IT Leaders

Jim Gehring: 00:19

A good leader knows who they are and understands themselves. They understand understand the world around them, the forces, the pressures, the context. This is not enough, however. They must go further. They must grasp how they interact with and can impact their world.

Jim Gehring: 00:38

They must be humbled by their ability to change it. A good leader is visionary. They create a future that others can see themselves in. They are compelling, spurring others to action. They work in service, sacrificing themselves for the cause.

Jim Gehring: 00:54

They are inclusive, allowing others to feel ownership. Their vision is but a roadmap, not a mandate, leaving room for those that follow to leave their mark. They are transparent, opening their process and themselves to others. A good leader is willing to sacrifice it all.

Jim Gehring: 01:17

So I'm gonna ask people to share what they saw. And for me personally, being a family guy, when I saw that little girl writing on the board leaving her mark, I got chills. I have chills right now. Like, a word that stands out for me is transparent when it comes to leadership. What does that mean?

Jim Gehring: 01:37

So thoughts, what did you hear?

Guest: 01:42

Trans you're asking about transparency?

Jim Gehring: 01:45

No. What did you hear?

Guest: 01:49

About being part of the bigger picture, not just yourself, but where you fit into society and the world.

Jim Gehring: 01:56

Yeah, great. That's perfect. What else?

Guest: 01:59

Leadership is a sacrifice.

Jim Gehring: 02:11

Yeah. Yeah. I can feel that.

Guest: 02:14

Having

Guest: 02:17

a vision, communicating that vision.

Jim Gehring: 02:20

I love that one. Yeah. I love them all. Don't get me wrong. I get that one in my gut.

Jim Gehring: 02:26

What else?

Guest: 02:27

Everyone has the potential to be a leader.

Guest: 02:30

Yeah. And make an impact.

Jim Gehring: 02:32

Yeah. Yeah. It's inspiring, no? It definitely is in my mind. So I'm gonna use some metaphors.

Jim Gehring: 02:44

And I'm starting with this one because obviously a conductor in an orchestra has quite the job. They're leading a large group of people who all have individual talents that don't necessarily need the conductor's help to do what they know how to do. Yet there's many sections and there's a song that's gonna be created, incredible harmony, tempo adjustments, transitions. The conductor is sitting back there in that place where they're guiding that. So they get the score upfront, they get to understand what it's doing, that's their job, they're setting the tempo, they're setting the pace, but also setting the level of confidence.

Jim Gehring: 03:33

The people that are running there are looking to them. This role is something that requires you to take on being a person who is going to steward and be in service to what they're all trying to create together including the conductor. Right? So typical, it's not about controlling every note. It's about being the person whose role is a team member but is particularly guiding what's going on.

Jim Gehring: 04:07

That's different than all the individual contributors who work together as a team. And one of the reasons why creating teams that collaborate well together is really important. And how you come across. I love when Jenny talked about being vulnerable. It's really, really valuable.

Jim Gehring: 04:26

In some rooms that I go into, we've got a lot of people who are leaders in here. And if I go into a room and have conversations with those folks, getting them to talk is a piece of cake. But have you ever facilitated a meeting and you ask a question and it's like, oh, I just heard a pin drop. You know? What do you do to create a space where people can start communicating when that's not their natural way of being?

Jim Gehring: 04:52

And in a leadership role, that's typically something that you're taking on. So to create emphasis on what this means and what you're stepping back into and how you're looking at it from the clouds while being on the ground working with people, this is Steve Jobs when he was at NeXT. And he takes this question from somebody in the audience. And I'm going to warn you, he's going to pause for eighteen seconds to think about it, which I just love. And I thought about taking it out, but I left it in because it has impact.

Jim Gehring: 05:24

So make sure you look at the words on the bottom. I don't know if the sound will come through here well or not, so you might wanna read what's being written.

Guest: 05:30

What was the thing that you personally learned at Apple that you're doing at Nix?

