Skot Waldron:
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Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Unlocked, where we talk about unlocking the potential of people, so we can unlock the potential of our organizations. Today I’ve got retired major general, John Gronski on the call. And he is going to share with us a little bit of the concept behind his new book called Iron-Sharpened Leadership. It’s brand new, just out. He’s got over 40 years in the military, leading thousands of people. I’m literally saying thousands of people in different ways, right? Different times of leading throughout his career in the military. And he shares an amazing story near the end of this interview that you really need to understand and listen to.
Number one, it’s super intriguing. Number two, it really goes into the guts of what leadership’s all about, right? And how selflessness, how understanding that we are for somebody is going to draw out so much power in those we lead and even in ourselves. So I’m really, really grateful that John’s on the call today. I hope you’re going to get a lot out of this. I know I did. So, let’s do it.
Welcome to the show, John. Super glad to have you here. How are you doing?
John Gronski:
Hey, Skot. I’m doing fantastic. Thank you for having me on as a guest. I listen to your podcast all the time. I always get a lot out of it and I’m happy to be joining you today.
SKOT WALDRON:
That’s awesome. Thank you. I appreciate that. Share it with your friends, everybody. Get the word out. I’d love that. That’d be great. Especially this one, of course. Right?
JOHN GRONSKI:
I’ll definitely get the word out about this podcast.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yes, yes. Well done. Well done. Okay. Well, let’s talk about this. So Iron-Sharpened Leadership. Let’s go. What is this all about? So this is, I’m going to say, completely different than the premise of your first book of a journey that you took across the country on a bicycle with your young toddler child, right?
JOHN GRONSKI:
Yeah.
SKOT WALDRON:
In a trailer on the back of your bike in 1983. Okay. And then you’re writing a book called Iron-Sharpened Leadership. So help me with this. What is this all about from the first book to the second book? What sparked it? Indulge us.
JOHN GRONSKI:
Yeah, let me just briefly talk about the first book first. As you mentioned, in 1983, my wife, Berti and I, went on this cross country bicycle trip with our 15 month old son, Stephen. We started in Tacoma Washington finished in Northeastern Pennsylvania. With the route we took it was over 4,000 miles, all self-supported. Two man backpacking tent, two sleeping bags, and it was just a wonderful trip. I kept a journal during the course of that 1983 trip. Remember analog world at the time, not the technology that we have at our fingertips today. And that journal I took on that trip in 1983, sat in a shoe box for over 35 years. And then when I retired from the army in 2019, my younger son, Timothy, who wasn’t even born yet when we took that trip, encouraged me to write a book about the trip, so I did that.
The name of the book is The Ride of Our Lives: Lessons on Life, Leadership, and Love. And it’s got a great element of leadership lessons in that book, and that brought me to write this second book, Iron-Sharpened Leadership. Really is about my leadership philosophy of character competence and resilience. And I just wanted to put out more content about the lessons I have learned over 40 years of leading soldiers, and leading other people in the corporate world. So aspiring leaders and experienced leaders could learn from the lessons I had in my leadership journey.
SKOT WALDRON:
Fantastic. So you were a major general in the US Army. Thank you for your service, appreciate you, and the work you did there.
JOHN GRONSKI:
Thanks Skot.
SKOT WALDRON:
How many people do you feel, would you guesstimate that you led during that period of time?
JOHN GRONSKI:
Yeah, well, I mean the most people I ever led as a commander was between 2012 and 2016. I commanded the 28th infantry division, which is a Pennsylvania Army National Guard division. And there were 15,000 soldiers in that division that I led. Going back to 2005, 2006, I commanded a brigade in Ramadi, Iraq during a very violent, chaotic time there. And I led 5,000 soldiers and Marines during that one year in Ramadi. So, starting in my career leading about 40 soldiers as a platoon leader, and then just progressively leading more and more. About 140 as a company commander, about 850 as a battalion commander, 5,000 as a brigade commander, and then 15,000 as a division commander. Then my career ended with my last assignment as one of the deputy commanding generals at US Army Europe, between 2016 and 2019.
And at that time there were about 30,000 to 35,000 soldiers assigned to US Army Europe. So again, I wasn’t the commander, I was the deputy commander, but just a fantastic assignment over in Europe, working with our NATO allies and other European partners and enable to work with the fantastic soldiers that we have serving our country.
SKOT WALDRON:
So you have just a wee bit of leadership experience, we’ll say.
