This week marks the 73rd National Day of Prayer. With numerous challenges facing our country and the world—such as the upcoming presidential election, wars, escalating crime, natural disasters, and climate disruptions—Dr. Karen emphasizes our profound need for prayer.
How did the National Day of Prayer begin? What issues and topics are we encouraged to pray for? Dr. Karen answers these questions while sharing heartfelt words of prayer to uplift and inspire. Remember to pray for our country and its leaders on Thursday, 2 May 2024.
The National Day Of Prayer 2024—”Lift Up The Word, Light Up The World” [Episode 474]
The National Day Of Prayer
I want to talk about the National Day of Prayer. The National Day of Prayer is coming up and we want to keep that in mind. The purpose of this day is to pray for our nation and to pray for our leaders. This is the 73rd National Day of Prayer and the theme this year is Lift Up the Word Light Up the World from 2 Samuel 22:29-31. The president of the National Day of Prayer is Kathy Branzell and she is a board member of the National Day of Prayer. She served alongside Vonette Bright, the wife of Bill Bright from Campus Crusade for Christ when she was in that role, and she also served alongside Shirley Dobson from Focus on the Family who has been in the role for about 25 years, Anne Graham-Lotz and Dr. Ronnie Floyd.
Now, Kathy Branzell is the President of the National Day of Prayer. She’s also the Founder and President of Fellowship And Christian Encouragement, FACE for educators. For many years, she weekly wrote scripture and prayer prompts, devotionals all for educators, and she’s also the author of a number of books mostly on prayer.
Every year there’s also a co-host who serves with the president of the National Day of Prayer, and this year’s co-host is A. R. Bernard, the senior pastor of the Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, New York. They have campuses in Long Island, Orlando, and 40,000 members as they are spreading the word of God in all of those places. You might wonder about this National Day of Prayer. How did it get started? I’m going to say that first of all, there was a biblical precedent for the National Day of Prayer and I’d like to read a scripture so we have a sense of it.
This is in 1 Timothy 2:1-2. It says, “Therefore I exhort first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings and all who are in authority that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence.” We are instructed and prompted to pray for our leadership, pray for all members, but especially our leadership and those in authority, and they mention kings at that time.
We know from the biblical record that God has moved the hearts of kings who weren’t even following him, men who didn’t even know him, yet he was able to move them to do what God’s plan was for that era and that season. Whether that be for building the temple for the Jewish people at the time, or to release his people and let them go. There are so many ways that God was intervening in the events of the world.
I’m reminded of a situation that took place in Babylon. This was when God knew that he was sending his people Israel into Babylonian captivity. He told them on their way, he gave them some instructions about how they were to operate in the midst of this. This comes from Jeremiah 29:4-7. It says, “Thus says the Lord of host, the God of Israel to all who were carried away captive, whom I have caused to be carried away from Jerusalem to Babylon. Build houses and dwell in them. Plant gardens and eat their fruit. Take wives and beget sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands so that they may bear sons and daughters, that you may be increased there and not diminished. Seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive and pray to the Lord for it, for in its peace you will have peace.”
This is still a principle as we read in 1 Timothy and at that time God was issuing a judgment on his people Israel because of their disobedience, and he had them go into Babylonian captivity. Rather than for them to be dismayed, he says, “I’m the one who sent you here. I will prosper you here. I will continue to grow you. Get married, have children, prosper in this place, and pray for this place so that you indeed will prosper.” We know from a biblical perspective certainly the aspect of praying for the nation where we are living, the nation where we are having our livelihood.
As far as the United States goes, the movement for the National Day of Prayer started officially in 1952. There was a bill that was initiated by Conrad Hilton of Hilton Hotels and Senator Frank Carlson of Kansas. That bill passed that the president would set aside and proclaim a suitable day each year other than Sunday as a National Day of Prayer on which the people of the United States may turn to God in prayer and meditation at churches, in groups, and as individuals. That was 1952.
Vonette Bright’s Influence On Prayer Day
All along the way, Vonette Bright started sensing that there should be a specific day that was named the National Day of Prayer. She spoke to senators and congressmen about it and kept after them. In particular, we had one particular congressman that she kept after until finally when we got to 1988 on the 5th of May, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the designation of the first Thursday in May as the annual observance for the National Day of Prayer. Vonette Bright was very instrumental in making that happen. Every year, the US President issues a proclamation concerning the National Day of Prayer. We want to remember that.
If you are from a country that’s not the United States, I invite you nevertheless to join us in prayer. You can pray for your country, you can pray for the world, for leadership across the globe. I want to mention the context that we are in general, and these are avenues for prayer. For example, we know that two major wars are going on that involve the United States, the war in the Middle East between Israel and the terrorist factions of Hamas and Hezbollah backed also by Iran.
The war that’s going on there where many lives have been lost, and people are still suffering in terms of not having food, shelter, water, clothing, or medical care. We need to keep people in prayer for that situation that God we know is still on the throne and will intervene and we are praying that God’s will be done on earth even as it is in heaven.
That’s one of the wars, and then we still have the war that’s going on between Russia and Ukraine and the suffering of the people there in similar fashion shortages of food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and safety, people are losing their lives in that conflict, which has been going on for a very long time. These are things we want to pray about.
We also have the US presidential election coming up and we want to pray for wisdom and discernment about selecting a leader for our country. We have the privilege to vote in the United States and we need God’s guidance about how to exercise that vote. We know that there may be others who emerge as candidates before it’s all said and done. We are asking God to lead us, to guide us, and to provide favor for our country in terms of finding a leader who is appropriate for our country. That’s another important part.
Medical Crises And The Power Of Prayer
Some issues have magnified I would say post-pandemic and those would be things such as the increase in all-cause mortality in the United States. We see almost weekly an increase in the deaths of young people including professional athletes along the way. There are so many medical crises for people, many that I know, who are dying in routine everyday surgeries.
People are dying from cancers and heart conditions and some medicines are being given to people whose side effects are worse than what they had to begin with, and so those side effects reign supreme in their bodies, making them weaker rather than leading to an effective cure. We want to pray that God will show us how to walk through these times, that lives will be preserved, and that proper medications and treatments will be identified to help people who are suffering from various conditions. We want to lift that up.