Guest: 05:36

Good question. I'm not sure I learned this when I was at Apple, but I learned it based on the data when I was at Apple. And that is, I now take a longer term view on people. In other words, when I see something not being done right, my first reaction isn't to go fix it. It's to say, we're building a team here, and we're gonna do great stuff for the next decade, not just the next year.

Guest: 06:33

And so, what do I need to do to help so that the person that's screwing up learns? Versus how do I fix the problem? And that's painful sometimes, and I still have that first instinct to go fix the problem, but taking a longer term view on people is probably the biggest thing that's changed. And then I don't know, that's, you know, maybe the part that's biological. So

Jim Gehring: 07:03

again, thoughts? What do you hear?

Guest: 07:07

A great perspective. You know what's

Jim Gehring: 07:09

funny about this? I met him and

Guest: 07:11

he was with Next. And I was at a conference in San Francisco and I was playing with his voice recognition.

Jim Gehring: 07:17

And he's standing behind me and I didn't realize that. And after

Guest: 07:21

I was talking to the computer, you know, using the microphone for the first time, he turned around and goes, like, he he was behind me and goes, that's pretty cool, isn't it? That was a great perspective. This is the bigger picture obviously. I hear him talking about succession planning.

Jim Gehring: 07:41

Okay. I

Guest: 07:43

think that really fits home. Especially what he said about seeing the longer term view with people. I mean, being in the tech space, your knee jerk is like, we know how to fix it. Let's just fix it. Let's get it done with.

Guest: 07:55

I have a very young team at our company and I I'm used to being a doer. I'm used to just go in there and just getting it done, getting things done behind the scenes. But as of recently, I've been, you know what? It's okay. Let them figure it out.

Guest: 08:10

Yeah. If they need help, they come up to me and ask ask questions, but you kinda lead them in the right direction because not everything is life and death that needs to get done immediately. Give those tools to those to then allow them to succeed and grow to a

Guest: 08:28

better professional.

Jim Gehring: 08:29

Yeah so

Guest: 08:31

this is another parallel example to teaching a person to

Jim Gehring: 08:34

fish. Right.

Guest: 08:35

Right. It's all about can we fix the problem? Yes. Should we for the sake of the company and the product? Probably.

Guest: 08:42

But am I doing the greater good if I'm focusing on that versus helping these people develop new skills and ways of thinking to help have a whole team of thinkers who can solve this problem going forward.

Jim Gehring: 08:56

Agreed. Go ahead. Yeah.

Guest: 08:58

I think if and and I've been super guilty of of this. If you fix everything, you become the fix. You no longer have any time to lead. Yeah. Because you're you're fixing everything, know, everyone's bringing everything to you to get it done and you're not really leading.

Jim Gehring: 09:18

Right.

Guest: 09:20

Yeah. It can be very difficult and I'm sure everybody knows in this room to allow someone to learn, especially when you know how to fix it. It's very difficult sometimes, but I think to your point about allowing them to learn and allowing them to be successful by allowing them to fish or teaching them to fish.

Jim Gehring: 09:43

So that's great. That sets up for the question I wanted to ask, is, so what's the difference? Who do you have to be as a leader? How would you describe that paradigm shift so that you're not doing that for succession or just for long term? It's a way of being.

Jim Gehring: 10:01

How would you describe that?

Guest: 10:03

I would use the word delegation. It's like the predecessor to succession.

Guest: 10:25

Finding that solution on

Guest: 10:26

our own.

Guest: 10:26

And I I think I found interesting about this is that what he's saying is very counter to the narrative, what you read about how it actually was

Guest: 10:33

in the world. I thought that was kind

Guest: 10:36

of interesting, notably shortsighted, and had all the answers.

Jim Gehring: 10:41

Strong opinions. Yeah. Yeah.

Guest: 10:45

So I think as technology leaders, one of the snares that we may fall into is we're all problem solvers.

Guest: 10:55

So our natural tendency is going to be real fixing and addressing. And that's just how we generally, most of us, probably, broke into leadership. I think if

Guest: 11:10

you go back to some of your previous slides and analogy, I'll go back

Guest: 11:14

to music, we're almost as leaders more of a conductor, allowing the people to express their artistic elements that they have personally, while at the same time helping them see the dynamics and the specifics on a page and really helping guide them and helping them learn along the way. I think the tricky part is there's times when it has to

Guest: 11:44

be precise, and we have

Guest: 11:46

to provide that guidance and we also have to know when to give them that latitude to express that artistic side of them as well.

