Hello, everyone. Jonathan Kirschner here.
This is a podcast about leadership, and I'm here today
with Jamie Ramsden. Surprise.
He's become a regular on the show, which I'm delighted.
And we have Ken Roberts, who is the president of Atlas
Roofing. With a podcast about leadership,
we could obviously talk for several hours, probably daily
about our fascinations with leadership, theory of
leadership, leadership science, and some of the incredible
research that's going on around leadership.
But this is a podcast that talks about applied leadership.
We wanna hear from actual leaders who are in it.
And so we have Ken here today who is in it.
And Ken is the president of Atlas Roofing Company.
So it's one of America's leading building materials
manufacturers, thirty three plants and counting in North
America. And and Ken's had a thirty
year career at Masco Corporation prior.
He served as president of Delta Faucet, president of Masco
Canada, and vice president of international sales and Asian
business. He started his career at GE's
aircraft engine division and holds degrees from Rose Hallman
Institute of Technology and Northwestern University.
He's also serving as president of ARMA, the Asphalt Roofing
Industry's National Trade Association.
And then, of course, we have our household name here, Jamie
Ramsden, who himself, a former CEO turned CEO coach and
coaches many CEOs and senior executives.
We have the pleasure of working together at AIR Consulting.
And Jamie is the author of of a really, you know, well known
book, Let's Go, How Great Leaders Shape the Future.
And, it's fantastic to have you here, because in addition
to being a great guy, you're also Ken's coach, which is
just fantastic. So thank you, Jamie and Ken,
for being on the show today. What's the hardest decision,
Ken? The hardest decision you've had
to make since taking the helm at Atlas?
Okay. It's a two part question.
Hardest decision you've had to make, and what has it taught
you about leadership? Sure.
By the way, first of all, thanks for thanks for having me.
This is this is a first time thing for me.
I'm really looking forward to it.
I've been fortunate. There haven't, so far we haven't
had to make a lot of gut wrenching decisions at Atlas in
my time there. But during my time at Delta, we
did several and probably the one that comes to mind as it
relates to leadership is during the follow-up to COVID
when supply chains became just a complete snarl, we got to a
point where, we were just so backlogged and backed up in
our our supply chain that we could hardly get anything
through. Our lead times were stretched
out. We couldn't service our
customers. And we were working on it.
And I usually like to delegate to the subject matter experts
on my team. And we kind of got to a point
where they were just looking at me saying, Ken, we don't know
what to do. And so that was a really hard
decision, but what we ended up doing is I said, okay, what
we're gonna do is we're gonna take about, we're gonna take
about fifteen percent of the items that we make and we're not
gonna sell them for the next one hundred and twenty days.
No new orders. We had, and it was hard
because we had no data to suggest that this was gonna be
the right approach or how people would react to it.
It was just kind of a gut feel coming from my experience,
having worked in supply chain earlier in my career and just
seeing that people, we needed a direction.
And so we did it. And it ended up working out.
Our customers respected us because we just kind of went to
them and said, look at, this is something, we're gonna do
something to fix this thing. But the part that really taught
me about leadership was it was a moment where my people were,
despite having all of their best efforts, were looking at me
saying, we're out of gas, we're out of ideas, and boss,
we need you to help us. And even though I had no data
and no analysis and even within a company like Delta, which is
very much into structured problem solving and analysis
based decision, I just had to kind of make a gut decision in
the moment and then own it. And and to go forward then and
say, and by the way, this is gonna work.
I'm highly confident even though behind the scenes, I was
kinda like, I really hope this works, because the team just
needed something to get rallied around, and and that
helped in the end. Yeah.
Oh my gosh. I love that example.
And I I think back you know, I'm I'm a CEO myself, and I
think about decisions that I've had to make.
And when you have the luxury of different data streams and being
able to write up a thesis and saying, here's the evidence for
why we're going to do what we're going do.
And here's and to be able to to to show that to everyone and
to rally around that plan, that's that's one kind of
decision. And the other is like, okay.
I've got about, you know, fifty five to sixty percent of the
data I need. I'm maybe if I spend another,
you know, four months, I can get, like, another fifteen
percent. But, like, I'm not getting above
seventy percent of of data. And so, ultimately, I'm gonna
need to I'm gonna have to make a call and lean into my
experiential wisdom and my intuition.
And that is a different type of weight on your shoulders than
being able to say, here's here's the thesis.
Right? The the data driven thesis.
Jamie, if you supply chain is I mean, you were immersed in
supply chain back in the day. Yeah.
It just makes me think about this.
You know, I always think about that there's a couple of times
where you really where leadership being in a
leadership role really forces you to have courage.
And I think this is what we're talking about.
One is the courage of decision making, where you might be in a
novel or a new situation, you don't have all the
information, and people are looking to you as they
invariably do and saying, 'Okay, well where do we go from
here?' That in itself, even if you have
a clear eye of where it's going, you can't control all the
variables that are at play. It does take a certain amount
of courage, especially if you're trusting your instincts, if
you're trusting your lived experience that may not apply
here. There's another one that I
sometimes think of as well, which is the courage once
you've set something in motion and it isn't going the way you
think it is. And I'd be interested to see if
that happened in in this particular case, but where you
have the courage to stick with something that you've already
done. And I think those are two areas
where just hearing Ken talk that made me think about the
courage that's required sometimes to be in a
leadership role. If the trajectory is in the
right direction, the courage to say, no, this is the right
choice. Yeah.
And in your case, that played out.
It did. No.
I see that with, you know, some some of our clients where
they're they're putting together a transformation plan.
And then, you know, the quarterly earnings come out and,
you know, stocks tanked, it's like, we need time.
This can't just happen immediately.
Next quarter comes out, stock takes another hit.
It's like, this is our long term plan, and it's a it is such
a pressure cooker for leadership to stand by a
committed strategy, but also know where to adapt as well.
There's also a piece around that.
So where to stay firm, where to adapt, you know, especially
when the results don't don't quite you know, it takes time
for the results to come. Sometimes it takes time.
And the other thing that came to mind for me is indecision.
Right? So when there isn't the sort of
adequate level of courage, we can just say, we're not gonna
make a decision. And that that could be pretty
dangerous. Delta has a very deep catalog
of products that go across luxury to commercial,
etcetera. Over at that time, I think,
probably twenty thousand items in the catalog going from
memory. So a lot.
And as and the supply chain for, like, for most companies
stretches all the way across the ocean to China.
And so what was happening is with all of the disruptions, you
had back orders of all of these products, and it just got
to where people didn't know what do we make first.
