Your Transformation Station - 108. Critical Skills

Episode Date: October 3, 2022

What kind of leader does a company require right now? Marty Strong, a former Navy Seal, delves into "the vital talents that today's businesses require. PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com⁠⁠ Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/apple⁠⁠ Spotify: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/spotify⁠⁠ RSS: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/rss⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/youtube⁠⁠ SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Facebook: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/facebook⁠⁠ - Instagram: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/instagram⁠⁠ - TikTok: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/tiktok⁠⁠ - Twitter: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/x⁠⁠ - Pinterest: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/pinterest⁠⁠ - Linkedin: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/linkedin⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

That open line of communication, then if we have essentially all these skills that are shared and are utilized, then I know their job, they know my job. So then they don't have to ask me redundant questions and vice versa. Well, think of it this way. If everybody has a cross-training understanding, not only do they have cross-skill sets and knowledge, they also have empathy. that they didn't have before if they were in their stove pipe. The other thing is, You're listening to a podcast that encourages you to embrace your vulnerabilities and authentic self.

This is your transformation station, and this is your host, Greg Favaza. Marty Strong, welcome to your transformation station. How you doing? Good. Thanks for having me. Hey, well, first off, I want to appreciate your commitment to serve in the armed forces. Well, thank you.

Can you just paint us a little snapshot of your background? Well, so I'm a Nebraska boy. I was born and raised primarily in Nebraska. Went to Japan for four years. My father worked for the U.S. government, so I spent four years in Japan. And then another two years in Hawaii, then finally graduated high school from Gross Point. South High School in Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, same school that the movie was named after. I joined the Navy in an early program so you could basically sign up when you were 16.

So I went into boot camp immediately following graduation, turned 17 a couple of days before I walked into boot camp. And finish boot camp, go to radar air traffic control school. Then I go to basic underwater demolition seal training. and at that point the class was I think 126 initial candidates down kind of down screened from an initial 500 to try to get into that class and so later we ended up with 13 original graduates. So that launched my 20 year career in the SEAL teams. So you just wanted to be a SEAL. That was like your life purpose as soon as you wake, you came out of the womb. You're like, I'm going to fucking do this.

exact opposite. I had no idea what a seal was. Back then, there weren't movies, it weren't even books. And there was a mistake in my orders when I came out of radar air traffic control school. I was supposed to go to a ship in the Mediterranean. And I ended up being directed to San Diego for seal training. I didn't know what the word even meant. And my dad, I called him up and I said, I'm supposed to report tomorrow morning in San Diego to this U.S. DDT seal thing. And he said, well, I know what the UDTs are. They were frogmen. We had one of my ship in the Korean War. But that's not what you're supposed to be doing because my dad was a radar operator on a ship during the Korean War. So he said, well, when you get there, just go find a chief petty officer and he'll help you out. Tell him your story. I'm sure there's a mistake. So I arrived and over a weekend of wondering what the heck was going on and listening to a bunch of guys that had shown up who had been thinking about being a seal.

every day since they were eight or nine years old and filling me in on what the whole the whole thing was. I walked in on a Monday morning and expecting to get redirected to the Mediterranean. And instead I ended up going through the course because the guy talked me to staying. Do you recommend this book to people? Oh, yeah, sure. McRaeven was in the class. Bill McCraven was in the class behind me. No shit.

Yeah. At any given time in training, there's three classes, at least in those days, they had three classes later on, both President Reagan and then later President Bush W. Accelerated them for different reasons to try to get more seals into the system. But back when I came in, there was only about 250 seals and about the same number of UDT Frogman, and they had different missions. They all went through basic under order demolition training together, and then they went two different ways. and they were consolidated in 1983. So when I went through, there were three classes a year, and that meant there was always kind of a staggering of the senior class,

a middle class, and a class just starting up at the very beginning in first phase. And McRaven was in a class right behind me. We talked, I think we talked about 11 months ago because there was a huge fight at the Chauhalla base between all three Buds classes and about 150 Marines that were waiting for breakfast. to open up and we were singing songs about Marines and that started this 200 plus melee of extremely fit young men that filled the entire street and yeah and and he'd actually kind of forgotten about that until I brought it up and then all of a sudden we both started

tossing that back and forth. That's awesome. Just to let the audience know, make your bed by William McCraven. It's an excellent book. definitely a lot of insight for something simplistic. But tell me more about what can you teach organizations today with your expertise. So, as you know, I've written two different books now on business leadership. The first one being nimble, how the creative Navy SEAL mindset wins in the battlefield in business, is focused on the dynamics of small businesses or middle-sized businesses that are going through rapid change. So a lot of dynamic change. That dynamic change could be generated from within the

organization just by the fact that they're growing so fast or they're changing products, etc. It could be brought on from an external impulse such as a competitor starting to eat your lunch and you have to reinvent yourself. Or it could be something like the pandemic. It could be something that's much more environmental and atmospheric that you can't have any you don't see it coming and you don't have any control over, but you still have to deal with it and figure out how you're going to survive and push through successful on the other side of it. So that book focuses a lot on that, talent, leadership, organizational design. Let me pause you. I want to hit that real quick.