Jim Gehring: 11:55

I love the way you express that and I'm going use the garden as a metaphor to say the same thing. There's a big transition you have to make when you're going from being a sole contributor to a management role. Even when you first step into it, it's common for you to look at the things that need to be done, the goals and objectives and drive towards that. This is a shift. There's so many things.

Jim Gehring: 12:18

I've played the piano since I was little and I can go on about music, but that person is guiding that orchestra and the people that are in it individually are learning something by the conduct or who sees the big picture. And when they adjust something that an individual is doing or a team is doing in that, they're going to learn something about music. That from that individual perspective they didn't get. But to make the point on leadership, let's use a garden instead. I think the big thing that's really tough is that we're really good at seeing the problem.

Jim Gehring: 12:54

That's how we were trained. And so when I say what I'm about to say, don't think that I'm throwing that out. You have to be aware of what company's doing. A big part of what you're doing is aligning the strategy to what's getting done. But in a garden scenario, I'm not bearing the fruit.

Jim Gehring: 13:11

I'm not growing the herbs. I'm not the herb. I'm the person who's gonna tend the soil. I'm gonna make sure that the plants are in the right place for shade and sunlight. I'm gonna make sure that predators don't get to them.

Jim Gehring: 13:27

Right? And that becomes more of the job. Because if I'm hiring the right people, if I'm choosing the right people, then that's what I need to bring to the table. That's what's going to make the real difference. So we'll talk about that at the next level here.

Jim Gehring: 13:45

To be very specific, it's about building trust. So a quality of leader has to be a people person. I've got goosebumps. Like for me, that's something that I love. Right?

Jim Gehring: 13:59

You have to be willing to lean in and have conversations where they're tough. You're dealing with people's emotions. If you want a team to function well, how many people read Five Dysfunctions of Teams? If you haven't read it, go read it. It's a great book.

Jim Gehring: 14:16

It's a great story. But you've got to be in there in that way. And trust is so big and it creates so much in the way of when I said it in the beginning, I'm always thinking to myself, I'm saying this and this sounds like I'm selling something, productivity, greater value, opening for innovation. This is real. This is real.

Jim Gehring: 14:42

And this is a great example of why and who uses trust and what it means to them.

Guest: 14:51

Is the highest performing organization on the planet. Seal Team six are the elite of the elite. And I sat down with the head of training and asked him a very simple question, which is how do you choose who gets on this team? And he pulled out a piece of paper and he drew an x y axis for me. And on the vertical axis, he wrote the word performance.

Guest: 15:10

And on the horizontal axis, he wrote the word trust. Clearly, everybody wants this person on their team, the high performer of high trust, obviously. What they learned is that this person over here, the high performer of low trust, is a toxic team member. And they would rather have a medium performer of high trust, sometimes even a low performer of high trust, it's a relative scale, over the high performer of low trust.

Guest: 15:32

Now if

Guest: 15:32

you look at business, we have a million metrics to measure people's performance, and we have negligible to no metrics to measure somebody's trustworthiness. And then we take toxic team members who are high performing, and we promote them, and eventually they became toxic leaders.

Jim Gehring: 15:48

Thoughts?

Guest: 15:50

I actually played that for my team last year looking around the room in their eyes, were just

Jim Gehring: 15:59

Yeah. When I ask when I see people or talk with people about that, and then I've raised it up in companies I've worked in like, here's the idea. And we're all like, so and so. That's the guy. Odds?

Jim Gehring: 16:17

Yeah. Go, Joe.

Guest: 16:18

So as leaders, it's equally our responsibility to give them opportunities to earn trust as it is on them to earn our trust. Give them all of those challenges and opportunities, start small, see what their acumen is from a trust perspective and if they can deliver on small things or greater things and give them those opportunities. All too often we expect someone to come in as the new person, and they have to earn our trust, and

Guest: 16:50

that's it.