You know? What and so you can imagine
everything's trying to go through, you know, you think
about it, logs going over a dam. All the logs were trying to go
over the dam at the same time, so none of the logs were going
over the dam. And to a good example is, Delta
had at that time a piece of software that scheduled the
factories. And it normally for an eight
for the for each shift, it takes about, let's say, an hour for
the software to create the schedule.
Well, all of a sudden, was taken eight hours for the software
to create the schedule for the next eight hours.
And I was think I was starting to think, well, what happens if
it takes ten hours to get it? You can't get the schedule done.
So it was just it was just this huge log jam.
And so by by doing this, we what we basically did is we just
took that huge long tail and just cut it off and said, those
logs are no longer gonna try and go over the dam.
And we're just gonna focus on the high volume items that
most people need. And the theory that that that
should help to just get stuff through and then eventually you
can get things cleaned up. And, like I said, it was very
difficult for me to do this because as a trained engineer,
you know, I'm trained to like look at data, do analysis, you
know, maybe simulation, but there was no time for that
because as I mentioned, our whole team was saying, we need
action. And I realized that some
action that made sense right now was gonna be a lot better than
some really elegant analyzed plan later.
And so that's why I just went with kind of the gut.
So I can when you think back, you know, you roll back over the
past, say, year career. Right?
You were at GE, thirty years at Masco running various
businesses, now at Atlas. Walk us through the journey
and what were the inflection points you know, where you
became a a fundamentally different leader?
Maybe you could help us understand that.
Sure. I I would yeah.
I'd love to. So, yes, I started it out of
undergraduate, out of engineering school.
I started it at GE, And I was part of what some people, most
people would know as the Edison program if they know GE,
although that wasn't exactly what it was called, where you
rotate through. GE was a great company to work
for. They poured training into me.
I was there for three years and decided I wanted to go back to
graduate school. And that was if you remember
the Berlin Wall fell and you remember the peace dividend.
I like to tell people I'm a walking example of the peace
dividend because GE started ramping down when defense
spending ramped down and they were offering people a package
to take a voluntary layoff to go back to school.
And I wanted to, so as a match made in heaven, I left GE and
and I went to Northwestern. And so out of, Northwestern,
then I landed at Masco at Delta Faucet Company, a division
of Masco, and that's where I was for the next thirty years,
basically. But I'll I'll put I'll key in
on three transitions that I think that had the most impact
on me as a leader. And the first one was my first
coaching assignment. So I was a very, I'd like to
think a diamond in the rough, but very in the rough when I
was say a thirty year old. And the first turning point
for me was actually where I got asked if I would like to work
with a coach. And I said, of course, I said
yes. And part of that was at that
age, I was actually not apolitical.
I was anti political because I just felt that doing things that
politically oriented was so dirty that if something came up
that might become political, I would do something opposite of
that just to avoid the appearance, you know, which and
so one of the key things was kind of learning learning to
compromise a little bit. My coach said, hey, look, Ken,
this is the reality. Politics are a fact of working
in an organization and you don't have to like it and you don't
have to engage in it. But if you don't do some a
little bit, you will limit where you're gonna go in your
career. Actually, that was one of many
things that he said that caused me to think a lot and to think
deeply, but that was probably the biggest one because I had
to go home and do some soul searching, and I created my
rules of engagement on how I was gonna engage in politics
without compromising what I felt was my soul.
How's that? And so that was a major
turning point in life. The second one was I had an
opportunity. I spent the first ten plus
years at Delta in supply chain and operations.
And the president at the time pulled me aside and said, Ken, I
think you could lead a business someday, but you need
commercially facing experience.
And so we would like to offer you a sales leadership role.
I'd never worked in sales. So I stepped into a role where
I was leading a group of veteran salespeople who obviously knew
way more than me, and I had to figure out how to deal how to
do that, and how to gain their respect and trust and then to go
on to lead them. And that taught me so many
things about, you know, how to engage with a culture that's
different than yours, how to how to establish followership, and
so many other things. The third one was my first GM
role where you you can feel like I had relatively large jobs as
a as a functional leader, but there you know, the old saying,
the cliche, it's lonely at the top.
Yeah. That's where you started to
feel it at the GM level. Yes.
And on top of that, you start to feel the weight of you really
do start to kinda feel the weight of the business because
before I was responsible for making sure I did my job
right. But when I became a GM at this
business, Masco division, which was was smaller, but all of a
sudden I had about, I think, three hundred and fifty people
who wanted to have a good career and a, you know, a secure
employment. And to a certain extent, their
fates were riding on my shoulders.
And, you know, you start to feel that keenly when you're in
the big chair. So, you know, there's this, I
think, misnomer or or misconception that leaders
sometimes have that they need to be the smartest one in the
room. That they need to be the ones
that the clear alpha. And yet, we've talked a lot
about humility on this podcast. And I'm curious, what's your
perspective on humility, and how does it fit into leadership?
Sure. Well, I've I've like to maybe
preface that with a a more philosophical statement.
Actually, one of the best business books I ever read was
by a gentleman. I think his last name is
Farson. It's from the nineties.
The book's called Management of the Absurd, and it really
plays off of the the contradictions that are involved
in being a leader, the contradictory things that are
involved in being a leader. But I wanna go back to that.
But what I mean by bringing that up is, and I'll before I
answer your question directly, is I believe that leadership
is very context dependent. So you don't ever get to just
be one way. So you're talking about being
the smartest guy in the room or kind of being, I'll call it
alpha versus maybe more reserved.
And I would say, I believe sometimes you have to have to
play that role. Like I said, you know, this time
when we had this supply chain thing, I I didn't solicit input.
I, you know, I I didn't solicit input.
I didn't go around and build a coalition.
I saw the team was struggling. I stand up stood up and said,
we're gonna cut off a bunch of our SKUs and we're gonna make
this happen starting in whatever next week, and we're
gonna do it for one hundred and twenty days.
You know? Anybody in the room that can't
live with that? No?
Okay. Great.
Go execute. Right?
That's not my default state by by a long shot.
I believe, though, the eighty twenty rule, the eighty percent
of the time, one is I fundamentally all the time
believe that if you're the, in any specific topic that you're
addressing with your team as the CEO, if you're the smartest
guy in the room, you have not done a very good job building
your team. How's that?
I like to tell my team, look at guys, at this point in my
career, I've done a lot of stuff, so I'm an inch deep and
a mile wide. So anything you want to talk
about, I can intelligently engage with you.
But any topic that comes up, like in within my executive
team, somebody in the room is gonna be smarter than me about
that topic than me. And I I think that's a a
fundamental truism of being an effective leader.
If you're the smartest guy in the room, you probably haven't
done a great job hiring. I I I think that's quotable.
