[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Jamie Cochran.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm Lake Babin.
[SPEAKER_00]: Weed wind.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm extreme watershed podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're back with another episode of the lead wind podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we've brought in for the next couple episodes, another Eschlan front instructor, Carlos Mendez.
[SPEAKER_00]: Great to have you here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for having me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Couple weeks ago, we did a mustard event, which is our two-day leadership conference.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for this event, we had decided this time around.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were going to dedicate two hours in the morning of the day of setup to do a training with our team.
[SPEAKER_00]: our people at Est on Front get a ton of exposure to what we teach all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: To hear us talk about it, it's part of our daily calls and our weekly calls and our check-ins.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet I don't know that we've ever dedicated some time to just sit them down and run them through some workshop style training that we offer to our clients.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we opted to do this time around our operations director was a little hesitant because she's got things that need to happen at the master.
[SPEAKER_00]: But
[SPEAKER_00]: She gave us two hours and we took that time as a team to sit down together and go through these leadership principles in more of a workshop setting, give them some exposure to our instructors, and what we do in a workshop that maybe is very different than what they might see at a master.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it was awesome because the feedback afterwards was so
[SPEAKER_00]: positive.
[SPEAKER_00]: The conversations that happen in the next two days, the collaboration that you saw come about in the way that they were interacting with each other, just the momentum of seeing these principles in action and then going forward and practicing them over the course of the next two days at this event.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what it told me was the value of leadership training.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even at an organization where we talk about it all the time, I think we underestimate how important leadership development training is for our team.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's what we want to talk about for this episode, is this return on investment, a question we get from every client that we talk to, is how do we quantify the return of investment on leadership development when it's a difficult thing to calculate and yet we know in the work that we do, the value is immeasurable.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's what I want to talk about today and open it up to you guys to talk about your experience and how do you help leaders understand the value of investing in your people investing in your team.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was great to see that happen at the muster and the team was so excited about it and the feedback was awesome.
[SPEAKER_02]: And what was cool about that is not only do the team get to see what instructors do, because for the folks that are supporting the team that don't get to see it all the time, it was great for the help to break silos down, which was awesome.
[SPEAKER_02]: But more importantly, it was that investment and actually,
[SPEAKER_02]: developing the skills of leadership for the team.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's something that we teach all the time.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's not going to just happen through Osmosis.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like you actually have to dedicate the time and effort to do it.
[SPEAKER_02]: It wasn't convenient for us to do it.
[SPEAKER_02]: There was a lot going on for the team.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's always hard to make that time.
[SPEAKER_02]: But when you do that, you see the investment in leadership skills.
[SPEAKER_02]: And people aren't just going to learn that through Osmosis.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're going to have a culture that's developing in your team, whether you like it or not.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so you can be proactive to build that culture, build a culture for extreme ownership.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it actually on front, we know what works.
[SPEAKER_02]: We know that if a team is not using the loss of combat, cover move, simple, prioritized and execute, decentralized command, they're not going to be successful.
[SPEAKER_02]: And yet those things are very simple to define and yet very difficult to actually put into practice.
[SPEAKER_02]: and so we realize we actually have to do this for our team as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: Particularly as we grow, particularly as we expand and bring new people on board.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so that is definitely an investment that we will continue to make in our team to develop them and every team should make that as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: What am I favorite feedback points from that session was how many of our team were surprised at the humor that we bring about in more of like a workshop setting because I realize most of them, they exposure they get is either in our calls, which is maybe more informal or it's in a muster where the atmosphere is a little more intense, a little more story, a little more performative.
[SPEAKER_00]: where as an workshop setting, we're much more scaled back.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a lot more humor that comes in to create some of that interactivity.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the feedback from the team was, I didn't realize how funny all of our instructors were.
[SPEAKER_00]: And all of them had their own kind of sense of humor.
[SPEAKER_00]: For you, Carlos, you do a ton of work with our clients.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're working with all types of clients and different industries.