We also want to lift food crises. We have a lot of scenarios where God’s natural food that he created is being maligned and we are creating chemical food that does not necessarily agree with our bodies. It’s important that we lift up the farmers, growers, and food supply so that it not be tainted in the United States and the world around us. As we taint the food supply and as fake food is applauded, we find that our medical health and condition are not as good as they used to be.
We are also living in a world where there’s increased violence. Some people are shooting and killing their neighbors, meaning people who are in close proximity to them, and also random strangers, people that they don’t know. This is coming to everyday citizens and also those in leadership, whether they be police officers or others in security who are supposed to be protecting our people and our nation. We want to lift up those concerns. The police, for example, would have true guidance about what they should do in difficult situations. We need police officers, we need firemen, we need all of these services that we have and we want them to be doing the right things. We need to pray for them as well. They are in positions of leadership and authority.
We also know that a lot is going on concerning natural disasters, issues such as floods, fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, and all kinds of weather challenges that are impacting people across the globe and causing secondary issues. I want us to remember that Jesus is the one who was on that boat on the sea and he was asleep when a big storm emerged and erupted. The disciples were fearful and afraid and they couldn’t believe that he was asleep. “Don’t you care that we perished?” They said to him.
However, he got up and rebuked the waves and he said, “Peace. Be still.” Whatever is happening with our weather with natural disasters, God is the authority over it all. There is nothing that happens here that he can’t start or stop. The Bible even tells us that the snow, he has the snow in storehouses. That’s a way for us to understand that all weather things, all kinds of natural disasters, he can calm the seas even for those.
I would remind you of the time when after Jesus had fed the 5,000 people, he sent his disciples in a boat to go over to the other side of the sea. He went up into the mountains to pray and a big storm emerged on the sea while the disciples were in the boat on the sea. They were afraid and they were concerned about what they should do. Jesus came walking on the water and they were frightened when they saw this figure walking on the water not knowing that it was him and Jesus says, “Fear not. It is I.”
He was the one that was walking and we know that Peter said, “Lord, if it’s you lift me to walk on the water to you,” and Jesus told him to come. For a brief period of time, Peter was walking on the water towards Jesus until he looked around, saw the frightful waves, took his eyes off of the Lord and that’s when he started to sink and cried out for the Lord to save him, which of course the Lord reached out his hand and lifted him back up and rebuked him for having such little faith in the situation.
As we think about this context of all the things that are going on in our world and all of the prayer concerns, we want to remember that we serve a God who is the ruler of all. There is nothing too hard for him, nothing that’s impossible for him. Rather than magnify all these problems which indeed exist and which we have, we are going to magnify our powerful and awesome God and pray to him to intervene in all of these circumstances. That’s the attitude that we want to have as we go into this day of prayer for our nation, the National Day of Prayer. We want to remember that God is indeed more than able to handle anything that we are facing here.
Prayer For The National Day Of Prayer
Kathy Branzell, who is the president of the National Day of Prayer, did write a prayer for this occasion and I would like to read the prayer that she wrote. She says, “Jesus, we profess our faith in you. You are the light of the world and in you, there is no darkness. For you are our lamp, oh Lord, and our God who lights our darkness. Forgive us for fearing and focusing on the darkness around us. Instead of being filled with faith and shining like the city on a hill you have called us to be. Forgive us for the times when we have been the absence of light, allowing darkness to dwell in America.”
“Lead us forward to dispel the darkness and bring light throughout the church, family, education, business, military, government and arts, entertainment and media. We are saved by grace through faith, released from the darkness that once held us captive, and now free to walk in the newness of life in you. Light dispels darkness and exposes what is hidden and wicked. We commit to rise and shine for by you, Lord, we can take courage to run against the enemy, and by our God, we can fight the good fight and keep the faith as living lampstands in our communities and country.”
“We fear no evil for you are with us. Lord, your way is perfect. You lead us on paths of righteousness for your name’s sake. Your word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path. Your word is truth. Instructing and inspiring us to live an abundant life. You gave when you saved us from the death and destruction of the enemy. Fill us with truth as we read, study, and live your word. God, you are a shield for all those who take refuge in you as we abide in you and your word abides in us. We take up our shield of faith and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God, and run boldly into the darkness to lift up the word and light up the world. In the mighty name of Jesus, we pray. Amen.”
That was the prayer written for this occasion of the National Day of Prayer by Kathy Branzell. I want to read the scriptures that also go with this celebration of the National Day of Prayer. The scriptures I’m reading are from 2 Samuel 22:29-31. “For you are my lamp, oh Lord, the Lord shall enlighten my darkness for by you I can run against a troop. By my God, I can leap over a wall. As for God, his way is perfect. The word of the Lord is proven. He is a shield to all who trust in him.”
I will close with a brief prayer. Dear heavenly Father, we come before you acknowledging you as the Lord of our lives. Acknowledging you, Father, as the sovereign over all the universe. Lord, there is none like you. You are unique in all of your ways. You have all power and all authority which you have given to your son. Father, we thank you and we praise you because nothing is impossible for you. All things are possible for you Lord, and we praise you for being that God of the impossible, being the God who can intervene when all of these things are going on in our world, and more besides Lord.
Father, we praise you for being our lamp. You are the one through your word who lightens the path before us and dispels the darkness. We thank you for that, Lord. We thank you for giving us strength through your Holy Spirit, Lord, to leap over a wall and to also run against a troop. Lord, we know that your way is perfect. Father, we know that your word is proven. We lift up your word Lord, which is our light Father, our light shining in the darkness. We lift up your son who is the living word, Lord, as you lead and as you guide us.