So with this, like, preparing, having the right mindset to adapt to the situation. Now, like, there's a priority of precedence. A company has to partake with having it run, effectively and they can't always prepare for the unexpected. So what would be a little, like a little tidbit you could offer a CEO, a corporate consultant, kind of how to look at this? Sure. And this answers your first question more directly. You know, what conveys from the Navy SEAL experience? The preparedness is really the key in your second question. You can train organizations, especially the leadership teams, to prepare for crisis and chaos. The fact that

nobody does it just means it makes it feel like it's not supposed to be done, like it's not standard practice. Everybody just gets hit in the face with the event. Medium, small, large, doesn't matter. And they all react to it. And in the moment, they try to figure out how are they going to react to it, who's going to be the lead. And there's a certain period of time when they go through that approach where they're stunned. So they basically sit on their hands and hope that it all goes away, hope that it changes, hope that whatever they think is happening to them is a mistake in analysis or perception. So if you look at the military comparison, the military, you're preparing all the time for every contingency. You're doing it on a large scale,

strategically, you're doing it on operational scale. The weapons, the training, the battle plans are all based on figuring at best, worst case, moderate case scenario for every possible conflict, every possible engagement with almost every possible adversary, and at every level of play. Real small terrorism acts all the way up to, you know, World War III kind of thought process. At the tactical level, inside units like a SEAL team or Green Beret team or, say, Marines, which I consider elite infantry and the Rangers, they also do this, but they do this based on kind of the micro effects on that unit during a mission.

So everybody trains to handle somebody getting shot. Rarely in my experience has somebody been injured or shot that they're immediately taken care of by the actual medic. Usually everybody that's next to them is fully trained in doing everything from starting IVs and all kinds of things. So everybody gets cross-trained. That's part of the preparation. Everybody is walked through the mission set, the possibilities.

Then you brainstorm all the impossibilities together. And then you start mitigating each of these things with decisions in your planning until you eventually get down to a plan. And then in your regular training, you let's say you can't carry all the bullets in the world. So what do you do? You have to be extremely good at shooting. You have to be extremely good at target selection. So, you know, a seal walking into a battle with 30 rounds should be able to hit 30 people. And if you have to go into a battle and you just, you know, shoot 30.

30 rounds you hit two people, you're not going to have enough bullets because seals work in small groups and they're usually isolated from big unit support. So these are all just the natural contingencies that a small unit has to train to that the larger military structure trains to. You can do the same thing in business. You can have a strategic level of this kind of scenario-driven brainstorming. Okay, what do we do to prepare? It's kind of like continuing continuation of operations or leadership replacement planning, you know, so-and-so, Bob or Jane are the key leader in the entire organization. They get hit by a bus.

What do you do? Marty, let me paint a little insight for you. I was in the Army for five and a half years, started out as infantry. The very bottom got my EIB, and then I was at brigade level delegating the authority as a radio operator to 4,500 different troops. So I can understand the small army and big army and how that plays an impact in not only the military, but I can transfer that over to an organization, kind of relay that over to individuals. Now, this information that you're offering, okay, what about Amazon, big companies? They've obviously made the right choices and have

grown. What kind of insight can you give them? If you actually go and look at any large corporation, I don't care who they are. One, they're made up of people. So people are making decisions and it's human judgment. And they're broken up into the operational execution units. There's not one huge mob of 80,000 people at Raytheon, let's say, sitting in an auditorium or an arena, shouting out the answers, the problems. They're actually structured, much like the rest of society. So if you look at a department or division. It's like a small town or a city within the structure of a nation. So they end up being under the same kind of pressures as a small company or a mid-sized company, even though they're a part of an Amazon or Microsoft, et cetera. And that gets missed a lot because

the people at the very top of those huge organizations are looking out at the horizon. They are thinking big strategic. They are trying to come up with a leapfrog technology that either sustains their market advantage in the case of some of these technology companies, or it creates a whole new one, it creates a whole new S-curb, a whole new product line that nobody anticipated. So while they're doing all that, the people at the lower levels are just trying to get the product developed and move from point A to point B. It's normal human activity.

So any kind of, you know, improvement in preparation at every single level is going to improve the entire organization from the bottom up. Interesting. So looking at the top level down, corporate leadership, are you telling me that there's too many things that they're obviously looking at and they need some sort of governance either with a specific individual or a large group knowing their jobs? Can we go a little bit more into that? I would say the opposite of governance.

I would say creativity and innovation and insight, which means if you have 80,000 employees, you have 80,000 pairs of eyes and ears. You have 80,000 brains. If you try to control and channel and dictate and draw white lines on how information is going to flow or who's the proper level of authority to pass forward an idea, you basically cut yourself off. You can actually be 300 people trying to think up everything while you're, ignoring the other 70-something thousand people. And that happens a lot. It happens in the military

at times. It also happens in government and it happens in large organizations. So you basically have to create a culture that embraces this free flow of ideas and the flow up. Now, instead of governance, what you want is you want a big incubation team. You want a group of people that have to be led correctly that are open-minded, that are not, you know, scared of making changes or or suggesting changes. And, you know, you don't want somebody in there that's of the mind of if it ain't broke, don't fix it. You know, because if you've got, if you've got, you know, a musket and it works perfectly and somebody says, hey, I think we should get a machine gun because people are actually using machine guns now.