It's beautiful. I'm gonna write that, down
somewhere on my desk. I just wanted to add into that
as well. This can't you know, I just
wanna differentiate or define maybe between humility, which
you can have if you are still the smartest person in the room.
It's just how that would show up for you, how it would show up
for the people around you. And again, we make this mistake
sometimes as leaders of thinking that we think we can
see the outcome and we might just be leading people there,
but genuine humility is, well, let me stay open to this idea.
Let me actually start a debate or a conversation and actually
facilitate it and see where we might end up.
We might end up with a better solution than I would have come
up with on my own. But I also want to just talk
specifically about Ken because he's incredibly humble.
And I would say my work with him has shown that he's somebody
who's intrinsically motivated. And I think that would be
really interesting, like how you're working with
salespeople who are generally, as the archetype or the
stereotype would say, extrinsically motivated.
They want to ring the bell and high five and get the watch in
the car parking spot and all that.
Whereas, so I would imagine that would have been a very
interesting challenge for you. It's like how you're having to
operate out of type. And I think it just reinforces
the point that Ken has made is that you'll have preferences
and predispositions as a leader. If you don't see them, you'll
just default to them and there will be wake in the organization
that people will have to navigate you may not even see.
But if you are then able to be aware about, number one, your
cognitive capabilities, whether I am the subject matter expert
here and how do I compensate for that or mitigate for it?
Or in the team dynamic, what my role is, what the situation is
calling for. That self awareness then
allows you to step back. You don't have to feel like
the obligation. You still feel the
responsibility. If you're conscientious, you
will. But you don't necessarily feel
the obligation to do the work. You can step back and take a
beat and organize and orchestrate systems and
mechanisms or processes that will lead you to a successful
outcome. Yeah.
You know, it just triggered for me the word sense making,
which you talk a lot about in your in your book.
And, you know, obviously, that's, like, an important
faculty that you have to have throughout your life, and
that's what we do. We make meaning.
We make sense of things. But probably, you know, as it
pertains to what we're talking about right now, and like, so
imagine you are the smartest guy in the room, but being able
to read the context and know when is it appropriate for you
to chime in versus empowering your teammate, you know, or or
or how to leverage. And I do want to talk about
team and your philosophy on team at some point because, know,
very, very interested in that topic of of building high
performing teams. But how to be a sense maker in
real time and be very selective about what aspects of yourself
you're actually exerting versus restraining, right, I think is
a really interesting you know, that's a that's a muscle
actually that I would say you ought to build as a as a leader.
There's a whole question in the sort of leadership sciences,
if you will. You know, are you sort of born
a leader, or are you you sort of made a leader?
And, obviously, I'm sure there's some combination of of nature
and nurture. But what would you say to
people who think you're either born a leader or not?
Yeah. Like you said, the old nature
nurture. So, you know, I was a runner
in all through college, and and I was a respectable runner.
I ran division three at a division three school.
Right? It was a combination.
I had some talent, and I worked hard at it, and I became
respectable. But I was, I think, two and a
half minutes slower on a five ks than the current world record
holder. So I could have practiced
twenty four hours a day and never have beat that world
record because at the end of the day, that person has inherent
capabilities he was born with I don't have.
So that being said, that's the nature part.
But but I do believe leadership is more nurture than nature.
It is the a lot of these skills can be taught.
I do believe, though. I would say, though, to a
certain extent, if you're some people that are natural born
leaders, of course, it's like some people are naturally
bored to play basketball. You just put a ball in their
hand and they're good. But for people who are not, I
think something that is a requirement to learn that, to go
through the nurture successfully is is to be have
some self awareness and coachability.
Because you're gonna have to spend a lot of time looking in
the mirror honestly saying, where am I where are the gaps
in my leadership skills, and and what am I gonna go do to to,
fill those? I've worked with hundreds of
leaders all over the world, and one thing that really defines
or delineates Ken diff differently from them is the
ability to be able to take on feedback and to make the
adjustments, really. Even amongst the CEOs that I
work with. I'm chuckling because the first
time when we first started working together, said, oh, what
sort of what kind of assessments do you have?
What kind of psychometric or other And you had like a dozen
that you had gone and solicited from the organisation
or they'd given to them. I was like, oh, wow, I've
never really seen this much.' So we had so much data to play
around with. And during our process where
typically people are going to say, okay, well, I'm successful.
I'm ambitious. I'm driven.
I've got my own systems and processes that work for me.
And so, you know, what what do I need coaching for?
What do I need to be better for? And at the end of the day,
still to this day, Ken will be like, well, what's the
feedback? What's the adjustment?
Not in a way that is, like, you know, sort of centrally
anxious driven or, like, you know, I'm worried about
something, but just I would love to be the best that I can
possibly be. And to his credit, he does it
even to this day. And I think that to anybody
who's, you know, listening to this or watching this and
thinks about how am I gonna be successful if they're early
stage career or mid stage career.
It really is that willingness to go and find out information
about yourself that you may not like the sound of and to
make an appropriate context appropriate adjustment in order
to be able to lead better. Yeah.
Okay. So here here's where, so say
you do all of that. Right?
You, you're you're open and humble and coachable and, and
eager, right, to grow. And then you become a successful
leader in a certain context. Right?
So you come into a various contexts.
It could be a turnaround context.
It could be, like, a maintenance context.
It could be like a low growth context.
It could be like we're scaling context.
It could be Highly political context.
The highly political context. It's gonna be a volatile
context. It's happened.
But but you you achieve somehow as and, know, you
obviously see this all the time.
I see this all the time, you know, as an executive coach of
leaders. And and the leader achieves
some degree of mastery in that context, and then the context
changes. And the leader either falls on
their face, or or just goes sideways or becomes, like,
increasingly vulnerable to some sort of, like,
ineffectiveness or derailment at at the extreme.
So, you know, what I'm what I'm curious about is, especially
Ken, given like the various contexts that you've been in,
how how do you adapt your leadership as you go from
context to context? You know, what's the help us
understand how you did it. Well, if I were gonna put a
bumper sticker on it, I would say it's the old saying, what
got you where you are won't take you where you wanna go.
And so when you drop in so I'm very intentional when I step
into a new role. Actually, another one of my
favorite books, I don't know if you'd call it a business book,
but one of my like, I have a a list.
I have a group of about five books that are really meaningful
to Essentials. That are the essentials.
Yeah. I'm not a huge business book
reader, but one of them is seven habits of highly successful
people. I think it's timeless.