Thank you, Father, for being the shield, our shield, the shield for all those who trust in you. Thank you, Lord, for leading and guiding us and how we are to pray. Thank you, Lord, for being our shield even in the midst of these challenging and difficult circumstances. We magnify you above them all. We thank you Father and we praise you. In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
Natural Disasters And God’s Authority
Be blessed, my friends. Have a glorious week in the Lord remembering the national day of prayer to lift up our leaders, to lift up those who are in places and positions of authority. To lift up the media, education, military, and government at all levels. Oh, Father, we thank you and we praise you for protecting those who are on the front lines in every way, including those who are missionaries across our globe. We ask that your son be lifted up and that all people will be drawn unto him. In Jesus’ name. We thank you again, Lord. You, my friends, have a blessed week.
I’m here to celebrate the work of the Bible League, which is a global ministry that provides Bibles, ministry study materials, and through activities like Project Philip, also teaches and trains local people in how to share the word of God. The President and CEO of Bible League Jos Snoep is with me to share a little bit more about what the Bible League is doing.
The beauty of the local church is that it is the body of Christ and it is the Holy Spirit that is calling the local church to be engaged in the Great Commission. As Bible League, we come alongside those local pastors. I met a pastor, his name is Rolando, in the Amazon, and he has this great vision to reach 200 communities with the word of God and we are able to come alongside them and help them with bibles and resources.
Thank you so much, Jos. We are all partners together. You and the Bible League are the hands and feet to the local people on the ground, and there are partners and donors out there who can be hands and feet to you as you also share with others. Those of you who want to be part of this ministry and I invite you to be a part of it, I’m a part of it, go to Bible League. See more about the ministry and see how you can participate and donate.
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Victorious Family And Their Mission
I’m here with Terence Chatmon, who is the President and CEO of Victorious Family and also the author of Do Your Children Believe?. Victorious Family has a goal of reaching 9.2 million families by 2030. Terence, tell us. How far along are you on that goal?
We are very excited. We reached 133,800 families before that. We are right on around the 400,000 family mark towards our 9.2 million goal in the second year, in the year and a half. We are extremely excited.
That is very exciting news and I know that it’s many new initiatives that help you to reach even more families. Tell us what’s new in the ministry.
What’s exciting is on December 7th, 2023, we had a national newspaper cover, Victorious Family, and it went throughout the country. That has exposed us to over 30 million families in the US. From that, we have got a great deal of responses and one of those responses is a new partnership that we are forming with Hampton University to come alongside them and work in eight counties in the Hampton Roads area. We are excited about that. Millions of families will be exposed to what it looks like to have family transformation taking place in their homes.
How can people reach you and how can they reach your weekly resource that you have as well?
They can reach us at Victorious Family. Our resources are there and we are excited because we have a brand new resource that came out. It’s our weekly rhythms guide. It gives the parents and individuals a day-to-day rhythm and how they might walk in Christ. We would encourage them to get a copy of our weekly rhythms guide for parents and individuals.
Thank you so much, Terence. I’m so glad that you are here with me, and to you out there in the audience, please go to Victorious Family. Donate to the ministry, get the weekly rhythms guide, and see what else is new in the ministry. See you next time.
Dr. Randy Ross is the CEO of Remarkable and a bestselling author of multiple books, including “Remarkable!,” “Roadmap to Remarkable!,” “Relationomics,” “Fireproof Happiness,” and his latest book entitled, “Make Life Good.”
Working with brands like Delta, Berkshire Hathaway Home Services, GE Appliances, McDonald’s, Panasonic, Cox Communications, Keller Williams, Compass Group, Chick-fil-A, and the Intercontinental Hotel Group, he has inspired and enabled countless people to find new passion and purpose in their work, to work better together in teams, and have greater influence and impact.
Dr. Ross, a former Chief People Officer says, when people like what they do, they do it better. Today, he speaks with Dr. Karen about how to live a “conspicuously extraordinary” life, how to create a Remarkable corporate culture, the connection between employee experience and customer experience, the role of hope in creating a happy culture and profitable business, the four maxims of value creation, and more. Listen for practical wisdom you can apply in your business today.
Dr. Randy Ross: How to Create a Remarkable Life and Business [Episode 473]
We are talking about how to create a remarkable life and business. A remarkable life goes beyond world-class service to make a profound difference in people’s lives. When you live a remarkable life, you are conspicuously extraordinary. How do you create such a life? Our special guest knows what it takes and also knows the benefits of living a remarkable life.
Dr. Randy Ross is the CEO of Remarkable and a bestselling author of multiple books, including Remarkable!, Roadmap to Remarkable,Relationomics,Fireproof Happiness, and his latest book entitled Make Life Good. Working with brands like Delta, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, GE Appliances, McDonald’s, Panasonic, Cox Communications, Keller Williams, Compass Group, Chick-fil-A, and the international InterContinental Hotel Group, he has inspired and enabled countless people to find new passion and purpose in their work, to work better together in teams and have greater influence and impact.
Dr. Ross, a former chief people officer, says, “When people like what they do, they do it better. When people like those, they do it with, they work better together. When they like the impact they are having, they find meaning and fulfillment in what they do.” Dr. Ross helps them find what they like while building healthier relationships and pursuing a passion beyond self. A messenger of practical wisdom and needed hope. Dr. Ross untangles the biggest challenges facing today’s business leaders, tomorrow’s workforce, and the future marketplace. He lives with his wife, LuAnne, and four children in Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome, Dr. Randy, to the show.
Thank you. It is a pleasure to be with you and thank you so much for your time.
Understanding The Concept Of Being Remarkable
It’s a pleasure to be with you as well. I want to hear about this remarkable life and I know that my community would love to hear about it too. First off, what is the definition of Remarkable and how did you conceive that concept?
That’s a word that’s near and dear to my heart. It’s the name of our company for one, and it’s also the name of the book as you alluded to earlier, but remarkable for me means that you live life and you do business in such a way that you blow people away. You go the second mile, you deliver world-class service, you provide the unexpected, and you mark people’s lives for good, even if just for a moment to such a degree that when they leave your presence, they have this irrepressible desire to talk about and the good that you brought into their life.
