You can pick it up wherever fine books are sold. So give us the 30,000 overview. What's inside that new book? So the book, it's called Incompetence Index. And I think about leadership a lot. I've been thinking about leadership since I joined the army. And it seemed to me over the last few years that we pretend like everybody's got tons of potential and we're all pretty good at leadership.

But if you look at the research, if you look at studies that try to determine are the leaders in this organization good, all the surveys come back and it's anywhere between 50 to 70% of most organizations don't think their leaders are that great. I mean, they're probably okay and they're probably paying the bills, but they're not that great. So I wanted to take it from the other side, and make the assumption that most of us are incompetent in one way or the other. You know, we all show some like you can read the book, there's 11 kind of archetypes in there. And most of us has have exhibited something like those incompetent traits at one point or the other. So I just wanted to be a little more honest about it and say, look, acknowledge incompetence. Let's go through the root causes of incompetence.

See if we can identify it in yourself and maybe in your leaders and then go from there as a sort of a learning point. Can we use this to help the people on Twitter or X or whatever it is called this week, bankruptcy? There seems to be a lot of confident people there. So anyway. I hope they all buy the book, yes. Buy the book, folks. So let's get into it. You talk about there's 10 most common types of ineffective leaders and stuff that are inefficient to the dangerous me, Lee Malevolent.

I don't know why. It's Friday. My brain is broken. It's Friday. My brain is broken. It's Friday the 13th, man. Yeah, that's what it is. I'm malfunctioning at this point. And there's drones falling out of the sky. There's all kinds of weird shit going on.

I didn't do it. I'm just saying. So give us a rundown. Tease us out a few of these, if you would. We want people to buy the book, of course. Okay, so we go from the most benign to the most malevolent. Just a disorganized leader. And the way I structure these chapters is I'll have a little inner monologue of,

you know, what is this leader thinking about? And the disorganized leader has got post-it notes everywhere, keeps getting distracted by calendars and projects that they've got on the back burner. You've got, and I kind of exhibit this trait most of any of them, and that's the visionary without execution. The guy with just brilliant ideas all the time, but can't really take the time to put anything into execution. You've got indecisive leaders. You've got fearful leaders who are probably okay, but they're just too scared to take a giant step and to do something a little bit challenging. Inflexible leaders,omanagers autocratic leaders narcissistic leaders and then at the top of the

scale you have the dark triad leader which is the narcissism machiavellianism and psychopathy which is you know it's it's called incompetence what that really is is malevolence and in that you know everything they do is about themselves with no empathy. Is there degrees to that though? Because I mean, masculinity usually tends to pick up on the traits of some of those. And I think it depends on how deep you go. What do you think about that? Yeah. So I think within each archetype, you've got sort of a scale like a level three absent leader okay ranks can rank above a level five just depending on the severity of of the you know the traits they have so it's you know it's it's broad it's more of a kind of a think about yourself book than it is an actual classification

skill but yeah you're right because i like i mean i think there's a little bit of and correct me if i'm wrong because you study this as well but i think i think you know a little bit of of of psychopath tar tragedy psychopathy mockability and a little bit of narcissism is kind of okay i think i think sometimes to be a leader you almost have to have a little bit of narcissism don't you you have to think that people give a shit what your opinion is you you have to be bold enough in your own ideas to push them forward because people are always going to try to hold you back so there's that balance so a little bit like i kind of couched that in the book and i've written articles that are on medium.com about you know there are a lot of really powerful successful

motivational leaders that have some of these dark traits that if they went just a little bit further, they would not be a good person anymore, but they've managed to leverage those dark traits to make whatever they want to do to make it really, really great. I try and balance mine. I try and find a healthy dial-in medium. I'm not sure it's working, but I'll let the audience decide it's got you this far yeah that's true and i haven't been in prison yet for anything i've done so that's a good thing but you know i kind of operate in an operational awareness thing you know don't do anything to get arrested no it's kind of my thing i watch cops a lot that way i know how not

to you know all the tricks yeah i know all the tricks. Yeah, I know all the tricks. No robbery, no murder, no killing. All those things that I had to finally give up after all these years. That's right. The pillaging, all that sort of stuff. All that stuff. All that medieval shit. You come from the military.