And, you know, one of the one of the first few habits in there
is seek first to understand. And to me, in a nutshell, that's
that's how you manage context switching is when you step into
a new role. I mean, I will say if you step
in, if you step in, if you're taking over as captain of a
new ship and the ship's just been hit by a torpedo and it's
taking on water and it's on fire there's planes there, you get
attacked by airplanes, you're not gonna have time to do a
seek first understand. You just gotta be a wartime
general. Right?
Yeah. But generally, that's not what
happens when you take over in a leadership position.
And therefore, I would say first job job one in a new role
is to go in and understand what really are the levers that
drive the success of this role, and how are they similar
or different to what you did the last time, and learn those
levers. And that's, know, that's, I
mean, kind of in a nutshell, what I'd say philosophically.
Well, the interesting thing is how tempting it is not to seek
to understand and to prove yourself right out of the
gates because, you know, here, you've gotten this this fancy
job and everybody's counting on you.
And so I'm gonna run my playbook that worked for me in
my previous context. To me, that's like nine times
out of ten, you know, maybe six times out of ten.
There's a there's a high degree of a failure rate there.
It's very tempting. And actually, I I remember
there was a book that explicitly said, hey.
Look. What you need to do when you
step into a new leadership role is you need to accomplish
something in the first sixty days that you can put on the
board and say, look at what Quick win?
Yeah. Is that what it's called?
Quick win. Yeah.
And and Really?
Yeah. Right.
Well, I mean, I can but I can I I can see why?
Right? Because you're a establisher,
and you're I mean, it is extremely uncomfortable to go
into an organization, say, for ninety days.
I remember reading the first ninety days.
You know, at the time, you know, when I walked into our
organization, we were in crisis. And so this idea of sort of
taking time and speaking to people and This is back when
you were in the hot seat. When I was in the hot seat.
Yeah. And I was like, okay.
That that doesn't apply to my current context.
And I think that sometimes when we think about sort of framing
that we get or sort of themes and patterns that we can see
from the consulting worlds, they can be very valuable,
right? If situation is normal.
My flip on that, and this is something that I used when I
was in my role, was the last one hundred days.
And that really helped me to, again, we come back to the
courage to be able to push back on the organisation because
everyone's expecting you to jump in and make your mark and
leave a stamp and all that kind of stuff.
But actually it does take courage to be able say, Well,
hang on a minute, folks. And I don't know when that
last one hundred days might be. It may be in one hundred days'
time. Yeah.
But but for me, what was grounding for me when I
stepped into the role is to think about, well, what's the
legacy I wanna leave? And, you know, how do I want to
have affected the people that I've worked with?
And if I can do that, then everything else that happens
will just happen. Yeah.
You know? It was a very it it could sound
like it's, you know, okay. Well, you're you're thinking
about almost like business mortality.
Like, you know, at some point, you're not gonna be here.
But actually, it was very, very liberating for me to be able
to say, what is my last hundred days gonna look like?
And then you can sort of reverse engineer What are the
things that we need to do today?
And we'll do those. What are the things that we
don't need to do today? Because not because they don't
need to be done, but because there's a sequencing or a
prioritization behind that. And we will get to that when
the time is right. And actually sometimes as you
evolve through your ninety day cycles, those things actually
drop off and they're not relevant.
And you didn't see it at the time, or you weren't aware of
the time, or circumstances evolved.
And so that actually allowed us to create a sort of
essentialism around the work that we did too.
So that was one thing I was going to say about- I love that.
Last hundred days versus the first ninety days.
The second thing I'm going to say, which I think we may have
skipped over here is, Ken, you talked about the GE program,
which for me is always the the absolute benchmark of the
greatest leadership program that I have seen.
Is it at Crotonville? And it's the six month rotation.
Four different places, four different functions.
Right. Okay.
GE used to do this. Some organizations still do it
today. Don't know if GE does.
No matter where you sit in the organization.
You go through six month rotations, four different
places, four different functions.
So you might be in Singapore doing marketing for six months.
You may then go to, you know, Australia to do operations.
You might go into supply chain in Canada anyway.
And so that is a very sound grounding.
But even if you don't go on that program, GE at the time was
one of the best places to learn about leadership, without
a doubt. But then also the second thing,
so if people have had that kind of experience, because that
does force you, it's a forcing function.
Even if you're not in a turnaround, it forces you to
say, Okay, now I'm managing a sales group and I'm not a
salesperson. So what do I have to do
differently? Or I might be managing people
who are ten, fifteen years older than me, then what do I do?
And these are almost forcing functions that accelerate your
leadership learning in a way that you wouldn't if you stayed
in the same division. We'll also add to that the
second thing that I see. So if people have had that kind
of experience where they've gone outside of their function
at early stage, that builds the ability to make better
decisions as you move up because you can see the context.
You can see all the variables that are in play.
Even if you're not the subject matter expert, you can see
different aspects of why people are coming from where
they're coming from. And then you can understand
which one takes priority and make better organizational
decisions as a result. The second thing would be most
of the great leaders that I have worked with have had some
experience outside of the country, because managing in
Asia is not the same as managing in the US, or even managing
different parts of the US is not the same, or in Canada.
What you see in those circumstances, and this really
actually at a physical level, this changes your neuroplastic.
It changes the way that your brain is not just the way you
think, but actually the way your brain is constructed, which
is you look at transportation. I'll give you an example of
like transportation, if you go to work in Brussels versus
going to work in Washington DC. Okay.
You go from work to home and home back again.
But the transportation network, the ecosystem is completely
different in those two places. Right?
One might be car based, one might be trans you know, one
might be, trams, one might be trains, one might be rail.
The same thing with groceries, like when I buy my groceries.
The same thing with education, where do I train my and so what
we see is that there are many, many different ways to get the
same thing done. And that in a way changes the
way that you think, so it makes you a better problem solver.
It makes you a better decision maker, I think.
Those are the two hallmarks of great leaders that I have
worked with, is that they typically have gone through
some kind of rotation that put them out of their comfort zone
early on, and that they've spent some time outside and then
come back in again. There's a piece of research
that talks about accelerating into the CEO role, one of them
is that people took on assignments that either
something that's broken or something they needed to turn
around or something that was completely outside of their
comfort zone. Typically I have the stereotype
or the phenotype of a salesperson, then people
think, well, you're to be focused in sales.
And you might run that pipe all the way up to a certain point
where you realize you've missed out all these other dimensions.
It could be operations, supply chain, finance, marketing.
And a great organization, the decision making either in the
lower levels or at the top of the organization needs to take
into consideration all of those things.
And then help us just understand, like, what's the
value of of of a coach at this stage, know, when you're
president. Yeah.
Well, this is actually the second time I've worked with
Jamie. So I'll I'll just give you the
reason for both because they're two different reasons.