When people are remarking about you, then you indeed have become remarkable. That’s what businesses strive to do. You’ve heard the term raving fans. Remarkable is the same thing. Interesting. Robert Stephens the Founder of Geek Squad, several years ago in an Inc. Magazine article was quoted as having said this. He said, “Advertising is a tax you pay for being unremarkable,” and I like that because if you think about it makes perfect sense. The best form of advertising is word of mouth. When you leave an indelible impression, when you mark someone’s life for good to such a degree that they can’t help but go out and tell other people about it, then you become remarkable.
Overcoming Barriers To Achieving Remarkability In Business
I would imagine that most businesses would love to be remarkable. Let me ask this, what are some of the barriers that stand in the way of businesses achieving this remarkable state where others remark about them? There must be some barriers that prevent people from getting there, otherwise we’d all be there.
Let me give you a definition of what we consider to be a remarkable culture, and then we can talk about culture for a little while if you’d like, but culture happens wherever people get together. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in your business or whether it’s in the church, synagogue, or mosque where you attend worship. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the philanthropic organization where you volunteer your time or the gym where you go to workout.
Everywhere people get together, there’s a culture. We define a remarkable culture as a place where people believe the best in each other, they want the best for each other, and so therefore they expect the best from each other. I like that three-pong trilogy because the first talks about trust, the second talks about connection and compassion, and the third talks about accountability.
You are talking about barriers to creating that organizational culture, or think about it this way. You have a culture in your home. When there’s no trust, what happens to relationships? They fall apart because where trust is low, resistance is high. It’s very difficult to make forward progress or bring about change. The second thing is compassion and connection, which are essential for team dynamics, collaboration, and wanting the best for each other.
The third one is accountability. We have to call the best out of each other, which is about healthy coaching within organizations, and mentorship. The things that are barriers are lack of mentorship, lack of accountability, no connection and compassion, and low levels of trust. Those are all barriers that impede being able to create this remarkable culture where people thrive in a relationally rich environment.
I love those three items. Would you state those one more time?
It’s what we call the Remarkable Cultural Trilogy, where people believe the best in one another, they want the best for one another, and so therefore they expect the best from one another.
Role Of Values, Beliefs, And Behaviors In Corporate Culture
When you are talking about corporate culture, which is the ether in which everyone lives in the organization, tell us a little bit about the role of values, beliefs, and behavior as part of that culture.
You almost gave the exact definition that we use for culture because culture is talked about quite frequently. Everybody is beginning to understand now that healthy cultures create happiness, health, and productivity. They lead to the longevity of the tenure of their team members. Everybody is beginning to talk a lot about culture, but how we define culture is different.
We like to define culture as the collective expression of the values, beliefs, and behaviors that individuals bring to the endeavor. It’s not about their behavior, which is a big part. Some people say tongue in cheek that culture is how we play in the sandbox together, or it’s how things are done around here. It does speak a lot to behaviors, but underneath every behavior is a belief system.
It’s the way that you perceive the world. It’s the way that you see yourself. It’s the way that you see yourself interacting in your world, but beneath that fundamentally and foundationally behind the belief system is a value construct. The value construct plays into your personal beliefs, which could be faith. A big part of that is your personal faith. A big part of that is your worldview.
A big part of it is both the aspirational, the inspirational part of what you want to become, but also reflective of who you naturally are. That all creates that value construct that we as individuals hold to be near and dear. This will be fun to talk about. There’s a whole philosophy called axiology. Axiology and theology are kissing cousins because axiology posits this belief that in the universe there’s infinite good to infinite bad. Axiology is the study of good. It’s trying to define and measure good in the world, but at its very core, it’s about creating movements of good.
The way axiology defines good is to say axiologically good is having been designed for a purpose. You fulfill the purpose for which you are designed. Now in theology, we would call that sanctification, but in philosophy we call that axiology, fulfilling your purpose. A lot of what we do is bring principles of axiology into the corporate realm.
Challenges In Company Values And Behavior
If a company is struggling and they are having challenges and difficulties, and maybe their culture is not quite on point, what are some of the issues that you might diagnose there? What’s going on with values, beliefs, behavior, or that focus on the ultimate good? What might be standing in the way?
Honestly, a lot of times in corporate circles, there’s a tremendous amount of toxic behavior. We see this in a lot of organizations. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a nonprofit organization or a large multinational corporation, but sometimes even in church life, we see this, where people are about self-promotion and self-protection.
It’s all about trying to push or promote an agenda as opposed to trying to create a movement of good that’s beneficial for everybody concerned. That’s one of the things that a lot of organizations struggle with. It is to create a relationally rich environment where people can flourish. You said at the top of the show describing our work. It’s so true that happy people do good work. They do. Happy people do their work better. When you enjoy doing the work with the people that you do it with, you are more productive because you may be able to go faster alone, but you can go farther together.
Creating a relationally rich environment where people can thrive, they can collaborate, bring creativity, sharpen each other, and encourage each other, that’s what we are trying to create within corporate life. All of those are elements that can be addressed with applied axiology, the principles that can help an organization move things in a positive direction. We want to eliminate the negative or toxic behavior, and then we want to equip leaders to be strong in being able to create an environment where people are inspired to bring the best of who they are to work every day.
I know that this is much easier said than done. I have seen a lot of companies and cultures where the toxic behavior is going on, the self-promotion and the self-protection that you talked about, where it’s difficult for them to even imagine creating an agenda together that’s a good direction or a good agenda or something positive in its focus because there’s not the trust that’s there very often. When you think about ways to intervene when the culture’s already toxic, how do you help to move people who are very entrenched where they are?
One of the first things you have to do is you have to create what we call value-centricity. Don’t go look that up because that’s a word that we made up. That’s one of the prerogatives of being an author. You can make things up, but value-centricity means that the values within the organization are all aligned. First, an organization has to decide who they are, what they stand for, and what they want to accomplish. That’s what we call our vision, our values, and our mission statement, but then people who choose to be a part of that organization, their values have to align with the values of the organization. When they do, then they can create value centricity, which is an alignment of values, creating a circuit through which energy can flow to light up the world and do good.
The first thing that has to happen is there has to be an alignment of values. My personal values have to match the values of the organization. If not, then it’s not going to be too terribly long until I’m going to be experiencing cognitive dissonance. In other words, they are going to be expecting me to do things that I don’t morally or ethically feel like I should do, or they are going to be requiring things of me that go against the grain of my personal commitment and value construct.