Guest: 16:52

It's hard to do if you don't have an opportunity.

Jim Gehring: 16:56

So what are you saying then that the job of the leader is to create the opening?

Guest: 17:00

I think the job of the leader is to get to know each individual, to understand what their aspirations are and evaluate what their attitude and aptitudes are. But then from that, try to create opportunities, whether it's having them lead a project team or working on a particular solution. Give them opportunities to show that how far can you go without me coaching you in between? And do you have the wherewithal to come to me when you've hit a roadblock and you need some guidance or assistance? I think it's just it's equally we always put it on the new person to earn the trust of people but sometimes it's just very difficult to do in certain work environments especially environments where you may have other bad leaders in the organization if it's toxic People are afraid to even stick their neck out a little bit and show what they can do

Jim Gehring: 17:59

Yep, totally agree Anybody else? Yeah,

Guest: 18:07

I think, like, I'm I'm hiring for a system senior system admin. Right? I have to trust that person coming in the door at that level. I

Guest: 18:15

have given that speech. I trust you. I can't. You break my trust once. It's very hard

Guest: 18:19

to get back at that level. Right? That that higher level.

Guest: 18:24

But but you created the opportunity or the trust by giving the role. Yeah. Tell

Jim Gehring: 18:29

them that.

Guest: 18:29

Got it. Yeah. I mean, at that level, you're giving them essentially keys to the castle. Right? They're gonna be the domain admins, the cloud admins, they're they're gonna add all.

Guest: 18:37

Right. And this ties back to what we saw earlier with the Apple clip about,

Guest: 18:43

can I I know what

Guest: 18:44

to go and fix the problem? No. When you were an individual contributor, that's when your role was to fix the problem. Now as a leader, you have to create opportunities for the rest of the team to be the hero. And you have to judge how much guidance you have to give them.

Guest: 19:00

Do they need do you need to draw it out of them with a lot of assistance or you just need to give them the floor for a little bit to talk through it?

Jim Gehring: 19:10

Well, so for me, if I say you have to earn my trust in the beginning of a meeting with somebody, I'm scaring them. So, and in building trust with them, think it's something that if we took this conversation and made it into the garden scenario, not worried about trust with my plants. And some of them don't make it. So as a leader, I have to be bold enough to say, do I have the right butts in the right seats at the right time? But I wouldn't put, personally, I wouldn't put trust into the conversation because all of our languaging with the people that we're working with is so important and you won't perfect it.

Jim Gehring: 19:52

Right? But as somebody who's studied behavioral science, acceptance and commitment therapy, who's gone to training for this and stuff, When you're working with people in that life scenario, one on one, you're just giving them time, helping them find the right next action to take to grow. And for me, that might be growing that trust with them. That's what I'm hearing Joe, and I don't know if that makes sense, but Alfred.

Guest: 20:22

I think the word trust actually causes fear, right? Because now, you're not sure that, which was basically telling

Jim Gehring: 20:47

me Yeah.

Guest: 20:48

I have your back. Right? That it sounds the same, you know, you have to trust, but you are saying, so that way, you know, you have freedom to fail, and and and he has your back in business. It

Jim Gehring: 21:01

doesn't Correct. This time. Correct.

Guest: 21:02

Plus, it's not just, you know, one transaction.

Jim Gehring: 21:05

Correct.

Guest: 21:05

We just go back to dates and it's all the little actions like you said, the words used to Yeah.

Jim Gehring: 21:10

In in the SEAL Team six, it's I trust you with my money and I trust you with my wife. I take care of the person to the left and to the right of me. And taking care of means you can count on me. It's not a trust thing. Here's the thing.

Jim Gehring: 21:27

Humans can't think in the negative. I'll prove it. Ready? Don't think of a pink elephant. Whoops.