JOHN GRONSKI:
Honestly, Skot, I’m still on my journey to become an even stronger leader. And that’s one thing I write in the book is, I don’t think the journey on developing your leadership ability should ever stop, because I think when you stop learning you stop living, and you just start going on a downward spiral, if you think you know everything. So, I’m continuing to study, I’m continuing to learn lessons from the people I lead today, and just continuing that journey to become a stronger and better leader.
SKOT WALDRON:
Right on, I mean, it’s the premise of muscle atrophy, right? You work hard to build, build, build, gain endurance, gain strength, and if you stop, it goes away, right?
JOHN GRONSKI:
You atrophy.
SKOT WALDRON:
So, it’s all about that maintenance. It’s all about how do we at least maintain if not improve over time to continue to hold strong in our journey as leaders, or just as people in general? And I think that a lot of the principles that you and I teach in leadership, or that we learn about in leadership apply in our personal lives as well. We’re going to use them forever. It’s all people to people communication, right? So, let me go off this. Let me talk about your journey a little bit, or ask you about your journey from the beginning of your platoon leadership of leading smaller teams, to the end of your career. What was your growth journey like as a leader? What was the aha moments you had as a leader in your development? What were some of those things that you’re like, “Oh, I wish I would’ve known this early on.” What were some of those things that you can share?
JOHN GRONSKI:
Just in terms of perhaps an aha moment. I remember when I was about to take command of an infantry company of around 140 soldiers, and being in the army, I think the army is a great organization that focuses on teaching leadership. And so, just in my reading and in the training that I had gone through one of the things I read was an organization will take on the personality of the leader. And I thought how could that be? How could a leader’s personality be so powerful that the 100, or so, people they lead an organization, or even more, are going to take on their personality? That can’t be true. And then I took a command of this company about 140 soldiers, and I learned it’s exactly true.
If you put a sloppy leader in charge of a squared away unit, that unit is going to become sloppy. If you put a squared away leader in charge of a sloppy organization, that organization is going to become effective and efficient. And so, it’s absolutely true that the leader has the power to influence the organization on how it achieves. If it’s going to achieve success, or if it’s going to achieve failure. And that was really an enlightening experience for me, leading these about 140 soldiers over, I think it was about three and a half years I actually commanded that company. And that was early on in my career. And I just kept trying to learn from there.
SKOT WALDRON:
So these three principles you talk about in Iron-Sharpened Leadership, character, competence, and resilience. Can you talk about each one? Why did you pick those three, and what’s the premise of each one?
JOHN GRONSKI:
Yeah, well, again, it’s my leadership philosophy, and I’ll be quite honest with you I’ve found in my career as a communicator, because I think when leaders lead 90% of what they do is communicate. I’ve found that to keep things to three, is very, very effective way. So I could have had 15, 20, 25 elements of a leadership philosophy, but I knocked it down to three to try to keep it easy for me to focus on, and also as I train others, easy for other people to remember three things. But to me character has three elements to it, and when I talk about character, I talk about core values. I think it’s very important for people to be introspective and really think when push comes to shove, my back is against a wall. What are the core values that are really important in my life?
And I think a lot of people really don’t go through that introspective journey to determine what their three to five core values are. So, I talk about that. The second thing I talk about is trust. And in order to develop trust there’s a number of things you have to do. But one of the key things is you’ve got to demonstrate integrity all the time, be true to your word, follow through on commitments you make. And so that’s the second element of character, trust and integrity. And then the third part is care. And that’s caring about those you lead, and this is the key. To lead effectively, I think you have to care more about the welfare of those you lead than you do about your own welfare.
Now, that sounds easy. When you say that, that sounds easy. You could internalize that and understand what that means, but in reality, that’s a pretty hard thing to do, to put the welfare of other people before your own welfare, especially people that maybe you haven’t worked with that long, but they’re people you lead and you need to do that. In the army we talk about leaders eating last. So if you’re out in the field, either on a real world operation in combat, or you’re training, and they bring chow out to the field, a leader will always be last in the chow line, because it’s more important for the leaders, men and women to eat first than it is for the leader. The leader could live on the scraps at the end of the chow line, but you got to make sure the people you lead, your soldiers are taken care of. So that’s the whole premise of the element of character in my leadership philosophy.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay. And then going on to competence. Talk about that.