Tell us a little bit about your upbringing. What made you want to join the military? What were some of your influences growing up, et cetera, et cetera? Yeah, my background, none of my family members were in the military, so I had no exposure to it growing up. And I was kind of a rebel. I played in bands and failed my way through a few years of college before I did anything substantial. But I don't know. I think it was the Gulf War. I remember seeing that on TV. That's before I joined.

I remember seeing that. And something was just like, man, that's something I want to do. I felt like I should be there for that. So that was kind of the first stirring. And then after I failed my way through a few years of college, I was working in a hospital as an EKG tech. And I just made a decision one day, yep, I'm doing this. And I think just it's a – I wouldn't have guessed it at a younger age, but it's a pretty good fit for my personality.

Just I'm not a very good rule follower, except in certain circumstances. If you leave it up to me, I probably won't follow the rules. But if you put a little bit of boundary on me, I can do it pretty well to an extent. So that got me into the army. And like you read up front, I've been a lot of places all over the planet, Iraq a couple times, Afghanistan. But like I said, it's a good fit. And I think I'm a little bit of an anomaly in that I, that I, because we talk about in the book, but, but there's personality characteristics, right? And I'm a little bit of a low conscientiousness, low, low organized, but more on the creative side as a, my personality traits. So it's got me this far being sort of the anti-model of what's a, what a successful army officer looks like as far as

personality traits go. But I've managed to leverage that by coming up with the creative solutions that nobody's thinking of, fixing the problems that people don't see yet. Like I said, it's gotten me this far, but I'm about two years out from retiring. So I'm kind of looking forward to that. That's kind of interesting. You're more on the creative side. Yeah. Yeah. And I didn't realize that until a few years ago when I started studying all this stuff and doing a lot of research into the five-factor model for personalities and looking into it, looking at myself and then doing the reading that said the correlation between a successful military officers and personality styles is usually extroversion and conscientiousness. So very task and sort of checklist oriented and being able to talk to people. And I'm not either one of those. So kind of an anomaly. I mean,

of course, I'm not the only one, but it's just an interesting facet that I don't fit that model. So in the military, you don't do the full jacket colonel thing where you're yelling at people, calling them maggots. You're like, let's do a task list instead of, you know. Only weirdos come from Texas or something. I don't know what that joke is. Anyway. Yeah, I don't do that one.

That was the only thing I could come up with. But what a great movie that was. Yeah. It was a great movie. I do this every morning when I'm sitting on the toilet, too. I live in a world of shit. I think that's the line. I don't know.

A great movie. Yeah. It's a classic. You know, it was so amazing. That guy was supposed to just be an advisor on that movie and with his military experience. R. Lee Ermey, right? You're the guy. Is that his name?

Yeah. I think so. I don't know. I don't know. But Full Metal Jack metal jacket you'll never forget that yeah you know it's funny the model drill instructor yeah i only know the first half of the movie because that's the only half you watch because it's the funnest and after that that's true yeah the second half is kind of i have no idea it's okay yeah yeah some of the other

aspects of the book you talked about 11 different i think leader types archetype. Now was that including the ten most common types of ineffective leaders or did I same thing? Okay. Yeah, so it's it's it's 11. I started with 10. I ended up with 11 You saw it is 11. You talking about the levels of incompetence in four categories that you've indexed There's the benign to those who create toxic work environments. And I've seen a lot of those. Is the four categories part of what we talked about with the dark triad traits or? No, it's just kind of a rough categorization of take the 11 total and just categorize them into, you know, level zero through three is kind of your, your very benign level. So disorganized through absent leader, probably not causing a lot of harm,

but not maximally effective. And then of course, the fourth, the highest level includes dark triad and narcissist leaders and people who are probably really proficient, but are bad people in that they have these negative characteristics. Definitely, definitely.

It's all about them. I love them and Ligonin. That's right. They're great. You talk about red flags and warning signs and how to identify warning signs and prevent dysfunction within teams and organizations. Are those red flags and warning signs a reflection of, you know, analyzing one's, if one had poor leadership, analyzing that? Yeah. So I tried to make it simple for the reader. So first of all, you're reading the red flags. The red flags are, you know, typical warning signs. It's the behaviors and sometimes the language, the leader you're looking at will use. So for the main reason is that I think what we do is we tend to just broadly characterize a leader as not good.