You can say, well, my musket ain't broke, so I'm not going to change. And you're absolutely correct on a technical level, but you're absolutely wrong on the bigger picture level. You're going to get your butt kick, right? So a psychologically safe workplace for innovation. Yeah, yeah, not just, well, safe is probably a good word. I would say it's more than that. Safe would be the minimum, right? You want it to be an environment that becomes a catalyst,

like you're invigorating and you're stimulating the kind of activity I'm talking about. Not that just it's safe for you to, on your own, say you come up with an idea and it's okay for you walked down the hall and knock on the CEO's door. So I'm a CEO. You knock on my door and you come in and say, hey, I've got an idea. And I say, yeah, you know, hit me with it. That's safe. That's a safe environment. But I'm saying that as a CEO, I'm telling everybody, I want all these, I want you thinking all the time.

Or I bring in all kinds of diverse people in my organization, maybe accountants and salespeople and operations managers, and I bring them into a room to solve a problem that isn't any one of their areas of expertise. I really want objective, divergent opinions and ideas. I want somebody to look at it and say, why don't you do this? and nobody thought of it because they're so used to just following the football play. So that's another way of cultivating that. So now let's look at like how do you get that healthy level of communication? Not too much transparency, but enough to illustrate the authority, but as well as,

I'm trying to hit the word here and I just can't seem to do it. But I feel like you know where I'm going with this. Well, that's the million dollar question. And people ask me that a lot, especially in interviews, because they're hoping that I'm going to give them, you know, give them an answer that says, hey, I've got the key to this. I can actually go back and make this happen in my organization. Organizations, large and small, no matter what their purpose is, are made up of human beings. So human nature is what it is. Good leaders have to embrace human nature and understand it and not try to control it, manage it, and dictate to it.

So communications in most organizations is stilted, it's managed, controlled, and it's choked off for lots of reasons. Managers at the middle level are concerned that somebody below them might go up and say something that puts them on the spot. So as a leader, creating a culture of kind of an inclusive mind, a mindstorm of shared thought, experiences, ideas, concerns, whatever, means that everybody, every level of leadership has to be. become more mature than they probably are and sit back and be okay with the mess because it's messy. And what they should do is, and all leadership, asked to do this, is your job is to go out and encourage this activity to encourage the cross-communication, to encourage the flow of communication up to the leadership, and not inhibit it, not create a format for it to be delivered. Because all that stuff, it chokes it and inhibits it, right?

And if you can do that, it's funny, if you can enlighten and free your communications methodology, the rest of it kind of follows. Because once somebody feels comfortable communicating, they vomit ideas. I mean, it just, you know, so that's, you know, your question's on point. If you can get a good communications, I guess, process or program or policy where you have that freewheeling kind of. exchange, you don't have to sit back in micromanage attitudes or opinions or emotions because everybody's going to start engaging because that's what people do. That's what they do when the manager's not looking. That's what they do when they're talking to each other in social media after work or when they're texting each other across the room. They're just not doing it with

a manager because they're not sure how it's going to be taken. So would there be a risk-reward kind of moment that will motivate this healthy culture. I sure hope so. I think we have a autocracy structure in the United States and in almost every country, just the way, again, human nature. There's somebody at the top and there's somebody in the middle, there's people at the bottom. And the people at the top are supposedly smarter, quote unquote by benefit of experience or education or a combination of both. But even the smartest person in the world doesn't see everything everybody else sees. And they don't know everything everybody else knows. So to me, to be truly, you know, a great leader at the top of an organization, you don't

have to be smart. You have to be wise. You have to understand the value. And sure, is every idea coming up going to be something that radically changes the course of the company? No. And once you get this thing going, you could actually feed a problem down to the group and say, and the group could be 80,000 people. Hey, let's just crowdsource this thing.

What should our motivational saying be for next year? And wait and see what happens. Somebody's going to come up with something that resonates as long as you're open minded. If you think you're the smartest person in the organization, you're going to come up with it and you're going to shove it down everybody's throat the other direction. So it does start at the top.

And I know a lot of senior leaders are very experienced and they're very smart, but they have a tendency to try to take it all on their own shoulders and execute without realizing how much. And I'm not just talking about their company. Nowadays, you have access to global insight. I talk to people, I've talked to two people today already that are completely outside of my normal sphere of influence. They're both entrepreneurs. They do two totally different things that I'm doing right now. and we sit there and talk and everything and I say what I'm doing they said I'm what they're doing

and a lot of times I'll say did you ever think of and they go holy crap I didn't think of that or or they'll say something I go man it could we share experiences and we're all three in charge of our own you know our own company so yeah you have to have that at the top to really make it all work let me let's paint a picture for the audience for something very simplistic if you can just give us the definition your definition of what what it means to be wise and what it means to be smart? I think smart is different than intelligent. I think intelligence is actual capability, like brain capability.