JOHN GRONSKI:
Yeah, with competence, it’s not really the technical competence of one’s job that I’m referring to, it’s really the leader competence. And when I talk about leader competence, I’m talking about the leader being competent enough to provide a vision, because I think a vision is so important. And I know you focus on why in the work you do, and I also focus on why. People have to understand what is the overarching purpose of what the organization is doing, or what the organization is all about. The second part is decision-making. There’s some leaders who fail because they don’t have the personal courage to make a decision. And so I focus on decision-making as a competence. I already talked about communication, but that’s also an element of leader competence, and understanding, that’s really 90% of your job. Communicating one-on-one to people, talking to people in a group, emailing, whatever the medium would be to communicate to those you lead is extremely important.
And then the fourth element of leader competence is developing others. A leader has to focus on developing others to become better leaders. And so when I talk about competence, it really involves those four things. And then the final one is resilience. The way I define resilience… Some people think of resilience as overcoming adversity, which absolutely it is, but I also so think of resilience as being the best possible person you could become, and there’s several elements to that. One of the elements is positive energy. A leader has to exude positive energy. A leader has to be optimistic, and I’ll tell you what that means to me. It’s not looking at problems and challenges through rose-colored glasses. It’s when your organization faces a challenge, you have to be upfront about what that challenge is. But for a leader, be optimistic, that means a leader has to believe, and get others to believe that tomorrow is going to be better than today.
And that just doesn’t come with words. You have to put together a viable plan that people believe in, but positive energy is so important. I like to say a leader should not brighten up a room when they leave it. A leader should brighten up a room when they enter it people. Should want to gravitate toward that leader. And then the second element of resiliency is fitness. And I know you and I are both into physical fitness, and I do think physical fitness is an important element to be a resilient person, certainly. Then there’s other elements to fitness. There’s emotional fitness. There’s spiritual fit. There’s mental fitness. A leader has to work on all those elements of fitness. And then the last element of resiliency, which I think is starting to be talked about a little bit more now, which I’m glad to see, but it’s vulnerability.
A leader has to allow themself to be vulnerable in order to be successful. And that means a couple of different things. That means a leader has to be able to step out of their comfort zone and try new things. A leader has to ask people that they lead what their opinion is, and hear people out because a lot of the folks we lead have different life experiences than we have. Allow yourself to be vulnerable. If you, as the leader say, “Hey, you know what? I don’t necessarily have all the answers. So I’m going to ask you, what do you think?” So that’s a way to allow yourself to be vulnerable.
And then a third way to allow yourself to be vulnerable is to tell stories to those you lead. Stories about the time you may have made a mistake, stories about a time that you may have tried something and you failed, because a lot of our followers think because we’re in a position of leadership that everything we touch turns to gold. We never made a mistake. We never failed anything. And Skot, you and I know that as leaders, that can’t be further from the truth. We know we’ve all made mistakes in our life. And and I think to tell stories about some of those mistakes and some of the failures we had to our followers, it helps to inspire followers to know that, “Hey, you know what? I could use some initiative, even at the risk of making a mistake, but I’m going to be okay.” And so to me, that’s the element of resiliency.
And it’s not only important for a leader to build their own resiliency. I think it’s very, very important for a leader to help others in the organization also develop their resiliency. And that’s one of our jobs as a leader.
SKOT WALDRON:
Brilliant. I love it. There’s a principle we talk about that I coach people on called self-preservation. It’s all about what am I afraid to lose? What am I trying to hide? What am I trying to prove? Right? And I think that that principle prevents us as leaders from being vulnerable, right? From sharing those mess ups, those mistakes in the past, from being open, from asking questions, from asking for contributions from other people, because we might be afraid that their idea might be better, or we might be trying to hide our incompetence, or we might be trying to hide that we failed at something and make us look weak to other people and then lose respect.
So there’s all these things that we have to overcome in our own minds in order for that… I love that vulnerability piece, because you’re right. I think that it’s starting to get talked about a lot more now than it ever has been as part of leadership, but that is so instrumental in building trust with those that we lead. And we see it a lot in politics, right? That transparency, that ability to be vulnerable instead of just being a talking puppet that the people see. So, I love that principle. I just wanted to riff off that for a second. Because I think that’s really, really smart. So-
JOHN GRONSKI:
Yeah. Skot, that’s all part of being an authentic person, because the people we lead are not stupid. They’re smart people that we lead, and they can see right through you, if you’re not being an authentic person, if you’re trying to be somebody who you’re not, if you made a mistake in front of other people, and then you just try to whitewash and pretend you didn’t make that mistake, you’re not going to be able to develop trust that way. So authenticity in a leader is an extremely important trait.