Jim Gehring: 21:36

So it's really important what you say and especially if it implies something you're expecting from them, that's different than fostering or nurturing something, in my humble opinion. I guess the point I would make, because I'm one of many opinions, is that there's lots of ways to look at this and study it and learn about it so that you become more and more conscious of that leadership role. Even the people that are natural leaders wind up doing things that can be a little toxic. It's the amazing the impact, I'll give you an example. So I worked at a consulting company and things were shifting, people were changing at the time.

Jim Gehring: 22:16

And a person who was a client care manager, meant they took care of our resources, we had over a 100 consultants in the city. And these guys went out and took care of multiple clients at the same time. And one of them moved up a level, he wasn't in that position and somebody took his place. And about, I don't know, maybe four months give or take later, all the people underneath him who were by the way some of the cream of the crop at the company were complaining. They were miserable and things weren't working.

Jim Gehring: 22:47

Same jobs they were in when he was there. So they asked me to go talk to him and I went out and started having conversations. I spoke with this person, this person. I got to the third person and it suddenly dawned on me. And I said, if Craig was still here, would this be a problem?

Jim Gehring: 23:05

And he got quiet. He got really quiet because he was complaining. I was kind of surprised knowing the person that he was bitching like this. He paused and then he goes, no. I guess I wouldn't.

Jim Gehring: 23:23

That's leadership. That's how important the rapport is with the people. That's the difference you can make in productivity and value and innovation. It's just it's amazing. So to talk about this, what we're trying to harness is collective intelligence.

Jim Gehring: 23:41

It's doing a lot for the individuals in a team like that, but it's also doing something when those people are working together. AI is really intelligence amplified because it's brought together. You do the same thing with humans, I think it's up one. And if you can do that with humans and AI, who knows what you'll get. But trust is the key thing here.

Jim Gehring: 24:02

And there's a couple of simple points that are really important. As a cognitive science nerd means neuroscience is in there too. So it means I know what happens when you drop that word in the beginning is I'm going to give you the space to earn my trust. All it takes is a little thing inside that person to feel hesitation or concern and their chemicals change. Literally.

Jim Gehring: 24:30

And we're talking about people who are thinking of things that are pretty good. You've got toxic leaders, you don't want to be in the room with them. Somebody who comes back after being for three weeks on vacation hasn't said anything to you about where things are at and says, your project's behind. I'm like, we're at the beginning of our one on one. Maybe we should talk first because as far as I know everything's on that happens all the time.

Jim Gehring: 24:58

Happens all the time. So we're talking about leadership at a level where we're creating something really powerful. And what what are we doing? Anybody read the book, Thinking Fast and Slow? Yeah.

Jim Gehring: 25:12

That's a good one. It's a tough read. About 500 pages. It's a lot of science. Connoheim's a guy who wrote it.

Jim Gehring: 25:18

Amazing individual. But he broke out this system one and system two thinking. System one thinking, driving the car. I don't have to think, I drive. System two thinking, hey Jim, tell me what you think about consciousness and dualism.

Jim Gehring: 25:34

Hold on one second, I'm gonna start thinking about that. Right? Well, you go into your frontal cortex for critical thinking and your pupils dilate. In other words, what I'm saying is it's real. When we're building trust and helping people, we're helping them physically.

Jim Gehring: 25:53

There's chemicals that are released in the body. And if people are coming in strained, how well are they going to perform? So learning to create that rapport, learning to be with people. Here's a good example. How do you think I'm gonna come across right now?

Jim Gehring: 26:17

I've changed only a few things about my body. This isn't as complex as the frontal cortex. All I have to do is drop my shoulders, show you my hands, use a nice tone, and I'm related. You try this when you meet somebody new because you'll start to notice your posture and who you are with a new person. We're naturally a little hesitant.

Jim Gehring: 26:43

What happens if you just told yourself, I'm just gonna drop my shoulders? It makes a huge difference. That's what you're learning about leadership. Jenny put a couple of them up. What do you do?

Jim Gehring: 26:53

These are the things that you can practice. So leadership is like anything else. It's different. You're not working on the problem. You're creating a garden, and it's very powerful.