So so by the way, so I'm I'm a, by nature, a highly
introverted people person. Actually, one of these
assessments they did once was this company.
It was I don't remember it was it wasn't plan nine.
That's a bad movie. It was something like the
ninth house. It was ninth house is the main
ninth house. Yeah.
They went they put us all through that, and they did this
big assessment. And and in their database, I
scored in the oneth percentile for extraversion.
Yes. So my point being, I For
introversion. For introversion.
So the I was one yeah. So I'm totally on the end of
the scale for it, for being an introvert.
Point being, I therefore, I much prefer and am best at building
relationships one on one. Like, if I can get you off and
go have dinner with you, we're probably good.
By the same token, I'm highly uncomfortable in trying to get
to know people in a large group setting.
It's my worst scenario. The cocktail party is my worst
scenario, right? So I went from Masco, Canada,
where it was, like I said, it was about one hundred and
eighty hourly, one hundred and eighty salaried.
So I had about one hundred and eighty people.
And, you know, there's this saying that in a village of
one hundred and fifty people or less, you can build
relationships just by knowing everybody.
And that's what I did. But then I went to Delta, which
was over two thousand employees, and I recognized
there were gonna be a whole group of people at Delta that
the only thing they the only way they ever got to know Ken
Roberts was through what they saw in the town halls.
And I recognize that was that was my backhand.
So actually that was a big part of our first engagement was,
hey, help me, Jamie, help me to learn how to to never be
great, but how can I be better at breaking through and creating
a connection with people when all I'll ever do is be able to
be in these large group settings?
So that was that one. The one that I'm what we're
working on now is I'm actually in a position where I
actually, the at Atlas, I really have four four businesses
reporting to me, and each one of them is run by a general
manager or Okay. Almost a a president of that
business that has and those GMs have full p and l
responsibilities. So I'm finding my in a new
position where previously I was president where I had all the
functions reporting to me. Now I'm in a position where my
title's still president, but it's really almost like a CEO
role because I have GMs reporting to me.
And so that's and it's putting new demands on how I lead
because I no longer have that kind of direct control over
those functional decisions. I don't wanna drive my GMs crazy
by looking over their shoulders.
Also, an a mentor earlier in my career said, Ken, there's a
big difference between delegation and abdication.
Oh. You know, you should do one,
not the other. So I also don't wanna be so
disengaged that I'm basically abdicating my role as their
effective leader. So so that's really our focus
area right now. So this is, you know, balance
you gotta strike between trust and staying engaged.
Yeah, exactly. Which different than, I guess,
a previous context you were in. Right?
It is. How do you harness the power
of of a team to to accomplish what you're driving towards?
Because I feel like over the last several years, I've learned
a lot about that through the school of hard knocks and by
making mistakes. And I like to tell people my
way of my my path to success is to make a lot of mistakes one
time. How's that?
That's a good one. I like that.
And and behind that then is the idea behind that is the idea
that in order to be able to make a lot of mistakes, they
have to be small ones because big ones, you don't survive.
And and then also, if you make them one time, it means you're
not making many mistakes two times.
So there you go. That's that's my With the
primary implication being that you learned something very
important. And then you don't do it
again. Right.
So there you go. There's my there's my leadership
mantra to myself every time. I every morning I get up, I
tell myself, let's just make a lot of mistakes one time.
One time. So so as it relates to to
building teams, yeah, I so part of it, I think, goes back to
what's your fundamental leadership philosophy, and mine
is the best teams are collaborative teams.
Not everybody thinks that. I mean, some people think, hey.
Look at just point you know, you become some people believe,
I think really, I think it was good to great.
Good to great actually said one of the leadership things they
saw in there they felt was not effective was the genius with a
thousand helpers was the term they used.
And to me, that's where the CEO is controls it, and he just
sends each individual team member off on the mastering.
Exactly. Yeah.
I don't believe that's the most effective.
It's my philosophy. I like I said, I believe that
most effective teams are collaborative.
So that means you want as close as you can get, you wanna
break down silo walls. You wanna you want boundary
boundary less collaboration. And then actually, I'm not
talking out of school because my current team, if they were
sitting here, they would acknowledge this.
When I came into Atlas, it was a very good team, but they were
to a certain extent operating in independent silos, which is
not all that shocking when you understand there's really four
different businesses there. So we've been very intentional
there at Atlas about building, we call it, you know, one
company, one voice, one Atlas. And we did that by I established
regular staff meetings. And the team, they previously,
they had staff meetings, but what it basically was
everybody showed up and did are just a report out on their
financials. It's the group of individual.
Exactly. So we changed it.
Now our agenda is really about wrestling with strategic issues
that affect the whole company, you know, and so we established
those. We also established an annual
off-site where, which is, you know, lots of companies do
this. I'm not, not starting
something new there. And also just being very
intentional about telling the team, hey, look, my
expectations are we're one team. So and some of the way to
reinforce that is to win if some I I I refuse to be
triangulated. So when that happens and
somebody, you know, Joe comes and says, hey, Ken, we really
need to do this. And I was like, okay, well,
did you talk to Tim about that? Because that's really gonna
impact him. Well, no, not really.
Okay. Well, you go talk to Tim, then
you and Tim both come back. Let's talk again.
You know? So, I guess that's my way of
of driving teams. I would say the other thing
that I've learned through the school of hard knocks is just
how to be much more militant about policing non teamwork.
Oh. So and I don't mean, like, I
don't mean really hammering people, but just simple things
as simple as I'm sitting in a staff meeting and I see that
the team's just kind of starting to circle where they've, you
know, they've gone, they're just going around and just to jump
in and say, Hey, you know, let's just cut this off right now.
I think we're not going to make more progress today.
We can afford to wait. Here are the assignments.
You know, we're going to do this, this, and this as follow
ups, and then we're going to come back in our next staff
meeting, make a decision. I love that.
So I love I love the word militant because it it expresses
just how intensely important it is to to cut off or to
extinguish behaviors that are contrary to team effectiveness.
Right? That's I will also say
triangulation, that is a real concept that you do not learn
in business books. I've seen I mean, we've both
seen CEOs and a CEO that, you know, literally came to his
fall through a protracted triangulation.
And you think you're adding value when you're in a triangle.
You're, yeah, oh yeah, I can You think you're being part of a
problem solving scenario when in fact you're just perpetuating
and emboldening the problem by being in this triangle.
Takes a lot of dis takes a lot of awareness and also, I would
say, kind of resilience or fortitude to say, no.
You guys figure this out. I'd add to that, Jonathan, is
that's just great parenting advice.
Yeah. I mean, happens there too.
Right? We've got eleven kids, I
think, between three of us. So, you know, great parenting
advice is avoiding being triangulated.