[SPEAKER_00]: What have you seen with regard to this question of the value of leadership development and why it's so critical that people invest in that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I get this question a lot when I work with clients.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's one of those tough things, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because you can't put it in a spreadsheet.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I worked in private equity quite a bit when I was an investment banker.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's one of the things that I think a lot of PE firms overlooked was the leadership and culture part of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you look at some of the private equity firms that have outperformed, they'll tell you that the two biggest meta-levers, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Besides the five typical levers that you'll look at,
[SPEAKER_01]: leadership, putting the right leaders in the right spots, and then the culture, which comes from having those right leaders in those right spots.
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of the books I read 100 Winnie moves, or I think it's called Winnie moves talks about that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it talks about turnover and all things that you would expect that come from leadership.
[SPEAKER_01]: But one of the surprising things that I found was besides the things that we normally look at, I'd like to turn over Moral was the increase in stock price.
[SPEAKER_01]: So companies that invested in culture and leadership had a much higher stock price than their competitors.
[SPEAKER_01]: But one story that I want to share with you that I really think illustrates the importance of leadership and the ROI that you get was this gentleman that wrote me not that long ago on Instagram, he sent me a message and this is a workshop that we had done with the client and he was telling me how
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, in his company, he was probably one of the lowest performers and his managers kept telling him, hey, you're on the chopping block, like we're looking to fire you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he said that after sitting in the workshop, he realized all the things that he had done wrong in terms of leadership and how he engaged with his teammates and the attitude that he had.
[SPEAKER_01]: And three months later, three or six months later, he sends me this message and he says, hey, I went from being the bottom performer to being one of the top performers in the company.
[SPEAKER_01]: He said that during his six month call or six month review, his leadership literally told him, hey, listen, usually this call is all about, hey, these are all the things you're doing wrong.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he said this last one was like, hey, we're so impressed with you that we're actually looking to promote you and give you some more shifts.
[SPEAKER_01]: So how do you put a price tag on that?
[SPEAKER_01]: you can't because think about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were about to fire him.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they want the price of having to fire him, having to hire somebody new, having to train that new person.
[SPEAKER_01]: And by the way, he works in an issue with the turnover is extremely high.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that and itself is a huge competitive advantage if I don't have that huge turnover and my competitors do.
[SPEAKER_00]: that's one of the biggest conversations we have with clients is trying to help them understand how to quantify this return of investment in leadership development training.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the one of the things I learned from you and Jaco early on, Dave, was
[SPEAKER_00]: the metrics that you use to determine if your business is successful, if you're moving in the direction that you want to go.
[SPEAKER_00]: What we have found to be true, and certainly in my 13 years, is that when you invest in your team, when you bring in leadership development, you put some effort towards showing your people that you care about them, and you want them to learn these principles.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when they do it, even if it's a small percentage of that group or that team that doesn't effectively, you see those metrics improve.
[SPEAKER_00]: The metrics you want to go up, go up, and the metrics say you want to go down, go down.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is irrefutable in the case studies that we've had with clients that we've worked with.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we've got some great.
[SPEAKER_00]: now some quantifiable data that we try to share with clients to show them that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But to me, it's always one of those questions of why can't we get people around this barrier of there's a cost to leadership development and training and some of that can be done in-house for sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of that, it's great to bring in people outside perspectives kind of like when you're data, your mom tells you to do something versus a coach.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's some value in having that outside perspective.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it whether it's with us or other programs or training efforts out there,
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just the effort that you're showing your team.
[SPEAKER_00]: I care about you as an individual.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want you to get better as a leader and be able to take these principles, whether it's ours or others that are out there and apply them effectively to increase in your leadership capabilities.
[SPEAKER_00]: One individual like that makes a huge difference to an organization and saves a ton of money over time, especially if you're doing that 10 times over in an organization.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think what you have to do is just think about, okay, what are the problems?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like where are the challenges?
[SPEAKER_02]: And when you start to dig into those challenges, I think you can come up with some pretty easy quantifiable data on what you, what metrics you want to improve.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's something that Jalkon I've said for a long time when we come into a company and work with the company is, is,
[SPEAKER_02]: But this ROI, hey, what are we going to get?
[SPEAKER_02]: What is our return on investment?