SKOT WALDRON:
Right on, have you seen in your time in the military… I’m going to put you on the spot here to see if you can come up with one pretty quick, but seeing the difference between a leader that doesn’t exemplify these things versus one that does. I’m asking this because as a civilian, and watching the movies and reading the stories and the books, we have this perception, I’m saying we as civilians, of the drill sergeant, right? The military leader that demands complete respect, complete obedience. Don’t question me. Do what I say. I’m the leader. I’m going to come in, I’m going to tell you what to do, and you’re just going to obey.
Versus what you’ve just described, and you’ve [inaudible 00:22:11] 40 years in the military of leading. And you’re coming out talking about asking people’s opinions and vulnerability and developing character and caring for them, and all these types of initiatives that are a little bit more touchy feely, a little bit more of the give and take as far as communication is concerned. So help bridge that gap for me, maybe through a story of seeing leaders that exemplified both, and what the difference was.
JOHN GRONSKI:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is a great question. And really, again, another term that’s used a lot is toxic leadership. A leader who is caustic, a leader who just makes the organization feel ill at ease , but they’re all about getting a job done, right, at the expense of stepping on people. And I think leaders like that could be effective, but for a short period of time. I think if you want to have sustained leadership over a long period of time being a servant leader, a character based leader is the way to go.
A friend of mine, he wrote a book, and in the book he was interviewing Coach K, Coach Krushelnyski from Duke University. And of course, Coach K has a remarkable reputation as a coach and a leader. And during the interview, Coach K was asked… Because the coach was talking about and the importance of character, and the importance of values. And he was asked, what does character have to do with winning a basketball game? And Coach K’s answer was this, he said, “Character has absolutely nothing to do with winning a basketball game, but it has everything to do with winning a championship.
There’s a difference there. You could be a toxic leader and a grind it out guy who doesn’t care about people, and you could be successful probably for a short period of time. But if you want to have long-term success, that’s where servant leadership and character based leadership comes in. One other thought about toxic leadership is, I think it’s impossible to be labeled as a toxic leader if you treat the people you lead with dignity and respect. Now that doesn’t mean you can’t hold people to the standard, because I think holding people accountability is key. I think one of the issues we have is teammates not holding other teammates accountable, and leaders not holding their people accountable.
So that’s not what I’m talking about, but you could hold somebody accountable in a dignified and respectful way. If somebody screwing up, take them on the side in private and explain what’s going on and how they could make a course correction. You could even fire somebody in a dignified and respectful way. So being dignified and respectful to people doesn’t mean holding people to standards, and not making changes if you need to make changes in terms of personnel, but it will prevent you from being labeled as a toxic leader, I believe.
SKOT WALDRON:
Is there a story or an experience you can share where leadership just made a huge impact on you while serving in the military?
JOHN GRONSKI:
Yeah, I’d say really multiple times throughout the course of my experience. I mean, leaders who have worked for me, I’ve been inspired by. I’ll tell you a quick story. Gunnery Sergeant Michael Burkhardt, he was a Marine who served with me in Ramadi, Iraq. Gunny Burkhardt’s job, he was an explosive ordinance disposal Sergeant, which meant he would go out and neutralize improvised explosive devices. And just a quick story on this. It was September 19th. We had a patrol out in Southern Ramadi. We were getting a lot of improvised explosive device attacks, and many of these IEDs, what they’re called the acronym, were placed in the ground where you couldn’t even see them. I mean, years before we even got there, actually. And we had a patrol out improvised explosive device subsurface detonated under an Up-armored Humvee, killed three of our soldiers instantly.
And we sent Gunny Sergeant Burkhardt and two young Marines down there to do a post blast analysis to determine the tactics, techniques, and procedures, the insurgents were using. And so Burkhardt gets down there, sees the destroyed Up-armored Humvee. Our soldiers had the area secure. He saw a crater next to that Up-armored Humvee that was destroyed a couple of feet deep, about four feet in diameter, jumped down in the crater to take a closer look, because he believed that’s where that IED had been in place. But as soon as he got in that crater, he noticed a live IED right in front of him, about two feet away that was ready to go off. So he took his KA-BAR knife cut the red detonation cord, neutralized that, but there was a third artillery shell in that crater behind him that he didn’t see. An insurgent was off in the distance watching.