Avoid being triangulated. Most of my leadership lessons
came from having four kids. But that triangulation, okay,
that sounds like a great idea. Have you spoken to this person
about it? And so the second thing I think
is the point I wanted to make, building on what Ken said, is
this idea that sometimes as a leader, it's really easy for us
to get frustrated when people aren't collaborating or aren't
being seen to collaborate. And yet the systems and
structures and processes, the ecosystem in which they exist,
is all geared towards incentivizing individual
performance. Yeah.
So are not If they're in the ecosystem and they say, Well,
I've got my function. If my function does well, I look
good and I make my boss happy and I keep my job.
Right? What's my incentive to go and
step left and right and make sure that my peers are doing
okay? And really, that's part of the
system that the leader can see and adapt and mold and make a
difference on and be militant about if they have to, about
saying, hang on a minute. When when one wins, we all win.
When one loses, we all lose.
And so how can you break down? Or how can you catch that early?
How can you catch that early in ways that create systems that
reward Yeah. Collaborative behavior?
Because most of our organizations don't.
Alright. That's taking it to the next
level because it it's one thing to just catch it To enforce it,
but to build a system through a reward structure Sure.
That goes beyond just rewarding individual performance to also
rewarding collaboration and team performance.
Yep. And what that ends up doing,
you know, and we've seen this a lot of times, which is you end
up with sort of conflict in in the group that's hard to resolve
because they they can both justify.
Both people or all people can justify their own position.
We just simply react to people who don't seem to be getting on
and saying, Okay, that will take care of itself.
Oh, you got to take care of that.
Or, I'm going to make a decision that puts you on one side or
the other. What we don't think about, and
again, this is to your point, this is advanced level
leadership, which is seeing what are the systems and structures
that would encourage this behavior to happen?
And how can I not just react to it at the end or even see it
earlier, but actually get ahead of it and make the adjustments
so that people are incentivized to collaborate and to see
around corners and to help each other out?
Right? That's part of, again, sort of
we have beginner, intermediate, advanced level leadership.
That is part of the advanced level leadership.
So one of my favorite parts of Let's Go is the four
leadership types. Right?
So you have the future shaper, sense maker, community
builder, and the role model. Okay.
So when you work with Ken, you know, leadership type comes to
mind? Yeah.
These are the four dimensions of leadership that I have seen
through the history and research I did back twenty five
years ago about leadership, why it exists, why it is common
in all cultures and all civilizations, why it has
existed or persisted through time, and why even when we talk
about AI and tech and all these things that are going to be
non carbon life forms. At the end of the day, if you're
a carbon based life form leading other carbon based life
forms, these four things are necessary.
The expectations of your followers are that you are a
role model, you're a community builder, you're a sense maker,
and a future shaper. Why?
Because they tap into underlying needs that we have as
human beings to have a sense of self, a sense of belonging,
a sense of meaning, and a sense of purpose.
That's the high level theme behind the book.
As it relates to Ken, think we've been working together
now for six years. It's been quite a while under
two different guises. And I'd say when we first
started working together, again, was in pandemic or I think we
were in the pandemic. So that was a surreal Alice in
Wonderland world that we were all living in anyway.
But there I think, when I surveyed the team, we then did
that feedback just for Ken first, and then we actually
ended up doing a team session too, which I'll talk about.
But that first session with the feedback was they clearly saw
him as somebody who had integrity.
Like he really is humble, he has integrity, he's not trying
to steal the show, he isn't trying to one up people.
And they saw that he had a very clear perspective on the
organization, the industry, and the strategy moving forward.
What we saw then was, if anything, just this introversion
playing out in a couple of areas.
So there was a pull from the organization that said, We want
more from Ken than he's currently giving us today.
And I think either just, you know, like, I'm busy, I'm
responsible, I'm conscientious.
I'm also introverted. I've only got so much energy
to go around. And so we spend a lot of time
saying, how do we refuel? How do we restore?
How do we refresh? So that you have energy to
deploy where it's needed, not where, where you think it's
wanted or warranted. Does that make And so we
pulled that out. So really, it wasn't that there
was any deficiency in any of the four areas, if that's the
right way of describing it, or any of the four areas that
weren't. It was really just a double
click in a couple of areas. So they saw him as a role model.
They saw him as a community builder in that Ken was able to
create the container for people to get on well together.
But sometimes when there was conflict or sometimes when they
were looking for something from him and he had in his mind had
said, yeah. Communicated that.
So, you know, if you're like me, he's incredibly good at
getting things done. Like, his whole philosophy is
around being able to accomplish at a very high level and then
step away and say what what great work that was, not what
a great person I am. But there was a pull from the
team to say, well, we want to be able to get to know you more,
want to be able to get to know each other more, we want to be
able to celebrate our wins. And that is part of the
community building. So it wasn't that it wasn't
there, it was just that second step that took a little bit
more energy. Likewise, the strategic vision
was very clear and very comprehensive, but there was
just this other thing that leaders have to do.
And again, both of these things are sort of moments, the
golden moments, as I like to call them, where you're just
taking that extra pause or the extra step or the extra thirty
seconds, two minutes, five minutes with somebody to build
the bridge between where they are today and where they're
going. And so in the community builder,
it's about relationships. It's about taking an extra
step to build connectivity and connection and collaboration
across the team. And then in terms of the
strategy, it's actually building it back from, it was clear,
but what does it mean for me today?
Where we're going is really clear, but what's my next step?
That's where we started. Today, I'll say to Ken's
credit again, he's just amazing at sort of taking on feedback
and adapting and evolving. We don't have any issues
around that. Today, it really is about how
do we lean into the strategic, future proofing the
organization. Wow.
And I'm going to use it I've been working on this one because
we're talking about roofing, which is you need to fix the
roof while the sun is shining. So that's while the sun is
shining. That's an old business cliche.
And so we are literally thinking about what does the
next step strategically look like?
Like, where can this organization go?
What is the potential? If we unlock the potential in
those four divisional presidents, where could we go
from here in a way that's sustainable, in a way that could
be transformational, in a way that's really meaningful?
What's the hardest part of leading?
What have you found in in in all these years leading?
What's the hardest part of leading that that nobody
prepares you for? Like all those books you
mentioned, like Good to Great, you know, What Got You Here
Won't Get You There. Upside Management.
Yeah. What the first time yeah.
Let's go. Like, what what what you know,
what's the hardest part of leading that nobody or no book
prepares you for? Sure.
I I I'm gonna start with one and then maybe add a couple more
on too. The first one, I would say the
hardest part that no book prepares you for, I've never
even seen it mentioned anywhere, is energy management.