[SPEAKER_02]: Going to be for leadership development training and our answer is, what do you want to see improve?
[SPEAKER_02]: What do you want to see improve?
[SPEAKER_02]: If we got two different departments that aren't working together inside an organization and there's frictions and so there's a lack of effectiveness.
[SPEAKER_02]: So maybe the marketing team and the sales team aren't actually working together and supporting each other.
[SPEAKER_02]: and those frictions are impacting sales, or impacting the ability to reach more potential customers, then you can measure where you're at and put in the time and effort to break those silos down, pull those teams together, invest in their leadership development.
[SPEAKER_02]: So they understand this concept of cover move.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not about them and their particular team, but it's about the overall team and the overall mission.
[SPEAKER_02]: As they start to see that as what winning actually looks like,
[SPEAKER_02]: you will see those metrics improve.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's, we know that that to be the case, we've seen it over and over again.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think you just take some effort to identify where the problems are.
[SPEAKER_02]: Put some actual quantifiable numbers on that and then track those numbers over time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I understand.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was working with a client recently and they were there in this big kind of roll up maneuver.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're buying up companies, a lot of mergers, a lot of acquisitions.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what they found was they were going in and buying up these smaller companies, maybe 20, 30, 40 employees.
[SPEAKER_00]: And these mom and pop shops, they're buying them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as you know, you know, we hear this from a lot of clients who are in this merger game.
[SPEAKER_00]: that can be a really difficult time.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have a lot of turnover at that time.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have a lot of leadership changes.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of, you know, fear that happens with that company that's getting bought and it can take a lot of time and effort to get them onboarded to a new company, new culture, new processes and systems.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this company decided,
[SPEAKER_00]: six years ago that part of that effort was going to incorporate within the first 90 days, a significant effort in leadership development.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were going to bring them in, introduce them to their culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thankfully, it's the culture of extreme ownership that they've built this business on.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so part of that is every measure that they do, they run their people through some onboarding training to learn the principles of extreme ownership, bring them into what this culture is, and a field training exercise.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the conversation we had was how powerful it was for these individuals who had yet to ever be invested in this way.
[SPEAKER_00]: You think about some of these small organizations who just aren't prioritizing leadership development.
[SPEAKER_00]: And all it took was this company coming in, investing in them, that allowed them to be more excited, more positive about this change, which changes difficult for people, and you got people immediately connected to the culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: They got excited about being a part of this
[SPEAKER_00]: to some of the fear that happens in those scenarios.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, like, you can't quantify that.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're losing less people they typically would.
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't have as much turnover on the leadership.
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't have as much fear and negativity that happens in these situations.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of that because they're investing in these individuals who up until this point haven't really ever been invested in that way before.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's so critical.
[SPEAKER_00]: Which makes me wonder, what is the hesitation?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, why are companies and businesses not seeing this as such a valuable tool within their organizations?
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a great question.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think the number one thing that I see is that people say we don't have time for that.
[SPEAKER_02]: We don't have time for that.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're busy in our jobs.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're looking at their data data tasks.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a cost and pulling people away from their data data tasks in order to focus them in some leadership, volumetric training.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the thing is that it doesn't have to be for days or weeks or months of formal training.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can just pull people together.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like our team at the most, we spent two hours together.
[SPEAKER_02]: We spent two hours out of several days, which we made time to make that happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it takes some time and effort to plan it.
[SPEAKER_02]: It takes some discipline to make it happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: And some of that I learned from Jocca when we were working together in task in a bruiser is that you have to make time for the things that are important.
[SPEAKER_02]: And leadership development is crucial, and important.
[SPEAKER_02]: We believe that every child front, we've seen an over and over again, that leadership is the most important factor in whether or not your team succeeds your fails.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so if you believe that to be true, then you 100% have to make time to invest.
[SPEAKER_02]: In your team to develop that it's not just gonna happen unless you proactively make time to make it happen And I think that's the number one thing you have to do.