I think smart is applied intelligence where that implied intelligence that application aligns with common sense and is successful more than it fails. But failure is good too, because somebody said once that wisdom, the definition of wisdom is the sum total of all your failures. If you've never failed, it's hard to gain wisdom. If you've never failed, it's hard to gain the scar tissue you need to take risk. So how you deal with failure is important in that calculation. So, you know, you hear the term, you know, they're book smart and street stupid or they're street smart. That's because it's a common sense element in the word smart as opposed to book smart.

or pure intelligence from an IQ test per se. So I think it may be harder for people that are academically inclined on the intelligence side to believe that that is the credential and that equals wisdom. I don't believe that whatsoever. I've watched human beings evolve. If you've been in the military, you've seen the same thing. I've watched young leaders, both enlisted and officers, start out with better education, quote, unquote than the people they're leading.

And within a couple of years, they go from being ignorant and making blundering mistakes and ignoring input and everything to suddenly they kind of get it and then they become really good at what they do. That's the same evolution in business. I'm not going to go down. Yeah, I'll be careful, man. I spent half my 20 years as an enlisted guy and then half as an officer. So I'm kind of, let's go.

I'm going to take a different path there. can you paint a picture with for people to understand what a good leader is and how they react under pressure and not so great leader and how they react under pressure? All right. So I'll split that. My definition, and I cover it in the first book being humble, my definition of leadership is it's not necessarily textbook, but I think it holds up over time. And that is managers are paid to manage systems, processes, and talent. And they're managing what is designed to operate, and they're overseeing and watching and measuring what is designed to operate.

If you hire an accountant by resume, by education, by training, by certifications, you're watching that they can be an accountant, that they do the things an accountant should do. And if you have a processor, you just bought the G-WIS 5,000 software system, whatever, you're watching to make sure that it does what it's supposed to do, what you expect it to do based on what the vendor or the manufacturer said. The difference between managing all of that and leadership is if you have a little bit of a problem, like the equivalent of an oil leak, a manager knows, goes to a process book, opens it up, follows the maintenance checklist, and kicks himself in the butt because somebody missed

a maintenance checklist, and then it goes to troubleshoot. and then they fix the oil league and then everything's running again. That's the level of kind of, I would guess, you'd call it a crisis that a manager's normally handling and the way they're supposed to handle it by process, by procedure, by checklist, right? But what happens if the entire system fails in your company all of a sudden is in distress financially? The manager doesn't know to handle that.

That's where leadership comes in. leaders jump in when systems processes and people have either failed internally or they're impacted by something externally and they can't execute and it is a larger effect on the whole organization. Are you trying, are you painting the difference between leadership and management? Correct. Okay. So if you're a leader and you can be a manager and be a good leader, but to be a good leader, you have to be anticipating these. So when you say, what's a good leader? A good leader is, like we were discussing earlier, is somebody who's anticipating problems, who's planning for problems, who has contingencies in place, who's training the leadership, who's training the managers,

who's training everybody. What happens if something big goes wrong, right? And that's a leadership's or leader's responsibility. Now, a leader that does that may not be prepared for the really big whammy, like say COVID-19. But if everybody was trained to get in a room, hear what the problem is, and pull together like a little think tank to reimagine the solution, and you'd practice that a couple of times, it doesn't matter if there was a car wreck that a couple of key employees got hurt in, or you lost your top customer and now what are we going to do?

Do we have to cut costs to make up for that? Or something like a pandemic shutting down your supply chain. but if you have never done that before as a leader and you've never thought about it, then you are what you said reacting. You're basically waiting for somebody to throw the punch and hope that you can slip that punch. And you're hoping everybody else in your organization can't too. And normally, emotionally, they can't. I'm sorry to cut you off there earlier.

I didn't know where you were taking it, but now it makes a lot of great sense. So you're giving an illustration of rehearsals that good leadership can do. just doing these dry runs of something so simple can become automatic in a situation when it's stressful. Right. So my second book, Be Visionary, Strategic Leadership in the Age of Optimization, tries to make a very clear distinction between optimizing and focusing on optimizing and why that isn't strategy. That isn't thinking, that isn't looking at the horizon, looking for income. threats or incoming opportunities. That's a responsibility of a leader, not just to look at what's happening right in the moment, not the fire you're putting out today, but where are we running

into? Where are we going? What's coming at us in the distance? So you have to have that aspect to it. It all falls into you're anticipating what may or may or may not happen, both good and bad. It's not just bad things. And then you have to prepare your team for that too. What if your team's just sitting every day discounting beans, measuring what's happening in front of them. You know, they're looking at their toes. They've got all these new systems and all these metrics capabilities and they've got KPI's and they're proudly telling you every Friday, we've got 60. No, we've got 61.

No, we've got 59. Here's a percentage of difference. Meanwhile, your competitors across the street are about to take you out of business. But nobody's looking out there. Nobody even cares about it. All they're doing is making sure they report all this stuff and they're proud to do it. So now that raises another question. for businesses that aren't aware of this situation that they might find themselves in.