You know, that person's no good. Well, let's take a closer look at the words than, you know, the language they're using. Let's take a look at the things they're doing that we don't like and see if we can put those in a bin. So we get in and classify, you know, what is the dysfunction here? They're, you know, they're inflexible, they're a micromanager. And if you have that information, now I can start, I can use that information to start digging my way backwards to say, okay, what might be the evolutionary roots of behavior like this? What is the neuroscientific cause for them to behave like this? Really with the realization,

ultimately being that, you know, they're perfectly normal human behaviors, just depends on their circumstances, but they're absolutely not abnormal. Most of the behavior we exhibit is there for a reason. It's just because we're human and, you know, we're not perfect. And, you know, any of us can exhibit these behaviors at one time or another, but it's the sort of aggregation of multiple repetitions of the same types of behavior that said something to the effect of, just because you have the title, you have to, even though the title doesn't really mean anything that they give you, it's you have to earn your title every single day. And it was a reminder to me to try and suppress the dark triad as much as possible. But I had to earn my position every day even though you know I own the company I'm a CEO I still need to earn that in the eyes and and minds of my folks and you know there's a lot

of great books that talk about leadership a lot of great military books that talk about leadership and our military really has some really incredible techniques that they use to build what I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but the most competent and the most successful military in the world, I think, when it comes down to it. Yeah, 100%. Everybody else looks at us and goes, we should be like them. 100%. And you know what?

That's easy to say if you're American, it just feels right. And, you know, you get some indicators. But I've been to other countries and whether it's Europe or the Middle East and worked with the other armies. And it kind of dawned to me a couple of years ago. I was in the Baltics working with some of the, you know, there's a very small nations working with their armies and their armies are tiny, like microscopic, and I'm not, you know, denigrating them in any way. They're just, they're just very small militaries or small countries. And compared to ours, it kind of dawned on me then I'm like, Oh, now, now I see that America is truly the biggest, baddest army. Not, not just to, you know, flap our gums about it, but in scope, scale, technology, the way we raise our

leaders, the way we emphasize the cost of a soldier's life, all of that stuff, the investment we put in to make sure that soldiers have what they need and we take care of the families and we do all this stuff, our military is truly phenomenal yeah i mean it's just amazing and i really didn't understand much about the structure over the last couple years we've had lots of military folks on when i was writing my book beacon's leadership i my friend that i game with monowarfer is is in the army and so he he turned me on to the Be No Do. And I was wrapping the book in editing, but I was like, damn. And I really got into it looking through Be No Do, and I just fell in love with everything about it. And you come from the Army.

Does some of that play into the book, the techniques of the Be No Do? Yeah, not this book, but it's in the two other books that I've got. It's phenomenal. That's part of the reason I put it in these other two books, because the structure is there and it's been developed and refined over decades. And it's applicable, it's practical. And it's one of those frameworks that people are reading all these, the newer leadership books, looking for these innovative frameworks. and it's there, man. It's all there. I go through the be no do model, the army leadership requirements model, which kind of feeds off the be no do. There's just a lot of substance there that actually works. It's simple enough that you

don't have to be a genius to figure it out. It's the military, right? And it's ultimately very practical, very applicable, very easy to understand but but you can dig layers deep into this thing and that's you know i talked a little bit about neuroscience and evolution i did that with with all the army leadership doctrine models and i sort of because i could never find that in any army text where does all this stuff really come from yeah so i just did some digging and some research and you know there's evolutionary principles there's neuroscience personality there's game theory there's complexity theory in there so you can you can trace all of this stuff back to to validated leadership constructs that come from academia which i like

because they're interesting but but but they're not as proven as a leadership construct that's been in use for decades. Yeah. I mean, they've probably been using this be-no-do model for, I don't know, maybe over 100 plus years. I don't know. No, that one's fairly recent. I want to say it came out in the 80s. Oh, really? 70s or 80s. Yeah. I know Abraham Lincoln did a lot of instruction to the military to build it.