People talk about time management, which is which is
part of energy management. But the reality is, you know,
everybody wants some of the people want a sum of your time,
but not as a leader, different things you do with your time
have vastly different energy drains on you.
Correct. Like you said, for me for me,
going to going to whatever, let's say, the a an industry
cocktail party where I need to go around the room and and
check-in with all of my main customers, etcetera.
That may that may be a one hour cocktail party, but that's
more tiring than four hours spent developing a strategy
paper. Right?
And so so to me, that's that would be the key thing is
understanding. And for a long time, sorry, for
a long time, I just thought, you know, look at I'm I'm
invincible. And so whatever energy I need,
that's what I've got because, of course, I can do anything.
But maybe as especially as maybe as I get older and some of
the realities of physiology start to catch up with me, I
have to acknowledge more and more I have twenty four hours
in a day, but I don't have twenty four worth of doing
tasks that require maximum burn, you know?
Like a ****, I can't do a, I'm not Deadpool.
I can't make, I can't do maximum effort the whole time.
So I think that would be, if I were gonna be saying to people
that are like maybe starting that part of their career
where things start to go like this, would be to start
thinking about that now. Hey, what are the things that
give you energy? And then with the things that
take energy, what's the relative burn rate?
And how can you try to structure your commitments and
time so that you don't find yourself in a mission critical
event and you have no energy to rise to the occasion?
Well, it's interesting. I think we conflate I think we
naturally conflate time and energy until we have this
realization that that one hour task just, like, put me out of
the game for the rest of the day.
You know? It's it's it's really like it's
it's almost like there's two fuel tanks that you need to be
mindful of. One is the time tank, which is
fairly straightforward. But then the energy tank is
not straightforward because it relies on your underlying
structure of what energizes you versus what de energizes you,
as well as what might be generically I'm going add a
third as well because The three fuel things?
Ken will know this. What's the three?
We talk about time, space, and energy.
Time, space, and energy. Okay.
And so time, personal and professional.
Yes. So it's really interesting.
It's very important to think about how am I spending my time
personally and professionally? What's giving me energy and
what's taking energy away? Then there is energy management,
which is what are my natural biorhythms?
When do I do my best work? And sometimes we forget that.
But I remember one transformational coaching
conversation I had with somebody who literally their
best work was between eight and twelve.
That's when they were on. And they worked in a bank.
Very, very you know, lots of, assets under management, very
important. But they would actually AM to
twelve PM? AM to twelve PM.
Yes. So that's more out of
distinction because for me, it's eight PM to twelve twelve AM.
Right. I was gonna say.
I know when I text Jonathan, I'll get a text back between
eight pm and twelve, between midnight.
But this but the person just literally, we shifted their
decision making. So if it was a complex decision,
complex decision making meeting that had lots of variables in
it, it went in that slot. And again, we just decided
this as an experiment. And then the afternoon would
be for one on one small group meetings, reading emails,
writing emails. And it sounds so basic and
fundamental, but the person was fortunate enough to be able to
put things in that slot that were complex, but that were
energy draining. Again, somebody who was also
an introvert. And this person said to me,
literally, that's the biggest, effective change I have made
in my twenty five year career, is just simply putting things
in that slot. And so we can't overestimate the
power of thinking about time, your energy, your rhythms of
energy, and then also the space that's around you.
So I think that sounds peripheral, but we normally,
most people now, whether they want to or not, may have a
working space and they may have a space inside their home
that they work at as well. So thinking about how does the
space serve me? Is it organized?
If I'm high aesthetics, is it aesthetically pleasing?
Is it something that gets me to do my best work on a
sustainable basis? And so we think about time,
space, and energy personally and professionally.
Those for me are the three legs of the stool.
I think when you're younger, you'd say, just going to beat it
to death with hard work. I'll just work my way through
this, and that becomes a badge of honor.
And I think that is helpful knowing what your boundaries
are, understanding what your boundaries are because they
evolve. But at some point you have to
think, if I'm going to be sustainable and without
oscillating through making sure that I'm emotionally
regulated, I don't have boundaries around that, I'm more
likely to be dysregulated if I'm not centered, grounded, if I
don't have good sleep, nutrition, exercise, if I
haven't thought about time, space and energy.
And so for people who are sort of mid stage career now thinking
about how am I going to make this last, wherever I may be, I
would urge them to think about time, space, and energy
personally and professionally. Yeah.
So I there's there's two more
topics I wanna cover before we we wrap.
So at Atlas, I know it's a cult the culture is products
with purpose and people with passion.
So products with purpose, people with passion.
How do you make sure those aren't just words on a wall or
on a fancy booklet? Sure.
How do you make it happen? Me personally?
Yeah. Yes.
As the leader? As the president?
I guess the bumper sticker answer would be intentionally
reinforcing those. And to put a little bit more
description on what does that look like.
So for example, products with purpose.
I in town hall, we'll I'll talk about it.
So we do basically quarterly town halls.
They're they're they're mixed virtual in person so that
everybody around all of our North American factories can
join in, but I tie it to something real.
So for example, I've used before, I've said, hey.
Look at you. You know, maybe it may not
look like our products. We're making shingles.
We're making insulation board that may not look as sexy as
developing the next AI model or, you know, I said, however,
you know, you look at you look at Maslow's hierarchy of
needs, the base of the pyramid is shelter.
One of the bases is shelter. So nobody's gonna nobody's
developing that self driving car if the roof's leaking.
Right? So stand up, you know, hold your
head high about making shingles because we are the base of the
pyramid, you know? So let's just say stuff like
that, things with people with passion.
We've in one thing that we've that I've implemented since I
started at Atlas was being more intentional and vocal
within the company about what we're doing with community
involvement just to show and not not just that Atlas is
writing a check, but here are the people at Atlas that are
involved in driving these things and just reinforcing that to
people. Hey.
Look at here are the people with passion at at Atlas.
This is what passion looks like here.
It is really interesting to think about the the, you know,
sort of, you know, roofing material.
You know? It's like nothing is more unsexy
and important at the same time than and and by the way, we we
had, you know, a few months ago, Steve Bell, who is the president
of Brickworks North America. And they make bricks.
Right. Also, super unsexy, a brick,
and yet, like, super essential to, civilization.
Right? And so it's just it's inspiring
just to think about what you go to work every day building
and scaling is literally protecting humanity at the, I
guess, the bottom level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and
how important that is, like shelter, right?
And how blessed so many of us are to have it, right?
And yeah. And so one is I think you have
to keep that in front of people. I think a lot of times is not I
don't think I know as leaders. We think that everybody.
I think this is just human nature.