Once they finally realize, what can they do? Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what, it sucks if you're reacting to it. Because emotionally, it feels like a gut punch. And like we had a gut punch. I have two companies. I'm in a management holding group. And I have two companies that report to me.

One's a health care company. one's a government contracting company. So when the VACs mandate was announced September 16th of last year, the mandate was the military, health care, and government contracting. And the next day, we did a canvas and we had 60% of about 500 government contracting employees in 21 different locations around the country that said, no, not going to do it. we had got all through the COVID stuff and everything and weathered the storm and suddenly in one speech and I hadn't anticipated.

I had not anticipated that the federal government was going to do that. And then my other company, the health care company. And I had probably 25% of the doctors and nurses said no. So 24 hours after that news conference, I mean, I was looking at everything just completely. collapsing if I couldn't figure out a way to solve that problem. And I had no idea, you know, at the point, at that point in time, whether they were dead serious, whether they were kind of serious, whether they, so they started bumping the deadlines and he started, you know, mess.

So eventually we lost about 15% of the government side and about 5% on the health care side. But I had a battle book. I had a special team that I put together that next morning. And we were doing a census every four. days, putting together reports, we were recruiting to replace all 60% and all 25% and we did that for about three, four months. We were going to two government clients and giving them a copy of the battle book. Here are your contracts. Here are your sites. Here's the impact if we weren't doing anything. Here's what we've done. Here's how many we recruited. Here's how many have said yes to a letter

of intent. I mean, it was like a whole other job for a whole bunch of my people, but we attacked immediately. And, you know, not everybody does that, but I have a lot of experience at this particular kind of stuff. So I just get, and half my team didn't believe me. Half my team said, well, really, you know, we got to do what? Yeah, right now, next morning, this is, this is the time. We get ahead of this thing. Ironically, it all kind of faded away. And just last week, there was a federal court that said that the mandate for federal contractors was unconstitutional. So, okay, but we did what we had to do. We did it the next morning.

We didn't go into denial. We didn't hope it would go away. And we set up communications with my chief medical officer talking to all the people on the government contracting side. We had these night virtual calls so they could ask all the questions because of all the crazy information that was flying around about the vaccines. It was a whole separate job for a while. It was like a big crisis management thing. We had gone all the way through 2020.

and through most of 2021 patting ourselves on the back, we survived. And then wham. So, yeah, it happens. It happens to everybody. It happened to me. And you just have to attack it immediately. It sounds very army right there. Like I can just imagine like a tent or like officers kind of doing like an AAR.

Like, all right, this is what you guys got to do. You need to move out, do it again. Yeah. So is it leader? ship when there's a fire in a theater and somebody, there's always somebody, stands up, yells, calm down, the exits right over there, and everybody calms down and starts to file towards the exit in an orderly direction. That's not an officer. That's somebody, that's human nature. There's always somebody out there that steps up in those moments, right? Most times. So it doesn't have to be an ex-military person. You don't have to have that credential. You just have to have a mindset. that when it happens, like I have five kids. One of my daughters got in a car wreck one night or on two o'clock in the morning when she was in college, and the car was totaled.

And she called her sister first. So her sister comes running into the bedroom saying, you know, she's in an accident. She's in an accident and crying and everything. And my wife grabs a phone. And I grabbed the phone. And I said, real calmly, I said, are you hurt? She said, no. She was sobbing.

She did no. Has anybody else hurt? No. Is the car destroyed? Yes. No big deal. We have insurance. Just relax, chill.

And she did. Half of her anxiety was that she thought she was going to, we were going to hate her or something for destroying the car. Yeah. I mean, your dad. So, you know, but that's what, you know, that's what you do in those situations. You don't, you don't inject more emotion. You stabilize the group.

You calm them down. You have a good sense of humor. you smile, you say, okay, we're going to get over this, guys. You know, so you don't fire them up and get them more jacked up and everything. You say, this is something we are going to solve, and we're going to put our brains, you know, together, and we're going to make this happen. Now, I'm saying that very calmly, but you know, in the military, there's a lot of training with everybody, you know, from, you know, an E4 all the way up to, you know, generals on how to handle battle crisis,

battlefield events and all that. And you hope that everybody does that in the moment. when the bullets start flying, whatever, that they're calm. Not everybody does it. Maybe after their first experience being shot at, they're calmer. Their third one, they're really calm. By the fourth one, you know, they're a stud. You know, they're just walking around, bullets are flying around.