You know, handling of prisoners, things like that, that we still use today in the Geneva Convention. So those who don't know what we're talking about in the audience, the B concept refers to the internal character of a leader, which I have none, including their values, traits, and strengths. Again, this includes believing in yourself, your team, the mission, and being authentic. Authenticity, I think, is important too. People trust the leader that does that. Know is the skills and knowledge a leader needs, and that includes his training.

Do is the activities that leaders perform. So this practicing leadership actions, taking charge when needed. You know, I forget the military leader who leaders eat last or... Simon Sinek. Was it Simon Sinek? But he copied it from somebody. I think it came from... Oh, yeah.

Who was the last military general under Trump who kind of held it together at the end there millie millie i think it came from millie that came from one of the others but i believe or it became it was i think it was from the guy before him who got fired he's got a cool name but i forget anyway so yeah the b no do really interesting stuff there and all the things that go into it one of the things you talk about your book is emotional intelligence and that's kind of like seems like that's kind of a newer thing leaders are starting to tune into especially with the Gen Z because they they kind of want something more than just people barking orders them evidently that's what they tell me when I feel about that because i mean the army's not really

the you know emotional huggy sort of organization you know let's let's see how we feel and you know no but it has evolved i mean you're right there was a and i can't really put my finger on it but but just generations or you know every generation is different right and you know when i came in the army 30 years ago, I was perfectly comfortable being yelled at and told what to do and that, fine, this is just the construct. This is how this works, right? No big deal. But now, the younger soldiers, they're a little more aware. They have access to literally every piece of information you could ever want. So they're a little more aware, you know, the emotional intelligence ties into that.

It's, you know, it's, it's kind of being self-aware first of all, so that you understand what you're going to, the, the, the behaviors you exhibit, whether it's, it's the body language or, you know, actual language are going to elicit some sort of response from the person you're directing that at. So in some circumstances, like in a crisis, if you've built your team correctly, then you can bark orders and everybody will do what they're supposed to do because they understand this is a crisis and we don't have time to dissect why, why are we doing this again? But for the most part, you know, from my experience over the last probably 15 years, given that little bit of, this is why this is not, this is why we're doing it, blah, blah, blah. But

this is, this is why the thing I'm asking you to do matters. You don't have to do that every time, but you have to do it enough so that they understand that you're coming from a place of trust, really, so that what you're doing is benign. I won't do anything that's bad for you without good reason. And really, that kind of hinges on trust say it, they take the why as implicit. If my boss is telling me to do it, it's good. I trust him. We're just going to do it. Yeah.

And I think it does come down. I want, one of the things I want to signal to my audience is that I'm a good judge. That I'm good at reading the, I'm a good and fair judge. The worst thing I can do is have someone tell me I play favorites. Like that just really rubs me the wrong way. Because I don't want to play favorites. I would like to, hopefully I would signal to my followers that I, you know, I'm a good judge. I analyze the situation. I'm not going to send them into suicide missions. Does that play into kind of what you just said?

Yeah, absolutely. So being the good judge or being the good critical thinker or, you know, the leader that's able to take, to get access to the right amount of information, the right, the right data points, and then make, make decisions and draw conclusions from that that are reasonable. And part of that is, you know, sometimes you won't have all the data points. You can get your team together and you can tell them, Hey, look, this is what I think is going on right now. Here's the data I have. Does anybody else have any more data that would be helpful for this? What do you guys think?

Ultimately, like as a commander, the decision is mine, period. But we can sit here and collaborate because I'd like to hear other opinions and I'd like to hear where you guys are at. And ultimately, if you can build consensus, the buy-in and the willingness of your team to do a little bit of extra work on an idea that they had or a course of action that they had is usually far greater. Yeah, it's getting them to buy in on the why. We used to always explain the why to people in our businesses because we wanted them to fully understand how things operated the one person you know we used to have this rule around the office that was the only stupid question is the unasked question please ask questions if you don't understand something you know because the one person who slept through training is the one person who's going to break the $30,000 machine

because they didn't pay that's right and then we would always explain to them why we why we developed whatever the procedure was for the the job so that if they felt like they could innovate, they could come back to us and go, I think I know what I should do better. But yeah, getting that buy-in, having, I think authenticity is a big deal in being a leader. I mean, you don't have to be perfect. You can show them sometimes when you're wanted and when you're struggling. And sometimes, you know, you need them to step up. It really makes a difference. I think it was Jim Mattis that did the thing about the lunch.