It's not just leaders. Generally, it's human nature to
assume that everybody is kind of like you are, and that
probably everybody has the same perspective as you do.
And so the way that plays foul for us as leaders is things like
your strategy or your mission statement.
You're involved with it all the time and you just assume that
everybody's involved with it all the time, but they're not.
So therefore we have to be much more cognizant of leaders
to talk about that stuff until I tell peep I tell my team, look
it. If you're if you've been
talking about this strategic initiative to your your team
enough that you personally are sick to death of this thing,
you're probably just talking about it enough for it to stick
with the per the average person who's who's off here working
their their their normal eight hour job and don't see that
every day. You know what So Sage advice.
Which is actually something I learned.
That's a carryover from from when I was in sales because we
were out. We would go out and I was
shocked. We'd be out in front of
customers or plumbers, contractors, and we were
presenting products that had been in our portfolio for ten
years. And I'm thinking, why are we
talking about this is so old, like this is so I'm so sick.
And over and over again, like, really?
You you make that? You know, what you know?
I thought, hey, wait. If that's the case there, it's
gotta be the same, and it turned out to be true with employees
and things like strategy and your your mission, vision,
values. I love that.
What if you're almost sick, that means you're, you know,
doing it basically enough, maybe enough.
So when you step back and reflect on your career as a as
a leader, Ken, What advice would you want?
Jamie, I would love to hear from you as well.
Like, what advice would you want to impart and share with our
audience? I would say if I'm talking to
somebody who's earlier in their career and they're making that
maybe they're making that first step from being an individual
contributor to leading the team, being a first level manager, is
keep in mind you probably got promoted because you're the best
on that team at doing what you do, which ironically and
paradoxically means that you're now leading a group of
people who are gonna do a worse job at something than you
would do if you did it yourself. And so you need to learn how
to judge them by not what you would do, but what is considered
good good enough for that particular task or role.
Or else you will find yourself falling into, I need to jump in
and help them and get what they're doing, where all the
muscle memory lives. Right?
Exactly. Wow.
That's great advice, especially for somebody who's stepping
into a new leadership role, or maybe a first time leader, know
that there are forces that are going to want to pull you back
in, namely because you're going be leading a bunch of people
doing the thing you are most comfortable doing.
I mean, somebody who's moving into an executive or
especially a GM role, you probably got up to be in a
director level leader because you're really good at solving
problems. But when you move in, when you
become the lead of your whole function like a VP or even more
so a general manager, you more and more are gonna find that
you no longer have problems to solve.
You have dilemmas to manage. And success looks like maybe
making that a little better or not letting it get worse.
And I'm gonna, and let me just use one, for example, like a
real life example. You have two customers.
They're both very important. They both want to be your they
both want you to, fire the other customer and and give you all
of their attention. Well, you can't do that.
That is not a problem. You're never gonna solve for
like ten years from now. You're gonna still have both of
those customers pulling on you that way.
And as an executive, you need to find a way to navigate that
tension effectively without letting things fly apart.
So going from managing problems to managing dilemmas.
Yes. Yeah.
Where you're choosing between like sort of multiple bad
options in some cases. That's right.
And in the interest of full disclosure, I didn't come up
with that idea. I like to tell people I'm not a,
I don't consider myself like, super creative in terms of you
give me a white sheet of paper and I I I paint it on it.
But what I'm I consider myself pretty good at is, knowing how
to grab stuff from other people.
And I think there was a book called, like, is it, like, steal
like an artist? I think I think there is a book
called steal like an artist. I think the I think the
concept in that is that most artists don't just truly start
with no ideas in their head. They they pick and choose from
things that they to synthesize and integrate it.
Exactly. So that's that's my thought.
And important. And apply it appropriately to
the context. Yeah.
That's, I think, is the differentiator.
Gravity will pull you down in an organization.
Just by the very nature of the organisation.
Something will flare up and it will seem like it's urgent and
important. And so you will constantly be
The opportunity is there for you to gravitate back down into
roles that felt comfortable or things that you did that feel
familiar or where you think, Nobody can do this the way I
can. And so part of, if we're
thinking about building or architecting a career, the
first one is about how do I develop that capability in
things that aren't me? And it can be in your team, it
can be in people in your team, but it can be other ways too,
but to mitigate and compensate for that possibility is to
drag you down. And if you do the time space
energy audit, you'll see where you're spending your time.
There are opportunities for you to build an ecosystem or to
architect a world in which somebody else can do it for you.
And someday when you get there, you might find that they are
able to do it better even. So that would be my first
thought, which is find the anti gravity boots, however you
might find them, wherever you can locate them.
The second one is this, which unless you come in from the
outside, this kind of builds on what Ken was talking about.
Unless you come from the outside, once you become a
leader, many of the people who were your peers now become
your direct reports. And I have yet to read a book
about that, but it's visceral. So the challenges that you
have had as a peer among peers, as a first amongst equal, if
you like, how you treated those folks or what you did or how
you're perceived by the team who were your peers now become
your direct reports, that can make or break you.
And so we will tend to think in our silos and we might throw
elbows or we might try and think this is a zero sum game.
What I have found in the work that I've done with leaders is
that if you're able to not do that, to collaborate, to get
ahead of the curve, So we talked about this on the last
podcast, which is looking left and right.
How are my peers doing and looking up and down?
How can I be a servant to my organization?
Looking out and in, how can I bring disruptive ideas and
steal like an artist, bring things in from the outside and
adapt them to the context? But particularly thinking
about, if I do this well, my peers become my direct
reports. What's that going to say about
me? Like how are they going to
treat me? Are they rooting for me?
Do they want me to win? Or are they silently dragging
their heels? And that should inform, maybe it
can inform the way that you operate today.
Yeah. This is two well, three because
we got a two for from Ken. Three really solid pieces of
advice. I actually love the advice you
shared earlier. So this is a Ken Kenism.
Make many small mistakes once. Would you would would you say
I would. Yeah.
But and and the once piece being
really important because that means you've used that mistake
as or that that failure, if you will, as a learning
opportunity to propel yourself forward.
Right? Ultimately, it becomes, you
know, that lemon turns into lemonade.
Right? That becomes sometimes the thing
that that propels you forward. So, what what if what a rich
podcast episode on leadership. Again, this is not, this is not
a, you know, master class, on leadership philosophy and
theory and research. This is leadership in the
trenches, building roof shingles Going around the world,
managing supply chains, making mistakes, and somehow moving
everything forward along the way through great leadership.
Ken, it was just such a privilege to have you here.
Thank you so much for coming on the for having me.
Yeah. And and Jamie, of course, my
sidekick. Always a pleasure to be here.
What a great great conversation about leadership.
Until next time.