They're going, hey, you get pretty calm down. You get on the radio. Get that, get that wounded guy out. That's, again, kind of human nature, right? We don't train because we can't to real casualties and real battlefield conditions where bad mistakes equal, you know, loss of life. So we could do this. We could create a healthy culture where things are automatic. I mean, with the military, a private all the way up, they all know the ethos,

the ethics, the customs, the courtesies, that automatic, it's the hidden obvious where individuals just collaborate naturally in this little end group. How do we make that happen inside any kind of organization. Yeah. So in the military, it's part DNA because you are talking to people that volunteered for the life, right? And what you also described is essentially the software of a military organization, which is all those things you mentioned plus standard operating procedures for whatever it is you're doing. So everybody knows that when a shot comes from the left, everybody knows in a squad what they're going to do. They know which way they're turning, they know how they're going to react to it. They know what the officer is going to do in a certain

situation because you train to it. There's a certain, some basic football place and basic things you've drilled to, along with all the other things you're talking about, about ethos and loyalty and looking out for each other. And you train your replacement. You're always trying to train everybody up to the highest level because you never know when you have to go. And when you go, you have to go with the guys you've got. So that's different than the commercial world, right? In the commercial world, when you say, I want you to cross-train, I want you to train your replacement, well, job security, that's the first focus people think about. Why would I want to train my replacement?

Not only that. Now, they didn't know that when they got out of high school or college. They were learned. They taught that. They observed that and they learned that as a bad behavior in different organizations and companies before they came to you. But it's a real thing to them. And they are actually fearful when you say, I want you to train your replacement. I want you to train everybody in your accounting team, your sales team, would be as smart as you about this. Then I'm not the smartest person anymore. I've had people say, well, then I would be redundant. No, you wouldn't. You'd be a good leader. and you'd be so much stronger if everybody was more capable. It's just a different mindset.

One, because the DNA is not there. Nobody's working for ABC Corporation because they have a love of God and country and they're willing to put their life on the line for ABC Corporation. And nobody in ABC Corporation is willing to make that same sacrifice for their coworker in Cubicle 47 down the hallway. So you're not going to get that level of commitment. I do apologize. I have my dog just sitting over here and she's like, she's having some dreams right there. I'm like, be quiet. But that's, I didn't think about that with training, like, your replacement. You, inside a company, people have certain set of skills. And that is essentially their job security. I'm a master of this. And that is, I feel like, was what might be holding people back. So would it come down to, again, corporate leadership being, just having that open line of communication.

If we have essentially all these skills that are shared and are utilized, then I know their job, they know my job. So then they don't have to ask me redundant questions and vice versa. Well, think of it this way. If everybody has a cross-training understanding, not only do they have cross-skill sets and knowledge, they also have empathy, that they didn't have before if they were in their stovepipe. The other thing is, if everybody's cross-trained, you have organizational resilience, you have really strong bench strength. You're not open to a single point of failure if somebody quits or goes on vacation. And you can project focus if you need to. You can grab a couple of people instead of the one person you have, put them in a room and have them sit there for two days and solve a problem because they all understand the problem because they've all been trained.

What you were saying before is true, though, it's hard for people, people, not just leaders, but it's hard for people to believe and accept and have faith that the point of the exercise isn't something nefarious. They really do believe that if they're giving up, they're giving up their advantage, their home field advantage essentially. and what they don't understand is that by being more versatile, by being more aware, by being trained in other elements, actually the path either upward mobility or sometimes it's the path to lateral mobility into something that's more fun, more exciting, or even more lucrative. If they don't do any of that, they are where they are and they're only going to move at the pace they can move. And they don't think about that normally. They don't. That's, wow.

Okay, that's cool to hear. that. So by opening, by opening your mind up and it's almost essentially it's a bias that we are afraid of something that is not but perceived real essentially. Right. Now back to communication, if leaders want to create an organization that has all the, you know, all the things we had talked about before on the creativity innovation side, and the communication is facilitating all that, then there also should be a bias by management for this resilience building approach.

Yes. And if they do that, they have to communicate it. And if they communicate it, it has to be genuine. And it's going to take a little while. But once you, it's kind of like a, you know, talk about your dog. It's like a dog that's been abused. You can take it into your home. And it's going to take a while before it trusts a human being again.

It's going to take time. But eventually, two months later, they're running around acting like you raised them from a pup because they trust you. They trust the environment. The repetition of you doing the right thing by them. So the same thing with managers, they have to realize in human nature, you can't just walk in, give an order or give a fancy speech or a PowerPoint presentation. Everybody gets it. They start changing the way they operate. You have to be consistent in building this kind of organization every single day.

You can't go hot and cold. You can't give an open-minded speech about creativity, and then the next day you shut everybody down when they give you an idea. It's got to be, you've got to walk the walk the whole way. And in time, the employees will, they'll realize that this is real, at least at this company it's real, in this organization it's real, and they will start to warm up and they will start to participate. Is that how you prevent employee disengagement?

Yeah, I mean, just think of the empathy part of the whole equation. it's so much more human for me to understand why Susie or Johnny to my left or my right are having such a hard or bad day when they tell me, well, we've got this financial forecast we've got to get out or we've got the sales report that's due. And then you start thinking, well, if you're a good person, you start thinking, I wonder if there's any way I can help. And if you don't know how to help, you say maybe to the manager, is there some way I can help? I have a little less on my plate this week because empathy causes human beings to care. And caring human beings, you usually want to know, how can I help?

And you can't be disengaged in that mindset. Let's go deeper. Let's go deeper than that. There's different types of leadership styles. We have laissez-faire where they're just standing in the background. Just like, yeah, just do that. I know. I appreciate you.