Didn't he? I read a couple of his books, and of course, I've read a few other ones, including William McCraven. But I think Mattis was the one who would sit with the troops. Didn't he? Wasn't he? He would lunch and dine with the troops. Oh yeah. Mad Dog Mattis. Mad Dog Mattis. Yeah. And I remember, I think I remember his book. One of the generals said, yeah, you don't have to sit

with everybody. You can go to the officer's quarters or whatever. And he's, no man, one of them. And you know, that's, that's just so important, I think, as a signal to let people know. But yeah yeah how you signal as a leader it's really important because you know people read stuff and a lot of times they misread you and so you really kind of have to follow a good hallway or a guideline of of your operational awareness i guess yeah that ties i mean you said authenticity a couple times and i agree and you know and that's important for young leaders to hear. It's important for young leaders like I'm the, you know, the old leader.

So it's important to model that stuff because I remember being a young leader and thinking, man, that older leader knows everything. I never see a weakness or a chink in the armor, which, of course, was never the case. Just that they, you know, they hit it right. I found that that, you know, being forthright with what I don't know and what I don't understand and saying, you know, here's here's what I don't know about this situation. You know, who can help me understand this and just being honest about what you know and what you don't know. And because at the end of the day, like I would always tell them, you know, I want to be part of a great organization just as much as you do. I'm the commander, but, but you guys, you guys affect the direction of this organization a lot more than me.

So yeah, authenticity. And then, you know, being a little bit vulnerable, not to the point that you're weak, but, you know, being clear that, you know what, Hey, Sergeant, I don't know anything about this thing. Can you help me understand this thing? And he's an expert. He'll help you out. But that goes a long way. To me, it goes a lot further. And even stories about the authenticity one kind of jogged my memory. But I remember hearing leaders tell stories about when they were in my job, how awesome they were and how, here's the way I did it. That was perfect. And those stories never, and maybe just me,

but those stories never resonated with me, but I've had some leaders who would tell me how they failed. Hey, look, man, let me show you, let me tell you how I screwed this thing up. I would listen to that and that would be okay. I gotcha. You know what I mean? So just be an authentic you know you're not perfect yeah you can't fix the problem until you address it right i mean i see a lot of people in today's world that operate in states of delusion and their own private idaho whatever sort of narcissistic thing they built social media is really giving rise to narcissism yeah i i don't know about full blow clinical keep that in mind folks narcissism gets kicked around a little too much but like everyone

has it but it's definitely contributed i think to to most people's i mean it's you know when you have all these you can build an audience and you have these people adulating you all day long and you know you can start buying your own supply they start doing your own supply But you know it's an interesting world and how it's changing because it used to be just like You know you you would tell people hey you want to work here fine If you don't you know there's a door, but now you've got to have really developed emotional intelligence and understanding people Understanding motivations you know feeling like they they're they're connected to you and that things you talked about and their transparency authenticity you know it when you when you ask the frontline or people below

you as in leadership you know for help you know a lot of times they have knowledge you know they have operational knowledge of what's going on that's right at the front line and there's things you can't see and you know but seeing that you know you can ask for help that you're you know you're not breaking down you're just going hey who knows i used to ask our staff i go here here's the concept or idea of what where i think we should move forward to what do you guys think about this? What am I not seeing? Where are my blind spots? Where are my scotomas? You know, it seems like a great idea to me for some reason,

because I'm in it, but I know there's got to be holes in it, and I can't see them because I'm too deep in it. Help me out. And, you know, I learned a long time ago, running businesses as a CEO, I'm not the purveyor of all the greatest ideas. And so many