Hit the button on his detonation device. It blew Gunny Burkhardt out of that crater, 15 feet, landed on the ground, unconscious, pants soaked with blood. Our soldiers go up to him, see how serious his wounds, call in a MEDEVAC helicopter. Cut off his pants, start treating his wounds. About five minutes later, Gunny Burkhardt regains consciousness. The soldiers couldn’t believe that. They were just thankful he was alive. And then a couple of minutes after that, he actually tells the soldiers… Well, actually he asks the soldiers. He asked them, he said, “Do I have my legs?” Because he had no feeling from the waist down. Soldiers told him he had both of his legs. And then a couple of minutes later, he actually tells the soldiers he wants to stand up, and they couldn’t believe it. He had just gotten blown up.
So he stands on his feet, MEDEVAC helicopter lands on the ground behind him, and the soldiers say to Gunny, they said, “Gunny, we got to put you on the stretcher and carry you to that helicopter.” And Gunny looks at them, and he throws a one finger salute to the insurgents who we knew were out there somewhere watching. I think you know what I mean by one finger salute. And he says to the soldiers around him, he says, “I’m not going to be carried to that helicopter on the stretcher. I don’t want the insurgents to have the pleasure of seeing me being carried to that helicopter on a stretcher. I’m going to walk there under my own power.” Rest of the story, the leadership element of this story, and he told me this himself a couple of days later, because he never was evacuated any farther than our forward operating base.
Four weeks later, he was actually out there neutralizing roadside bombs again. But the leadership element to the story, because remember I told you two young Marines were with him that day. He told me that the reason he didn’t want to be carried to that helicopter on the stretcher is because he didn’t want to shatter the confidence of those two young Marines that were out there with him, because he knew with all the IEDs we were getting, they were going to have to be out there probably later on that day, neutralizing IEDs while he was recovering from his wounds. He wanted to walk to that helicopter, so we didn’t shatter the confidence of those two young Marines. It had nothing at all to do with what the insurgents were thinking. So the leadership element, the leadership point to the story is even 15 minutes after getting blown up, instead of being overly concerned with his own wounds, he was more concerned with the fact him being cared to that helicopter would have on those young Marines who served with them.
To me, that’s a true leader. And I think that’s just a great leadership story that people could reflect on and think to themselves when times are tough. When they’re suffering, they’ve got to really keep their followers in mind, because their followers might be suffering too. And those are the ones we really got to take care of.
SKOT WALDRON:
Thank you so much for sharing. That’s amazing. I mean, I’m just like in awe, right, of him, just to be able to think outside of himself in such a… So, that’s the leadership principle, right? To expand on what you said, right? In high stress, high self-preservation mode type of environment where it’s my legs. I just got blown up. I can’t feel half my body. I might die. I need to survive. Fight or flight instinct. And he was saying, “No, I’m for them. I’m not for myself in this. I’m for them.” That’s crazy. That’s amazing. How many of us can stand up and say that we would be like that, right? And sometimes we get stressed because we miss a deadline. And we all of a sudden become, “No, no, no, no, no.” All niceties go out the door. We don’t care about anybody else. We care about our own deadline being missed. And it’s like, hold on a second. We still have our legs, and we can still feel our legs, at certain times. Right?
JOHN GRONSKI:
Yeah, it’s like you said, a leader missing a deadline. How many leaders throw their teammates under the bus, if a deadline is missed, instead of taking the full responsibility? And then the other point of the Gunny Burkhardt story is Gunny had certain core values that he was true to, and putting his people first was one of those core values. And again, just getting back to the conversation, we had a little bit earlier about the importance of core values and understanding what your core values are and when your back is against a wall, that’s the time when you really got to adhere to your core values. If you don’t have any values, you’re not going to know what to stand for. So, that’s why that’s so important.
SKOT WALDRON:
And I love because as I go into corporations and talk about values, I’m like that’s nice that all 20 of your values are in nice fonts on your wall, in your break room, but do they mean anything? Do you live them? Do you even know what they are, if I asked you what they were, right? And so when we hone it down to those core set and then you see them actually living them out, that’s when the respect comes. That’s when the trust is built. That’s when this is authentic and real, right? It’s not just something plastered on a picture of an eagle flying through the sunset. It’s straight up for real.