But, I mean, if I have that kind of leader, I know I'm not going to be motivated every day because I like just hear that, a little speech to get me going, you know? Yeah, I'm not really big on speeches. I think I went through my speech phase, maybe when I was a young officer. And because I was giving speeches to hardened, seal, enlisted guys, the facial expressions pretty much shut me down from doing that anymore. like really. We don't need a speech. That speech is in our head every day when we wake up. We don't need that.

And then I stopped that. And that was me trying to figure out, you know, how to be an officer. And then I realized that what people really need, just like families need, is firm parental guidance, some boundaries in a way to communicate within the family. So what I do is I usually come in, and it was harder when we had everybody gone during COVID. but I come in and I interact with everybody in the building that I bump into in a personal way. And not because I'm trying to memorize their kids' names or anything. It's nothing superficial like that. It's just that I recognize they're a human being and they see that I know who they are.

So that's one good step of leader can do. All good military guys do that, right? They know their guys. Yes. So that's what I was trying to hit on the head is that the speech, essentially is the source. So you have the source, but some employees don't, and that's where they're going to lane on the leadership to provide that source for them to get them to do what they need to do. Yeah, I think a good sense of humor, listening. And the other thing is,

if you listen as a leader, you get the same kind of empathy feed that I was talking about before. It's just a different, it's not co-worker to co-worker. The other thing you do is you walk around. You can see people that are stressed. You can see people where the wheels are wobbling a little bit. You can collect a lot of tells. And if there's, in my case, there's other layers of management leaders and all that stuff between me and the people I'm saying hi to in the morning.

I will pull that leader aside and say, hey, you know, I think there's something going on here. And it might be personal, it might be professional. Are they overloaded? Do they need more help? does the leader know that they're stressed out? And if it's something that's personal, is it something we can do to alleviate some of the stress? And, you know, on and on and on.

So these are things you can observe as a leader and you can have an interaction if you understand your people, if you're willing to walk around and get a little bit of a gauge on what Joey's like on a good day or a bad day. If you never talk to me, you don't know. And if you wait for a formal moment, guess what? You get Joey's best face. at Joey's TV personality.

They're going to come on because the CEO's walked up to them and they're going to get very formal, professional, and they're going to smile, yes, sir, and you walk away, then they're going to go back to their real state of mind. So you have to be able to see and walk around and listen and absorb, but you also then have to interact in a more informal way, and then for a short period of time and walk away. So they're used to it, and you start to really see the nature of their personality. Now, if I'm doing it as a CEO, and there's 10 people between me. and this person, all 10 of those people should be doing the same thing.

So there's no way that those employees don't believe that their leadership team is aware of what's going on professionally. And if there's a personal problem that's impacting their professional performance, it should be observable, and therefore there can be some kind of intervention or assist. And that shows that you're empathetic and you care. You're part of a team. You're part of a family kind of thing. the only time I've ever given speeches or probably in the last couple years is if there's some rumor about something

that just doesn't seem to be controllable I'll pull everybody together and I'll say here's what's going on here's the deal it's not a raw raw speech it's just clarity I'm straightforward yeah and remember experienced employees like seals they can read through the

the BS rah-rah political speech in 10 seconds. So you have to be very careful trying to invent a motivational moment because it usually falls flat. Yes, it's usually the first two or three sentences, and there's definitely a lot of keywords that you have to use in order to get that to actually hit off right otherwise. I mean, employee disengagement. Yeah.

The other thing is, if you're going to have a town hall type, have somebody take notes for you listen engage listen engage listen engage don't make promises don't make any decisions and don't try to solve the problem while you're standing on your feet absorb all of it one that shows that you're really serious about what they're saying you're not just kicking out some some band-aid to make them feel right or feel better in the moment they'll appreciate that and and then let everybody vent even if it gets a little crazy, let them vent. I've had leaders tried, you know, they almost

want to shut somebody down because they're getting a little edgy and I'm like, no, no, you know, don't do that. I want this, I want, and like a lot of times what happens is, they just need a event. It's not, it's a level 10 problem and then after they vented, it's a level one

or two problem. And they've solved it for themselves. They just wanted me to hear, or they wanted their leaders to hear what they're going through. That's all. They just wanted somebody give a shit, you That's it. Beautiful. Tell us about your books.

So I've got two different kinds of books. I've got nine novels. The novels are in two different series. One is a time travel. It's called the Time Warrior Saga's. There's four books in that series. And the other one is about the SEAL teams. That's five books.

The fifth one just came out this summer. All the proceeds of my novels go to the SEAL Veterans Foundation. And that goes to a program that focuses on. PTSD and TBI and TBI. And then my two business books, Be Nimble and Be Visionary, Be Visionary comes out in, it's on Amazon right now for pre-sell.