times I need people in my organization to, to, you know, throw those ideas out and, and also for them to have a safety and emotional intelligence safety area where they won't get, you know, I won't be like, you're stupid. We can, what's that idea? That's the dumbest idea in the world, you know, and shame people. And they're like like i'm never getting an idea again because i saw it happen there that's right and you've got a cult you've got to cultivate that because because most people i want to say most there's a lot of people who would be intimidated to sort of voice an idea if they don't feel safe like you said that emotional safety net being emotionally intelligent about that but making a an environment where it's safe to fail and And there's,

you know, you as a leader will accept the risk. Hey, that's a great idea. We're going to do that, but nobody's going to all point fingers at you for failing. I will accept that risk. The company is going to buy that risk. It's a good idea. And then kind of people see that. So, you know, you cultivate that sort of environment where people are willing to speak up and sometimes even question you. Hey, Chris, I think I have a better idea. Why don't we try it like this? And if you're good, you listen to your team until they give you a reason not to. But I think that pushes a company so much further.

Oh, yeah. It makes all the difference in the world. And then on the website we had for you is it let's see where they put it is it summaryleadership.com yeah summaryleadership.com and then so tell us about some of the i i guess you do consulting there as well i see a schedule free consult yeah i'm i'm playing around with it right now i don't i mean if i happen to get some on on there i will. But right now, like I said, I've got a couple of years left in the military. So what I'm doing right now is kind of exploring

how I'm going to do what I love doing, which is coaching leadership and teaching leadership, really to sort of younger folks that are at that transition period where they've been put into a leadership position. They've sort of, they've seen that there's a massive amount of variables they have to play with and then want to sit down and understand how to turn themselves into the best leader that they can be. So the website's kind of a forward-facing. It's a little bit about me. I've got a blog on there.

There's tons of articles on there that i've written and i'm i'm really playing around with ideas playing around with leadership constructs looking at where i want to source my models from and i've i've already hit it but you know the five big theories evolution personality neuroscience game theory and complexity all tie into this i'm working on kind of a a sort of, I don't know if you've heard of the, there's a Hogan personality assessment. There's DISC assessments. It's sort of like those, but it's a takeaway that I can give to a leader

and say, look, based on, you know, based on your assessment, here's what does that make? There we go. No, that's, I can hear you. I'm just pulling up leader assessment tests here. I was getting some stat out there. Sorry. Okay.

So anyway, spit out a survey. Tell you, hey, these characteristics about you, you should highlight this. So these circumstances are when your skills and characteristics will be best leveraged. And then understanding the team, the nature, and the characteristics of the team is really important because a lot of times we do surveys that help us understand ourselves. You really need to understand all the people that work for you, too. Go ahead. David, your microphone's mucking up. Is there a cell phone close to it?

Yeah, there is. That was it. There's the signal. Fix yep fixed it okay carry on yep but anyway working on that survey with a lot of different theories kind of muddled into there i don't know how many months that's going to take me but it's it's consuming a lot of my time we'll look forward to seeing because i mean the this i watching the ukraine war firsthand you know roll out and watching you know military the russian military structure and just seeing it just just throwing bodies into a meek right now really yeah and seeing you know how their tier of management

works compared to ours i mean you just really i you know, I think it's more succinct for me in my brain or more sharper in my brain because I grew up believing the Russian army was the second greatest army in the world next to ours. And, you know, I used to cower under a desk, you know, to save myself from the nuclear bombs. We all did that. So, you know, I grew up with the USSR, and I grew up believing that, you know, they were number two and

to watch how they've just played out in ukraine is just extraordinary yeah and then the innovation of the ukrainians i mean who whoever would have thought you know million dollar tanks it's all just ten dollar drones or something you buy on the show that's right what a change in i mean that's probably the biggest change in war tactics since, I don't know, Patton or something. I don't know. Yeah, it's a weird thing that the war brings out the best in human innovation just because it's life or death. We have got to, we've got, here's all the money you need to fix this problem. I saw it myself in Iraq.

Soldiers were coming up with, you know, if you could weld and you could get metal, you could build something. And, you know, that was the new TTP for, you know, getting around IEDs or whatever. So it's just, you know, it's an interesting playground for inventing stuff. Yeah. And maybe we should just have more wars then. I don't know. There's got to be a better way. Let's try and keep the peace.