That’s when organizations have a hard time coalescing because the values of the individuals are not shared by the organization, and vice versa. When we are all on the same page, we all have a common vision, we all have a common commitment on how we are going to get there, and we are not going to compromise our values. We know what our values are.
By that, they are not subtle plaques in the lobby, but everybody has embraced them, they have embodied them, and they imbue them, and all three of those are important that they have to personally own them, they have to manifest them, and they also have to be evangelists for them. When that takes place, then what happens is that culture becomes magnetic. It both attracts the right people and begins to repel the wrong people.
The challenge for most organizations is they don’t have values that are strong enough to be repulsive. An organization that has a culture worth its salt, its values, should be so strong that it repels people who don’t align with those values. The problem with most organizations is they are so intent on filling a seat with the most talented or most competent person, and the thing that they overlook is, does this person shares the values that we possess as an organization because culture is nothing less than the character of the organization? That’s very critical because then you begin to realize that every addition to the team is either going to codify a great culture or they are going to compromise our culture. You can’t afford to have your culture compromised by people coming into the organization who don’t share your values.
This is such an important conversation that we are having. I see this every day. What you are talking about is the impact on organizational culture by people who may be the wrong fit. What’s fascinating to me is that even though a culture may be strong and you would think it would repel the wrong people, sometimes people are in there and they have their own reasons for not wanting to leave. Very often the organization itself, the top leadership, is not as willing to get rid of people they need to get rid of because they are never going to share the values of the corporation. It’s always going to be a friction point, and they are always going to have somebody working against them in the organization, no matter how talented that person may be. Speak a little bit about those issues.
You are right. You do see this quite frequently. Unfortunately, in a lot of corporate situations where we reward the wrong behavior, you will get more of what you reward. To your point, I have worked with a lot of organizations who may have an extremely talented team member, let’s say, a great salesperson who brings in a tremendous amount of revenue into the life of the organization, but at the very same time, he or she behaves in such a way that it demoralizes other team members.
Maybe they are in sales and they are bringing in a lot of volume in terms of closed deals, but the pressure that they are putting on the ops team, the people who have to come behind and deliver the service that’s been promised, may be devastating them with expectations that are unrealistic or poor relational activity. I see a lot of times when organizations are afraid to step up and intervene in situations like that and go, “That doesn’t align with our values. That behavior either needs to change or you need to shift out of the organization.”
Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen. What happens over the long haul is it may serve the organization in the short run, but they compromise what they could have had in the long run, and they exchange a short-term benefit, money through closed deals, for the long-term loss of morale, or other people exiting the organization because they have gotten burned, discouraged, or disillusioned because no one will step up and address the bad behavior. It’s all this matter of interchange between whether we are willing to take a short-term loss for a long-term gain, or do we want the short-term gain, not realizing what the long-term loss will be.
That’s a tension particularly in publicly traded organizations because there’s this dynamic tension when you have to have quarterly returns where “Who do we serve first? Do we serve our shareholders who are looking to get a benefit from their investment, or do we take care of our stakeholders first?” Our stakeholders, our employees, our supply chain, and our vendors. In other words, that whole ecosystem that provides our service or our product.
I have seen time and time again, decisions made in corporate life where the shareholders are put first at the expense of the stakeholders. That may drive a great quarterly return, but in the long run, it’s damaging for the organization. We have to get back to putting our people first and making sure that the employee experience is robust and that it’s dynamic, and then we create a place where people love to come to work.
They wake up in the morning and they don’t have the attitude, “I have to go to work,” but they want to go to work, and then that’s when great things begin to happen in organizational life. In the long run, if the shareholder is patient, it’s much better for them as well. They may not see the immediate return, but the long-term return can be 10, 20, or 30 times what it would have been had they settled for the short term.
Connection Between Employee And Customer Experience
This is hugely relevant and very important to talk about. What seems like a short-term cost is less a cost than it is an investment in the future. When you think about it that way, and you are investing the resources for a larger return on the back end is what you are referring to. People have to think about it that way, look more holistically, not at this moment only, and then in essence, you are selling the company off and it could be a whole lot more. You mentioned something else that I want you to comment on and double down on a little bit. You were talking about the employee experience and we know that you know that there’s a connection between the employee experience and also the customer experience and what happens. Talk about that and why it’s important for companies to double down on that.
There’s no question that the customer experience is going to be a direct reflection of the employee experience. The question is, if we want to have a stellar customer experience, how do we make the employee experience better? It all gets back to this idea of putting your people before profit. A lot of organizations are still struggling with that idea. They want to do what’s going to drive results. They want to do what’s going to drive more money to the bottom line, but they don’t think about the fact that without your people, nothing is going to happen. If we don’t take care of our people in the right way, then sooner or later the business is going to suffer. That can take on a myriad of different forms.
We have one organization that we have done work with. The one that you may be familiar with, it’s a little chicken sandwich shop in our backyard here in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s called Chick-fil-A, and they have done arguably a phenomenal job when it comes to creating a culture about taking care of people because they put making a difference above making a dollar.
Here’s the point. It started with the Founder, Truett Cathy, way back in 1946. This is interesting information for those who want to see the business case for it. In 2022, Chick-fil-A was about ready to break through the $19 billion mark, $18.8 billion in gross revenue. That was more revenue than their top five competitors combined, more than Popeyes, Cane’s Chicken, Zaxby’s, and Wingstop combined. Here’s what’s fascinating. They generated more gross revenue than their top five competitors with almost a third of the number of retail outlets. Their five competitors had 10,600 outlets, while Chick-fil-A had under 3,000. Think about that. Chick-fil-A does several things to take care of their people if you know much about them. Number one, they give them a day off. They give them Sunday off.
They are not even open on Sundays. They are working one less day.
Arguably, in the quick service restaurant space, that’s one of the busiest days of the week for most organizations, but they said, “No. Our values dictate that we are going to be closed one day a week.” Part of that was a commitment to faith. Part of that is a commitment to their people. They said, “We are going to be closed.”