It comes out January 1st of 23. Beinimble's been out since January of this year. And those two books are basically like my business books and consulting support kind of books. And I think I described the first one earlier and be visionaries about how to come up with a vision, how to build a team that can help you take the vision from a concept and turn it into a business, kind of a business model, case study, and then how to pitch that thing to the resource side of

the equation, whether it's internal or, you know, you could be even venture capital. And then using the naysayers, the people that always see, you know, pie in the sky as a waste of time, use them actually as your filter to attack what you've put together, see if they can punch holes in it. because usually they'll come up with some very good practical observations that you have to fix before you get to the resource pitch because they'll look at it and they'll turn it around 360 and they'll find those holes. So you can use the creative people, the optimistic, the visionary people, and you can also use the people that are kind of stuck in the mud and don't believe in change and all that because they both have a purpose in that. It's kind of the yin and the yang of putting it all together. No, that's beautiful. we're going to transition to wrap up and I'm going to ask you just simple questions and you can just provide me some what easiest insight that comes to mind.

So with that team that you've created in the beginning right when COVID kick off, what did they, what was the, what do they comprise of whom? What types of people? The senior leaders of the companies, both the financial side and the operational side, the chairman of my board and that was about it in the early stages and then the and a chief medical officer

on my health care side who was very insightful obviously he ended up being on the governor of Virginia's COVID task force within about a month after COVID hit so that was a very that was a very insightful person to be in that group

but because we prepared the way I've been describing through this interview, they expected me to pull everybody together. They expected me to ask them, okay, what are your thoughts, what are your insights, what do you think we should do? And, you know, we sent everybody home.

And at the time, I think we had about 65 people in the headquarters office out of about back then I think we had about 800 total employees all around. Now we're closer to 1,000. And then we started managing and monitoring.

and, you know, anticipating and figuring out how do we beat this. So if COVID was going to compress sales or compress performance, we had to actually accelerate market penetration and growth to offset it, which we ended up doing. We ended up like a 2 or 3% growth rate in 2020 and 21 on the healthcare side with a 25% compression in our base business because of COVID. So we had like a 27% growth rate, but we only realized about a two to three percent because of the and and they worked really hard to do that

rather than just hunkering down hoping it went away you know bunkering up and all those things and i didn't come up with that that idea you know out of out of whole cloth that was the collaboration of everybody thinking about well how do we do this what if this what if this downturn continues remember it's like two weeks to the it was going to be a two week deal when it's over uh we took it we took it like this isn't going to go away. How do we reinvent ourselves, reimagine what we're doing it, how we're doing it? So that's what we did in that particular situation. Beautiful. Now, what have you noticed with companies you've worked with in the past and currently with underutilizing this global connection that we all have now? We have the virtual channel where we can

connect anywhere. What are we not doing? I'll give you an example. I'm on the board of a nonprofit called Best Robotics, and we went through a process early this year, three, four-hour strategic sessions. Best has been around for 30 years. And instead of just kind of breathing our own air and tossing around ideas with the same people that have been discussing ideas forever, The executive director brought in people that were world-class experts in certain aspects of what we were looking at. We had a professor from Tel Aviv University. We had a professor from a university in Canada.

We had a McKenzie expert out of Stockholm. Because guess what? In this format, like you and I are sharing, there's no travel costs. And all they had to do is be willing to provide their insights, which they did in like a PowerPoint presentation. presentation and then be available for a big exchange with the board members and everything. So that's probably the way to do it. You can crowdsource at any level you want to, and you can crowdsource by niche. You can find, look up and find every physicist in a particular country or every physicist

working on a particular kind of question in physics, and you can put out a blanket email to a thousand of them, and you're probably going to get three or four of they're going to answer and say, absolutely, I'm willing to participate. So you just have to not be, one, you have to be conscious that that's a resource out there. Two, most people are willing to help and they get challenged by questions like this. And they want to get involved. They want to see if they can solve the problem and help you solve the problem. So never be reluctant to do it.

Make sure you're aware and open-minded to do that. And by all means, put, you know, know how to do my landscaping better. I want to know how to get rid of moles in my yard. You can get all that information everywhere. Everybody in the universe is going to help you. And all you need is like a tenth of one percent out of the whole global population of mole experts. And you've got more information than you need.

That's beautiful. So two more questions. And I will let you go. What kind of leader does an organization need right now? I think we've described a lot of the characteristics and attributes. If you are a. If you're stuck in the mud, if you are using the same football plays you've always used, because they've worked, and you're not looking at another way to do things, you're probably already in trouble. You just don't know it yet.

You're one crisis that you haven't anticipated away from failing in a big way. So you need leaders that do all things we talked about. You need open-minded leaders, leaders that are looking all around them, 360 degrees, for each. insights and ideas, you know, asymmetrical approaches to problem solving. You know, obviously, you look inside your organization for that, but you have to become a student of your industry. You have to become a student of the commercial environment, the financial environment, both globally, nationally, regionally. You have to do all those things. And you have to be 100%, as you would say in the military, your head's on a swivel, right?

Yes. We've hit it on that. We've hit it on that. head. How can our audience get in touch with you if they want to learn more? You just go to Marty Strong, be nimble.com. There's access to all my books, articles, a lot of other things there. Beautiful. Well, Marty, I do appreciate you coming on the show today. Thanks for having me. Thanks for joining us on this adventure of growth and discovery. If you're ready to achieve a sustainable transformation, don't forget to hit that

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