I mean, I like it when we kind of have a peaceful detente. Sometimes those are better, I suppose. But, yeah. Do you have any anticipation of launch dates on the upcoming books? So the next one's called You Don't Know Shit About Leadership. And I'm shooting for the – I love that title. I do, too. That's funny as well.

I'm shooting for the end of January for that one and then I've got one and a half more so I'll try to space them out because I've had a lot of time I've been writing a lot and I've cut you know I'm halfway ADD so I can I can do more than one book at a time, which sounds crazy, but that's just how my brain works. Yeah, I have the ADHD disease as well. They call it the CO disease. Thanks. That's right. I mean, it's funny. I mean, it's a tremendous tool.

I don't think I would ever have been successful without it. But the downsides are quite fun, too. So you have to kind of manipulate those. I thought I got my ADHD completely under completely under control my old age and i was slowing down and and just calming down and you know but then i started testosterone replacement treatment a year ago in november man that that came back and you know kicked it back in squirrel squirrel i mean i i have to just apply myself every day to try and, okay, quit looking at 50,000 YouTube videos and flip between this, that, and the other. Try and focus.

So, scroll. Anyway, give us your final thoughts as we go out. Tell people how they can reach out to you and onboard you in the future as you develop your coaching and all that good stuff. Yeah, I'll stay at Assembadership.com. I just want to say, the reason I'm writing these books and the reason I want to publish is because I know there are tons of leaders out there who are pretty good characteristics you have, why you exhibit the behavior traits you do exhibit to sort of understand that a little better, build yourself up, and become the leader with full potential that you already have in you. People need to learn these things. A lot of times, one of the problems we would have is we'd have really great salesmen, and they were really great at sales. But man, they made awful leaders.

And a lot of times they're not prepared or trained to do it. I assume a lot of time they've been hanging out with me long enough. They've seen what I do, but maybe I'm a shitty leader. That's why they never succeeded. But sometimes salespeople just don't make management. It's just two different brain modes. That's in the never succeeded. But sometimes salespeople just don't make management. It's two different brain modes. That's in the next book, right? There's things like the Peter principle is you have a skill that makes you stand out at a certain level.

Eventually, you're going to get promoted to a level where that skill no longer matters. If you're good at sales, it doesn't necessarily translate into management or anything like that. So it's a fairly common concept. And nowadays, I mean, the more training you can have, what kind of leader am I? What does it mean? You know, I ask a lot of leaders, CEOs, when I interview them. I'll be like, what's your leadership style? What do you do?

And they really have no awareness of what they do. They've just been kind of doing All the patterns and tools that they use like I do And they just been doing them over and over to a point that they didn't really think about it much So they really don't know. Yeah Man, I would say you're right and I've tried to coach junior leaders on this too If you can codify Your leadership you have to sit down and kind of

think about it and codify it. That's really important, A, because it keeps you consistent, and B, because at some point, you're going to have the opportunity to coach someone who works for you how to be a better leader. So at least you've thought your way through why you are the way you want to be, what your values are, what your priorities are, and how you exhibit the right behaviors to get that out of other people. They may not be the same type of leader as you, but if you help them understand how you built your leadership framework, then they can sort of build their own leadership framework and become better through that. I mean, that's the way to do it. You know, it's, it's any more better tools people can get to be developed leaders. I, you know, whenever people fail, I ask myself,

how did I fail them? Did I not train them enough? Did I fail in communication? Did I fail to set a good example as a leader, moral compass, you know, and, and I take a lot of that back to us. You know, a lot of times someone failed in our trainings because we know we didn't train them well, uh, you know, maybe we left something off the table. Maybe our communication wasn't succinct, you know, but I take responsibility for that. I mean, even though sometimes it's probably pretty clear they're, they're not the best people or they have some ethical problems and moral problems, but even then I'm like, how did they get in an organization?