I can’t even begin to tell you how many people-centric programs Chick-fil-A has. This says it all. Their motto, their mission statement are very simple, and it’s this, “To be the world’s most caring company.” Now, what does that have to do with chicken sales? Nothing, but it’s about taking care of people, and you see this in their Red Couch commercials because the Red Couch commercials are about acts of kindness. How do we take care of our people, not just internally, but externally as well? That’s the whole focus.
The point is that when organizations deeply invest in taking care of their people, their people appreciate that. Their people feel affirmed, acknowledged, and respected. They in turn bring the best of who they are to the equation, and then they provide the same stellar service to the customer base that they have received as the employee, and it makes perfect sense, but why do so many organizations fail to recognize that simple idea that simply taking care of your people is the best thing that you can do to drive business. It seems like common sense, but unfortunately, it’s not common practice.
Make Life Good: A Soul-Stirring Parable About What Really Matters
One of the things that you were talking about, they sometimes think that there is no connection between creating the most caring company in the world or the planet, and the results of the business. When in fact, your results do depend on that. You get the best results by caring for your people. A lot of businesses don’t believe that. They don’t know that and they haven’t seen it because they haven’t tried it. Here’s a business that doesn’t even work on Sundays, the busiest day in the fast food industry, and yet they are outpacing their nearest five competitors. That says something about the value of caring for people, and so we have to talk about it differently. We have to connect those two. It does make a difference. They are deeply connected.
A lot of organizations strive to be the best. Here’s a great question. A friend of mine by the name of Jeff Henderson has an organization called The FOR Company. He wrote a book titled FOR, and he made this challenge. He says, “There are a lot of organizations that try to be the best in the world, but we need to be the best for the world.” There’s a big difference between the two.
The way that we like to say it in our organization is there are two kinds of organizations. There are organizations that use people to grow the business, and there are a lot of organizations that do that, but the best organizations in the world use the business to grow the people who then grow the business. When your focus is on using the business to grow the people, helping the people aspire, helping the people attain their goals, dreams, hopes, and aspirations, equipping them to become leaders worth following, and providing for them the resources they need to excel, not just at work, but at home as well.
When you have that focus on helping people grow, then the dividends are hard to describe because they are exponential. Because you’ve marked their life for good, they then want to turn around and mark other people’s lives for good, and that’s the whole idea of creating a movement of good, which brings us back to the principles of axiology.
Four Maxims Of Value Creation In Business
I think that the work that the employees then do is done with much greater ease. It’s not work. It comes naturally. It springs out of what’s been invested in them, and therefore they naturally show that to the customers and also their fellow employees that the other people they are working with inside the organization as well. I know there’s a concept that’s related to this that you talk about, which is this whole notion of value creation. You have four maxims value creation, creativity, positivity, sustainability, and responsibility. Tell us how this ties into what we have been talking about so far.
Those four maxims are at the very heart of axiology. Those are the principles that we help organizations not only begin to understand but be able to put into practice to create and crystallize a very compelling culture. The first one that you mentioned, the maximum of creativity simply says this, we are all designed to create value in life, which means that we feel good when we do good. That’s the way that God made us. He created us to give back to the world, not just to be consumers, but to be creators of good. That’s where it all begins, and then the question tied to that is, do you create on a daily basis more value than you take? In other words, do you bring more to the table for others than you expect others to give you in return?
There are two types of people in the world. There are value creators and their value extractors. A value creator lives by what I call an abundance mentality, and they say, “If we all bring more to the table than we take away, then at the end of the day, there will be a surplus on the table that can be shared by everybody who helped to create that value, and that’s a win for everybody.”
On the other hand, there are value extractors, and we all have had experience with value extractors. Some people are very myopic. It’s all about them, “What’s in it for me?” They live by a scarcity mentality. They believe, “There’s not enough to go around in the world, so therefore, I have to get to the table to get as much for myself as I possibly can,” and often that’s with blatant disregard for anybody else but the challenge is if everybody has the attitude of being a value extractor, it won’t be too long until there’s nothing left on the table. When there’s nothing left on the table, go home.
This whole idea of do you bring more to the table than you take away, that’s the principle of creativity, the maxim of creativity. The more value you create, the more invaluable you become. I don’t care if that’s in my organizational life or personal life. The same thing applies to my wife and our relationship at home.
My wife has what I call an emotional piggy bank. If I make more deposits into her emotional piggy bank than I make withdrawals, if I’m more interested in her good than my own good, if I’m bringing more to her than I’m expecting from her, if I’m striving to make her world better where she can thrive, then her emotional piggy bank is full and life is good. If I’m making more demands on her than I’m giving to her, if I expect more from her than I’m creating for her, I’m going to drain that reservoir pretty quickly. When I do, mama ain’t happy, and if mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.
There’s nothing else to draw out of the bank either.
She’s depleted, and our relationship is bankrupt. The same thing happens personally, and it can happen professionally as well because we have to consciously keep our hand on the helm of culture, and we do that by value creation because we are going to have a culture. Anywhere people get together, you are going to have a culture. The question will be by design, meaning you give a thoughtful reflection and intentionality, move it in a constructive way, or are you going to have it by default? You are not thinking about it and one day you wake up and you don’t like it. You often hear couples talking about, “I don’t know, we drifted apart.” That’s a culture by default because you didn’t focus on making it better.
The first and most important is the maxim of creativity, and then the second one is positivity. Positivity says, do you leave a positive wake in the world? It’s a great question. Do you leave a positive? All of us sometimes move through life in such a way that we don’t slow down long enough to smell our own exhaust, but we leave a ripple impact on the shore, and we need to know what that is. We need to stop and think about whether we are leaving a positive wake in all that we do.
The third is sustainability, which simply says to continuously create value, and leverage your passion and your strengths to solve problems. I love this one because there’s a lot of talk in our world about passion. There’s a lot of talk in our world about strengths, but the key is we have to leverage both of those to solve problems. The bigger problem you solve, the more value you create, the more value you create, the more invaluable you become.