Jim Gehring: 27:07

So I love Brene Brown's work on vulnerability and Jenny used the term a couple times. This is probably one of the things that is one of my natural traits. I worked for a company that used to pick me up from wherever I was to go across town to sit in front of a mad customer. I was head of data services. On the other side of town was a C sharp program in a manufacturing site, and this guy was pissed off.

Jim Gehring: 27:41

We had screwed things up. They brought me over to sit in front of him, even though I was the data services guy, and help him calm down. I can lean into those. As somebody who's going to be listening to people and understanding when something's off, you got to be looking for that lack of trust or looking for that uneasiness. And it's not to run around and over weed the garden.

Jim Gehring: 28:09

Don't get me wrong. It's too much. When is it important? That's what you learn about. And leaning into those conversations is so powerful.

Jim Gehring: 28:18

And you have to be vulnerable. In acceptance commitment therapy, they do a new thing now. So when the person sitting on the couch talking to somebody else over there, they're trying to pick up where they're at and what's going on. In this training, they have to think of where they are. Not the therapist and Freud and here's what's going on with you.

Jim Gehring: 28:42

They have to be a human in the room. That's what you have to be as a leader. Period. End of story. And by the way, it's if you're really going to be curious and reach into it, you will grow.

Jim Gehring: 28:54

Period. End of story. So here's something on that uncertainty. All

Guest: 28:59

I'm about vulnerability is that when you are in uncertainty, when you feel at risk, when you feel exposed, don't tap out. Stay brave, stay uncomfortable, stay in the cringey moment, lean into the hard conversation, and keep leading. Stay brave.

Jim Gehring: 29:19

Do you get that? Thoughts on that?

Guest: 29:25

I think what stuck out is, and I've had another person tell me is being uncomfortable. And from a leadership perspective, was always told is get comfortable being uncomfortable. Right. Yeah. That's it, for sure.

Guest: 29:41

For

Jim Gehring: 29:41

sure. And you do over time. It's kind of that thing like, we don't get rid of fear, we grow courage, the ability to act in the face of fear. We don't get rid of our emotions, we build emotional resiliency. So when we're feeling sad, we can act regardless.

Jim Gehring: 29:55

And we can act towards our values and the things that we want to become, the organization that we're building. Any other thoughts? So I'll leave you with this. I'm gonna pass this up just because of time. With the onslaught of AI and the way things are going and the rate at which the things are gonna accelerate, leadership is needed now more than ever, especially as it relates to the culture.

Jim Gehring: 30:29

But there's something that it does that's beyond just the culture. In other words, if you're familiar with the waterfall methodology for software development, most people in the room,

Guest: 30:39

yes? Yes.

Jim Gehring: 30:40

So it's it's about a long term view. It was done a while ago. We gather all the requirements. We figure out what we're gonna build. We know what it's gonna do, and we start building.

Jim Gehring: 30:50

And everything's nailed down. Big problem. Imagine if that project's the skyscraper and I put in the foundation and I'm going to 40 floors and I get to the Tenth Floor, it's not gonna work. The foundation has to be changed. You can't do that.

Jim Gehring: 31:10

So Agile came along and a whole new platform. Guess what? We can do it. But guess what's not doing that yet? The organization.

Jim Gehring: 31:22

Strategy lives up in the boardroom, that vision. And when it comes down into the different departments, you're already in silo mode. Even inside of IT, network, server guys, desktop guys, security, data guys, and I've given a lot of talks on this. In large rooms to technical guys who go, do these people talk to each other? I don't get many yeses.

Jim Gehring: 31:50

And then the same thing happens at the organization level. So now I have my strategy and my vision and my mission coming down to people as orders for being a cog in the wheel. Do this. They don't have a sense and people are ready for this. Give me a sense of what I'm creating, the value I'm creating for my customer and where things are going.

Jim Gehring: 32:10

So leadership has the opportunity to create an ecosystem of strategy, of operations and of culture. And it's not just something I'm talking about from a textbook. It's when we take that vision and make it so tangible that we can talk about what we're doing and where and how. I don't just mean the OKRs. Because in companies that do that, it's still driven towards just hit these numbers instead of fostering that garden the way I'm talking about.