[SPEAKER_02]: I saw this recently with a client that we were working with and I got a chance to speak to several hundred of their senior leaders And they brought them together for the first time in like seven years.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was the first time that they actually came came together to make this happen and the feedback point was
[SPEAKER_02]: people were so thankful that the company took the time to carve that out of their schedule invest and bring everybody together just so they could build relationships with some people that they never actually seen before or worked with in seven years.
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of personnel had changed, a lot of things had changed at the company.
[SPEAKER_02]: They were so appreciative of that and they were also appreciative of us coming in and actually talking about a culture of extrem ownership and the loss of combat and their recognition that the company was investing in their leadership development this skill of leadership And so it definitely pays some significant dividends and we saw this in the seal teams too.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we had we you would have different silos and organization where you have the seals that are you know a bunch of premodontas and think it's all about them all the time
[SPEAKER_02]: This is what we do, where the guys that are out in the battlefield, and look, obviously that's the whole point of the seal team is to put seal operators into the deepest darkest places to go out and perform their missions, and there's a whole bunch of support personnel as well, on the community communicators and CBs and ordinance personnel, and supply clerks, all kinds of people that are supporting this effort to make the seals job possible.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you don't have an organization that sees themselves as one team, that's a problem.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we would take our tax as we call the non-seals at the seal team.
[SPEAKER_02]: We take them to the range and let them fire some cool machine guns and see what seals were actually doing.
[SPEAKER_02]: We'd have them service role players in the field training exercises.
[SPEAKER_02]: So they can actually observe those exercises.
[SPEAKER_02]: And now the seals instead of being the pre-modernist thing, it's all about us and these guys don't know what we do.
[SPEAKER_02]: It broke down the silos, so they saw the taxes, like, hey, these are hardworking people that want to support us.
[SPEAKER_02]: If they're not given us what we need, we need to build better relationships once so we can help them understand what we need.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then the tax all the seals, as hey, we're here to support them.
[SPEAKER_02]: Here's a better way that we could do that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we saw a huge return on investment from that effort.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, one of the things that we did in our testing it, when we realized that maybe some of the texts saw their jobs as medial, right, not important.
[SPEAKER_01]: What we did is we brought them into the mission room and we had them watch these missions go down live via the drone footage so that they could see like these missions and the people that they're actually supporting and showing them, hey, listen, this is what you're actually supporting.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it works in the civilian world as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: I get this question a lot when I work with in particular construction companies, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: The big question is, hey, how do I get this frontline worker who's literally just digging ditches or doing whatever?
[SPEAKER_01]: How do I get him to care?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because in his mind, he's just doing his medial job, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't mean anything.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's just collecting a paycheck.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then comes a question, well, why doesn't he care?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why doesn't he care?
[SPEAKER_01]: Have we actually taken the time to ask him, hey, what are you trying to accomplish from this job?
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you just trying to use this as a summer job, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because if you are okay, cool, let me help you get to your goal.
[SPEAKER_01]: You give me three months of hard work.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll introduce you to people that I know.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll give you a great letter of recommendation Oh, you want to be a foreman.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, well, in order to be a foreman.
[SPEAKER_01]: Here's the steps that we have to go through All right, and now they're starting to see the bigger picture.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're starting to see purpose.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're starting to realize that you care about them But all that is leadership
[SPEAKER_02]: And what you're talking about is that's informal leadership training, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Taken time to actually just talk to someone about not just what they're doing, but why they're doing it, understand what their goals are, and what you can do to help them achieve those goals.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're investing in the skill of leadership training, you're developing your people at every level.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so it doesn't have to be a formalized process where you're pulling people out of the job.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, for days or weeks on end, that informal day-to-day training.
[SPEAKER_02]: In fact, if anything, what we try to do at echelon front is instill the need to do that at every level of the team that you've got to take ownership of that.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're waiting for the leadership development organization inside your team, you know, to run this formal training, it's great if you can do that.
[SPEAKER_02]: But you have to develop your people and develop yourself and the people around you.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so that's what we try to do at echelon front is instill in every leader.
[SPEAKER_02]: The idea that they have to train the leaders around them and ultimately work themselves out of a job, so that as they delegate tasks, they can get promoted up the channel command.