JOHN GRONSKI:
Exactly. And I like to say that core values, when you see them on the poster, on a wall, in a organization, they’re inspiring to read, but they’re more powerful when they’re actually lived. Now, how does an organization live their core values? I think one way to do it is when business decisions are being made factor those core values of your organization into the business decision that you’re making. How many businesses do that? When they’re doing a business decision-making process, is there a step in there that says factor in what your organizational core values are? And that will help lead you to the right decision, I believe.
And then on a personal level, if you know what your own personal core values are, when you’re making a life decision, do you factor your own personal core values into the life decisions you’re making? And again, I think that will help us make better decisions.
SKOT WALDRON:
Right on. At the end here, what does Iron-Sharpened Leadership mean to you?
JOHN GRONSKI:
Yep. Thank you for asking that question. The book has a spiritual element to it as well. And one of my favorite Bible verses is Proverbs 27:17. And that Bible verse reads, “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” And to me, there’s a lot to unpack with that particular verse. And again, the title of the book, Iron-Sharpened Leadership is really based on that Bible verse. But there’s a few things to consider with that.
First of all, hanging out with the right people. Perhaps people who are a little bit smarter than you, people who are a little bit stronger than you, whatever element of fitness you’re trying to develop people who are a little bit stronger in that element, whether it be physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, whatever. Hanging out with people who are a little bit better than you, so you could help yourself improve. But then at the same time, as you reach up your hand to those people who are stronger than you to use them as mentors, reaching down a hand to people who maybe don’t have the talents you have, so you can help them along as well.
So to me that’s what Iron-sharpened Leadership is all about. Reaching up the hand to learn more, reaching up the hand to your mentors, but also reaching down a hand to help others along the way as well.
SKOT WALDRON:
Love it. I love that. That verse does have a lot of power and the meaning behind it, it’s so simple, but the principle is so strong. And so I really love that. So where can people get ahold of it?
JOHN GRONSKI:
Yeah. I do have an e-commerce site store.leadergrove.com. And if people order from me, I will mail you a signed copy of the book, or you could get it from the normal book website, Amazon has the book. Unison Books has the book. So unison.com, amazon.com, or my own e-commerce site, if you Google the title of the book you’re going to come to various websites that sell the book. So again, Iron-Sharpened Leadership, and I hope people have an opportunity to read the book. It’s for aspiring leaders, as well as for experienced leaders, and really what it is, is an after action review, or a lessons learned over the last 40 years of my career, leading people in the military and in the civilian sector.
SKOT WALDRON:
Brilliant. So retired major general John Gronski. Rockstar. Thank you so much. So good. I hope people reach out to you, hire you to speak, tell some of these stories that are obviously going to blow our minds, but also come out to train, how to train their teams on this principle of Iron-sharpened Leadership and what that means. So thank you so much for being on the show and sharing your insights with us. Appreciate it.
JOHN GRONSKI:
Hey Skot, thank you for hosting me. I really appreciated our conversation today. Thank you.
SKOT WALDRON:
Character, competence, resilience, those three principles and the things he talked about that he’s learned throughout his career in the military, throughout leading individuals and just throughout life in general, right? I mean his journey across the country, right? With his wife and his son in 1983. Understand character, competence, resilience. Understand what that had to do with even that journey is huge. I love the principle that we talked about with the values and understanding that when we have aligned values in ourselves, if our personal values align with those company values, or those organizational values, or whatever we’re trying to do, it’s going to be so much easier for us to have that alignment and have that vision going forward together. That unity going forward together, because that’s really what we need in order to succeed. When we have misalignment, when we have broken up thoughts, and the values are not aligned, then we have disharmony.
We have miscommunication, we have dysfunction, and we have people that just turn over. When we don’t have values, guiding our principles, guiding what we do, we will break down. And I want you to take that with you. Think about your own values. Think about your own principles. Think about this value of being for somebody as we heard in that story that John shared. How did that impact you, and how are you going to apply that principle to what you do going forward today? So thanks a lot, John, for being on the show.
If you want to find out more about me, you can go to SkotWaldron.com. I’ve got more interviews there and some other learning tidbits about leadership and culture development, and go to my YouTube channel. I’ve got tons of content there and find me on LinkedIn. I would love to connect with you there too. All right, until next time see you on another episode of Unlocked.
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