Jim Gehring: 32:43

I think that's where things need to go. Otherwise, AI is just going to replace everything because that's how we operate. What's the best solution for the way things are? Well, whether it's a lawyer or a doctor, etcetera, etcetera, that intelligence is going to have power. Questions on that?

Jim Gehring: 33:03

To me, that's something that I've been playing with for a few months.

Guest: 33:06

A lot of people who are looking at AI thinking about how do I learn AI so they can use other work. But, really, it's the organization looking to how to best innovate using AI. So it's coming from that perspective as well. And one of the things you mentioned was trust. And one

Jim Gehring: 33:26

thing that is so important when bringing in AI is the exact same perspective. Can I trust the AI? So it's interesting to think of

Guest: 33:35

the people side of it

Jim Gehring: 33:36

and the human plus AI both need trust on both sides of it. I've been going into a lot of organizations for a long time doing what I call a groundwork engagement, which is asking questions from the bottom to the top. I interview everybody and I ask these four questions. What do you do in your role? And if you want, share a little bit about yourself.

Jim Gehring: 33:59

If you're talking to somebody else and what you're doing right now appear someplace else, how would you brag about what you do? And then I ask this question always after the previous one, what's not working here? Because you get the laundry list. And then I ask, this is where I get out my gold pan and pick some great things up. Everything else is really good too.

Jim Gehring: 34:23

Don't get me wrong, but if you had a magic wand and you could wave away politics, culture, budgets, and all those other problems, anything you think that would get in the way, what three things would you recommend this company does to make a real difference for itself and its customers? And there's gold in them, are hills as they say. But that's on the front lines. You can't get to that unless the board has an ecosystem where that feedback loop is working powerfully. The metrics are being talked about in the meetings.

Jim Gehring: 34:59

They're being written down. You're learning things, taking action on them, etcetera. Leadership's an awesome opportunity. And to Jenny's point, like there's so much stuff out there. Learn about it, dive into it, see what it takes to be somebody who's making a huge difference in that role.

Jim Gehring: 35:22

Any other questions?

Guest: 35:24

I have a question,

Guest: 35:24

but more of a comment. I think two separate things. One is, Jornay just said that feedback group, it was a very good book from Howard on what's your problem. Reframing problems. And sometimes solving the problems which may not actually exist because that's another way to solve it.

Guest: 35:46

One example was about the dog shelter, and they were losing funds at sponsors, and they were how more people were coming to take the dogs. But then they experience. So that's why they look at it completely different. So your HR person may come and solve a technical problem. They have no idea what you're talking about, and they don't worry.

Guest: 36:32

Usually, we don't think of these people as part of the problem solution team, but they could be. There's another good book, especially going back to your leadership part, I've never read, the building your own brand. So the human brain only talks,

Guest: 36:50

and if you

Guest: 36:51

have a brain picture, got me thinking about that. They're very pleasing to two things. Number one, every conversation, even in this, right, what are what is Jim telling me that is gonna help me survive and thrive? Right? So if you're talking to any person on your team, that's what That's why people and this is the these are two things that the entire media industry runs on.

Guest: 37:25

That's why you go to a movie, you you know, you Star Wars, you don't realize that the bad guy does this, this is story, that's also right. And you're you're tuned. So if you go off script, they're gonna go to they're gonna do two d out unless you're telling them something. So here, I'm gonna be interested with you. They're gonna do What's gonna happen to me?

Guest: 38:12

How can I survive it? Right? In this world, with this with this technology coming.

Jim Gehring: 38:18

Yep. Great, thanks Alfred. So I'm over time. Appreciate the opportunity to talk. If you can't tell, I love building rapport.

Jim Gehring: 38:28

So if you have any questions or want to talk, even if you want to set a meeting with me, I'm in the third chapter of my life. I spend a lot of time helping out young entrepreneurs and having conversations because it's fun besides my work. So feel free to reach out if you have any questions about what was talked about today. Really appreciate the opportunity to speak here today. Thank you for calling me up and enjoy the rest of your day.