[SPEAKER_02]: It creates more opportunities as the company or organization is more successful.
[SPEAKER_02]: It creates more opportunities for promotion and other people to take on greater responsibilities.
[SPEAKER_02]: Leaders make more leaders and this is what every leader should be doing is trying to develop the people around them.
[SPEAKER_02]: That informal training that should be happening daily or weekly should be a part of every leadership development program.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and the best companies that we work with are the companies who invest early and invest consistently in this leadership development effort and to your point.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of that's formal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of that is taking that moment two hours at a bus to bring in the whole team together, bringing your team offline for a day of training, getting them outside of their day-to-day.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of that can be really valuable.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that that can't happen on a regular basis.
[SPEAKER_00]: But some of that effort is really important of front investing in that day of training, how day training, whatever you can do.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in between that, this tough can't be flavor of the week.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we see a lot of clients to talk about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, hey, we've done this step before, but it was flavor of the week.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we create sustainment around these leadership principles?
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the effort that we try to help our clients with.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, we can do something offsite.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can come on site for a full day workshop.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can come and do some executive coaching or some training with your teams, but part of that effort is what you do in between.
[SPEAKER_00]: At Ashlan Front, we may not do a lot of the formal bringing our team offline, which we're trying to do more of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's consistency in how we talk about these principles in our meetings, in our touch points, in our training, in our feedback sessions, whatever it might be, that's what you're describing as the day to day.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's little moments of opportunity to continue to invest in those individuals, or coaching and mentoring.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or just starting off your all-hands meetings or your team meetings with a question around your culture about something that matters to your organization.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those values that you put up on your mission statement in the organization, all of that can be part of that little bit of effort to create sustainment and consistency around the leadership principles of reteaching.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's 100% right, and I think the clients that we've worked with that have the greatest return on investment for their leadership element, they're doing that all the time.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so we've run training for them, Carlos and I got a chance to run training for a client of ours a few years back and be on-site with a big construction company.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we saw the laws of combat up on the wall.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, this is a part of their culture.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're talking about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're talking about in the meetings.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so they bring their team to Muster.
[SPEAKER_02]: We ran a formal workshop with their team.
[SPEAKER_02]: But in between, they recognize that this isn't an anoculation, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: Just to have a workshop or read a book or to come to a Muster, it's something that you have to be doing all the time.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's where we see the biggest ROI materialized.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, one of the biggest things that I tell clients when they ask me that question, like, how do we keep this going?
[SPEAKER_01]: I say consistency is probably the most important thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And by the way, it doesn't have to be anything crazy, it doesn't have to be anything super formal, like you said, five to seven minutes a day.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I always say some of the best training that I ever got throughout my career, it wasn't in a formal schoolhouse setting.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was on the job, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: With all these little things that start to add up over time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at the end of the day, what we've found is, you know, it's been 13 years of getting this question from clients.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we quantify the return of investment for leadership training?
[SPEAKER_00]: We have found some great case-to-it examples.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're seeing this play out.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of my favorite examples is a healthcare organization that we were working with who recognized that they didn't have any formal training for their people.
[SPEAKER_00]: They wanted to invest in leadership training.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they actually pitted us up against two other companies and said, we want to run a pilot.
[SPEAKER_00]: We ran three, you know, we ran a workshop, the other two companies ran a workshop, and they selected who they were going to pick for this group of 300 people that were going to go through this training.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were lucky enough to get that contract.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what was so cool was they every year do this big.
[SPEAKER_00]: employee engagement survey, which a lot of companies do that kind of identify their culture, how their people feel about their organization, those numbers usually connect really closely to retention and turnover.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so those numbers are important, our people engage in our company.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as they ran this pilot program, they did the engagement survey and they took the 300 people out that were given access to this leadership training, took them out of the equation.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the whole of the organization was somewhere in the 60s.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't remember that the exact number, but somewhere in the 60s with regard to employee engagement, which industry-wide isn't terrible.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not as bad as a lot of other organizations we work with, but not great.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then they looked at the 300s separate from that number.
[SPEAKER_00]: And how they felt their engagement scores after having been poured into with this six-month leadership development program.