The last one is the principle or the maxim of responsibility, which simply says to have the biggest impact, determine what those elements are over which you do have control because there are a lot of elements over which you don’t have control, and apply your energy to move those forward in a positive direction. Take responsibility for those things that you can change and move in a positive way. There are so many more nuances to that and how we apply that across the board and organizational life, but that’s the essence, and that’s what we unpack in the book Remarkable!.
That sounds phenomenal and wonderful information for people to absorb and apply. What is the connection between what we are talking about now, this value creation process and people living for the purpose for which they are created, and also the impact that they are having in the company? There’s some connection between all of those. How do you see those going together?
They are intricately intertwined because passion comes as a result of pursuing your purpose in life, and purpose in life is exactly what we are talking about. Everyone’s purpose in life is the same or should be the same, and that’s to bring value to other people. The scripture is clear, “God so loved the world that he gave.” God was a giver. To be a part of his greater purpose, we are givers as well as we reflect his likeness to the world.
As we create good for others, that’s what brings meaning, fulfillment, and joy to life. From a psychological standpoint, people are depressed when they are anxious. It’s all because their focus is on themselves. They have turned internally and they are concerned about what’s going to happen with me, what’s going to happen to me, why is this happening against me? Their focus is on trying to get through that particular circumstance but it’s all myopically driven.
We know psychologically the antidote to depression and anxiety is to turn your focus outward, either through appreciation for others or in helping others, but put your focus on helping other people and it will begin to eliminate the anxiety, the stress, and the depression as you focus on doing good for others. It’s profound, and then when you talk about organizationally. When an organization is on a mission together, they don’t have a mission, they are on a mission together. That’s where the real cohesiveness is. The team dynamics begin to gel, and you can begin to move things forward at lightning speed sometimes because you’ve got this value-centricity that we are talking about.
Fulfilling Your Purpose In The Marketplace
Let me ask you a more personal question. How did you come to do this work that you are doing in the marketplace? How are you fulfilling your purpose and your unique design in living like this?
I appreciate you asking the question. For me, this is so much fun because I look at the research that’s available especially from organizations like Gallup on employee engagement, and you would know that less than a third of the American workforce is what Gallup describes as actively engaged. Meaning that they bring passion, enthusiasm, and excitement to the work experience.
Think about that. Only a third of the American workforce. Pragmatically, that translates into $1.9 trillion of lost opportunity costs. That’s the economic impact, but let’s talk about the emotional impact. People don’t like what they do. For a long time, I have sat back and I have said, “That has to change. The most time that any of us spend is in our work, and if we don’t enjoy our work, then what’s life about?” For me, the passion is to be able to go in and help individuals and organizations begin to understand life is too short not to enjoy what you are doing.
Where this came from or the genesis of all of it was that I spent the first almost two decades of my career in the not-for-profit space. I worked with some phenomenal organizations that did great, good in the community and had a high impact on making life better for a lot of people, but I learned through that how you motivate volunteers. In a nonprofit, it’s driven by voluntary time, energy, and resources.
The only way that you can create a movement among volunteers is to tap into their passion to have a cause, purpose, or mission that they believe in, and then honor and recognize them and fuel their energy by appreciation, and this rally cry to do something worthwhile. Take that. I took those lessons learned in the space of philanthropy and moved those over into the for-profit space. It’s the same because people are not primarily driven by financial gain. They are not.
If they are paid a fair wage in a fair market for fair work, that’s great, but what drives people, what people want to be a part of is a mission that’s larger than themselves, and they want to do it with people they enjoy doing it with and beyond that, they want to have fun doing what they are doing because they feel like they are making a difference in the world.
By taking those ideas, concepts, and principles from the not-for-profit world, and translating them over into the for-profit space, the results are amazing. Think about it from the standpoint of a leader. The greatest resource that you have is the untapped laden energy that lies within the margins of life, the discretionary effort that your people have that you’ve not yet tapped into.
If you could get that 30% or 33% that are actively engaged, if you could get that number up to 40%, 45%, or 50%, the impact on the organization would be extraordinary, and that’s what we are talking about. We are talking about creating a culture that’s inspirational to tap into that discretionary effort in the margins of life.
Connection Between Hope And Happiness At Work
It is true that in the nonprofit sector, they are very tuned into what they believe in terms of the mission that they are going after, why they exist, and who it is that they intend to impact on the back end of what they are set up to do. It’s great to bring that same spirit to the for-profit world as well. I find that there’s a lot of cross-pollination that can happen in both directions for different purposes, for both what the nonprofits can learn from the for-profit and vice versa. Let me ask this. We haven’t used these words exactly, although when people are fulfilled at work, there’s this happiness component that’s a part of it, and there’s hope that is a very important concept for you. How are those two connected, hope and happiness?
I wrote a book during COVID, entitled Fireproof Happiness. A friend of mine challenged me to write it because we looked at what was taking place in the world around us with COVID and all the challenges and the anxiety. He said, “You need to write a book on hope that will give people an optimistic view.” I said, “That’s, that’s interesting,” and so I took up the challenge.
My audience predominantly, while I do enjoy speaking for not-for-profit, and particularly in the church realm, the vast majority of the work I do is in Corporate America, Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies. I can’t always lead with chapter and verse. I wanted to write a book on hope that was not heavily faith-based because I knew that would be something my audience in the corporate world may not immediately embrace.
I wanted to take it from a scientific standpoint, and I did a great amount of research. I gathered over 250 scientifically validated peer-reviewed research papers on the power of the efficacy of hope. I synthesized it, crystallized it, and put it in a form that everyone can pick up, read, easily understand, and apply. The link between hope and happiness is irrefutable. Everybody in the world is searching for happiness, but very few people attain it or know how to attain it, and the secret element is hope.
You have to first of all understand what hope is. You have to define it properly, then you have to know how to pursue it, and it’s not what most people think, and that’s what I write about in Fireproof Happiness. Let’s define hope. Hope is a dynamic motivational system that’s tied to inspirational goal setting. Happiness does not come in attaining the goal that you desire. Happiness comes in the challenge of the pursuit.