Why did we, you know, we developed different ways when we were hiring to where, you know, it used to be you'd meet with them and hire them on the spot. Then we switched to interviews, like three or four interviews, so we could really get to know them and kind of, they would kind of let their guard down too over three or four interviews. That's right. That's right. And you kind of find out, you know, they'd show up on the third interview in pajamas with flip-flops and they'd have their feet

up on your desk and you're like oh you're comfortable tell us your stories we need to know not to hire you yeah and so yeah and so i think as a leader i think you look at you look at failure within your team and your organization at least least I do, you tell me, and I ask myself, what could I have done better as a leader? How did I fail my men or my team or my crew, whatever? Yeah. I think that's the starting point for every failure is you. Like, okay, I'm going to start with me. I'm never going to assume malevolence or ignorance or lack of skill before I examine what did I do to make sure that we didn't fail. And honestly, it makes you a better person because like you said, now you revise your techniques on hiring. Okay, let's take a second and third order out.

Okay, did we hire the right person? Okay, we did. Did we train them properly? Maybe we did. Did we hire the right person? Okay. We did. Did we train them properly? Maybe we did. Maybe we didn't. Let's just take a look at our training real quick and see if we can, we can isolate the variable that caught this person up and cause them to fail. And it, maybe it is the person, but, but to me, it seems like a much more productive technique to go back and do some introspects and look at your whole process first so that because it's too easy just to blame the person and say that person's an idiot fire them which is probably not the case

yeah hopefully yeah i mean i think i think about the only time we pull the fire is if you know it's a moral thing you know someone stole from us yeah stuff like you just use those you know i'm pretty sure i didn't teach you to steal from me. You know, that's what you think. Yeah. I actually, one of my favorite stories is I was sitting in my office and I own 51% of the corporations that me and my partner own. He owned 49, but they were C-Corps. And then, you know, we had offices in Denver, Vegas, Ogden, Utah, and Salt Lake City.

And I remember one time this, one of my sales guys who was new, he came popping into my office. He was so excited. And I was busy working on something. He goes, hey, I figured out a way to get to set up an office at home. I've been telling people about it. I'm like, oh, really? What is it?

He goes, hey, there's a room in the back and it's filled with office supplies. And so if you want to set up your home office, you go in there and just take the stuff that's in there. And I'm sitting there watching my, and just i'm feeling my head start to crank around kind of like that girl in the exorcist yeah and i'm i'm thinking okay so we're putting on a joke on me because we did a lot of jokes around the office and i'm like i'm like are you for real he goes yeah yeah you just go back there and i'm like you realize that you're stealing from me and he goes no no no no this is a big corporation there's it's a faceless

corporation there's there's no there's no one doing the thing i'm like you clearly don't understand how any of this works i own 51 of this company yeah and half that money is mine and the other half of my partners and i'm a steward of this corporation. And he still didn't get it. And, you know, I fired him on the spot, of course, but just the level of just ignorance and I don't know. That's amazing. That was the other thing I told him. I go, do you understand this is theft?

And he goes, no, it's not. It's a corporation. It's faceless. It's crimeless. Still. You don't steal stuff from the office. Yeah. Wow. But, you know, that's sort of malevolence i guess maybe i don't know if that's the right word but i don't know yeah malevolence with ignorance i guess you know there's a certain point where you can't fix stupid so that's right colonel it's

been wonderful to have you on we love having military leaders on because you guys at least the american leaders are trained so well. Maybe we should have some other. I think we've had some European military folks on. Yeah, we've had some people from French. I think from the CIA, I think it was. They're MI6 and stuff. And I think we've had some ex-MI6 people on the show.

We love talking to you guys. So thank you for your service and all you guys do. Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Folks, order of the books books wherever fine books are sold. It's out December 1st, 2024. The Leadership Incompetence Index,

root causes, red flags, and remedies for learning leaders. And the one thing you learn as a leader or you should be at as a leader,

you should be constantly learning. You should be constantly checking your six and making sure what I like to call the crazy Ivans from Red October. You should be checking your six and making sure, what I like to call the crazy Ivins from Red October. You should be checking your six and making sure that your butt doesn't stink, basically, and you're walking your talk and talking your walk.

Did I do that right? No. Thanks for tuning in, everyone. Go to Goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfast, LinkedIn.com, 4chesschrisfast. Chris Foss, one of the TikTok and all those crazy places. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time.

That should have a sound.