[SPEAKER_00]: And those three hundred were I think 96% engaged and all that that shows it right there there is an absolute return on your bottom line as there is an absolute return the bottom line for an organization when you invest in your people.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you put forth that effort to bring the leaders that you already have part of your team and help them understand what the culture is and give them access to this type of training.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's, and that's one of dozens of other case study examples if we have of clients who are doing this effectively.
[SPEAKER_02]: One of the big challenges that people have, and it's very costly, right, to their organizations is when they lose good people, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: You have people that are getting burned out and they end up leaving the organization or going somewhere else or looking for a different opportunity.
[SPEAKER_02]: And this is something that we've talked a lot about about the solution to burn out is decentralized command.
[SPEAKER_02]: And yet, sometimes when people hear this concept of decentralized command, I need to let my leader step up on my team and lead, I need leaders at every level of the team that are solving problems.
[SPEAKER_02]: Instead of being told what to do, I'm allowing them to actually solve the problems so that I can look up and out in the organization.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes when we say that to people, they'll tell us, well, I don't trust my people.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't trust my people.
[SPEAKER_02]: When we start to ask them, okay, you don't trust your people, well, let's look at your training plan.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's look at your leadership development program.
[SPEAKER_02]: How much time are you actually spending and developing your leaders and building that trust and confidence in your leaders to be able to step up and lead?
[SPEAKER_02]: And the answer is never.
[SPEAKER_02]: For the people that don't trust their team to step up and lead, but just decentralized command.
[SPEAKER_02]: For the people that don't trust their team to step up and lead, but decentralized command, they're not training their team at all.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're not spending time with their team.
[SPEAKER_02]: So the idea that they're just going to magically get better, it just doesn't happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: You actually have to proactively make it happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's one measure that's one measure that you could put on a leadership development program is you're not going to burn out good people if you instill a culture of decentralized command where leaders at every level can make decisions and make things happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it doesn't depend on just one person or a handful of people to make all decisions.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Carlos, what would you say to a client who's wrestling with this calculation of there is a cost for leadership development, whether you're doing it internally or you're bringing in an outside resource like something that we do for our clients, and what would you say to the clients that are wrestling with this trouble around the return on investment?
[SPEAKER_00]: How do I understand that the money I'm going to invest in this is going to have some kind of return?
[SPEAKER_01]: So I would tell them, listen, the cost for leadership is gonna be there whether you want it to be or not, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So you're either gonna pay for not having it with turnover, with a low morale, with all these things that we've talked about, or you can invest into it and see good returns on your investment with higher turnover, higher morale.
[SPEAKER_01]: And whatever other metrics you're looking to increase, I was just working with a client not that long ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: They've been doing our leadership training with us for about six months, just six months.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was on the phone with them actually yesterday and they said every metric, every number that we have wanted to see go up has gone up and every number that we wanted to see go down has gone down.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's because they've actually taken the time to invest in their team and they've been consistent about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So listen, you're going to pay for it no matter what.
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, it's kind of one of those things I told my son, listen, life is hard either way, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So pick your heart.
[SPEAKER_00]: You are always paying for leadership, whether it's proactively or reactively.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's happening at some point in that process.
[SPEAKER_02]: You get to pay now or pay late.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: 100%.
[SPEAKER_00]: So with that for our immediate action drill this week, I want leaders to identify one area where poor leadership is costing you time or money.
[SPEAKER_00]: And with that, take one step this week to address it, whether that's through mentoring or coaching or figuring out how you incorporate some element of leadership development within your team.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it doesn't have to be through formal training.
[SPEAKER_02]: You may not have the opportunity to pull your entire team offline for days or a week at a time.
[SPEAKER_02]: It can be informal training.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you only have 10 or 15 minutes, you could pull your team together.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can utilize a case study that provides some lessons to learn or a best practice that you and your team can utilize.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can ask them what they might do to come up with a plan to solve a particular problem and listen what they have to say and let them run with that plan.
[SPEAKER_02]: Use that informal training to develop your leaders.
[SPEAKER_02]: you'll be able to lead and win.