That is interesting because John Templeton, a wise man, once said, “Happiness pursues eludes, but happiness gives returns.” What he was saying is that everything good in life that you want, you can’t get by saying there’s a goal and trying to attain it. It comes by creating value for other people. In other words, I’m the happiest as a husband when my wife is happy. I’m the happiest as a father and as a parent when my kids are happy. I’m the happiest as a team leader when my teams are happy. Therefore, happiness comes by providing those things that create an atmosphere of happiness for others, which comes full circle back to what we were talking about before.
Maybe you’ve heard the statement before, “Hope is not a strategy.” Everybody has heard that in corporate circles, but I would suggest that hope is the best strategy if you understand what hope is. If you are pursuing any endeavor and the people who are involved in that endeavor are hopeless about it, it’s never going to become a reality. Hope is your best strategy and hope is the basis for happiness, but it’s also the basis for health, productivity, and longevity. We go into great detail pulling that apart, unpacking it, and talking about it as we deconstruct hope and then put hope back together again.
I know that you and I both have a deep love and respect for Viktor Frankl who certainly is one of the luminaries out there on this whole notion of hope. Maybe say a word or two about that.
Viktor Frankl is the author of a book that is a classic called Man’s Search for Meaning. He was an Austrian neuroscientist, a psychiatrist, and a philosopher who was a Jewish taking prisoner and a Nazi prisoner of war camp. All of his worldly possessions were taken away. All of his family members were exterminated or executed in the Nazi gas chambers, and it was a horrific period of time for him as he endured four different concentration camps, but he came out on the other side of that. He wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning. It talks about the eternal struggle, about the common thread in humanity, which is suffering, that all of us have disappointment, disillusionment, dreams that are dashed, loved ones that are lost, and challenges in life that are difficult to face. That’s the common bond that ties us all together in humanity.
He talks about the importance of both being able to have the hope to persevere in the end while combining it with the discipline to embrace the difficult truth of the reality of your situation. He writes this masterful piece and essentially says, “Everything in life can be stripped away from you except for one thing, and that one thing is your choice.”
The power to choose your attitude. The power to choose how you’ll respond to life circumstances. The power to choose how you’ll respond even to those who perpetrate the greatest atrocities that mankind has ever seen against you. It’s a great story. It’s a great book. It’s a great lesson in life when we are down, we are depressed, and we wonder why is this happening. It’s good to learn lessons from other people who’ve walked roads that are even more challenging than our own.
I believe that his philosophy is exactly how I would say that my African-descent ancestors got through slavery. They had to think every day about the choices that they could make, which would seem from the outside to be very few, and yet every minute, they are making a choice. You could do this or you could do that, and those choices have different consequences.
Just knowing that even in a small way, you have some agency, makes a difference in terms of the outcomes because you can make the choice for hope and to see optimism on the other side of the fence, which brings me to the next thing I want to say and ask you about. We have been talking about hope and there are other words like optimism. There are other words like positivity. We mentioned that. I know that each one is a little bit different. Maybe unpack that for us a little bit too.
I love the idea of positivity. There’s a great amount of research coming out of The School of Positive Psychology, Dr. Martin Seligman, and others. Valuable work. I am a big believer in positivity, but positivity serves as the foundation of hope. Positivity alone will not get you through the most challenging issues of life, but it forms the foundation upon which you can then build the skyscraper of hope. After positivity, the next thing we call buoyancy belief is responsibility, and then there’s agility and then there’s reality, and all of those are buoyancy beliefs of hope. It begins with positivity, but hope brings more to the equation than just mere positivity.
That’s awesome because, in other words, you are saying you need all of those building blocks, not just one of them. If you apply that to what Viktor Frankl was doing, how did those other pieces look in his world? How did you see him having something that was beyond positivity?
The first point, the buoyancy belief of positivity says, “I believe that tomorrow can be brighter than today no matter how dark today may be.” The second buoyancy belief we talked about is responsibility, which says, “I’m not a victim of circumstance. I have a say in how my life unfolds. There may be a thousand things over which I don’t have control. I don’t have control over the weather, I don’t have control over the economy. I don’t have control over what might happen to me. I don’t even have control over other people, but I do have control over my own internal response. I do have control over my attitude, and so that’s where responsibility comes in.”
The third principle is agility. Agility says, “There’s not one single way for me to get to any desired destination. If one way is blocked, I can work to remove the blockage or I can choose an alternate route, and, if necessary, I can even choose a different destination. I have the freedom to demonstrate agility and I can morph, change, and be creative to face whatever life throws my way.”
Lastly, your reality. You have to embrace your reality, which simply says that I need to combine my perseverance and the belief that I will be able to persevere and come through victorious on the other side with the discipline of accepting reality no matter how harsh it may be. When you have positivity, responsibility, agility, and reality all together, that forms the foundation for what we call the core of buoyancy beliefs that will keep your head above water when the storm surge rises.
Thank you for breaking it down with that example because it makes it more tangible and more visible in a lot of ways. I appreciate you taking the time to do that. I know you’ve got your latest book, which is Make Life Good. Tell us a little bit more about what that book is about and what its connection to legacy.
Make Life Good is the one I have enjoyed writing the most. All of my books I have thoroughly enjoyed and hope that they are beneficial to the audience that receives them, but the full title of this book is You’ve Made a Good Living, Now Make Life Good. Make Life Good is about, beyond making money and taking care of your own, how you turn around and give back to the world. That happiness does not come from titles and trinkets that we attain from the world, but it’s in what we bring to the world. It’s about what we do for others that they are incapable of doing for themselves. It’s about altering our lifestyle so that we can alter the lives of others.
It’s about doing for one what you wish you could do for everyone and thereby changing the whole world for that someone and maybe in the process changing your whole world too. It’s about generosity, legacy, and philanthropy. I wrote the book twofold to encourage corporate responsibility, but then also I wrote it so that it would be a tool that nonprofit groups could use to inspire their donor base to do more than give their money, more than their treasures, but give their time and their talent as well.
It’s a fun narrative. It’s a parable of sorts that talks about this man in midlife who sees a lot of what he’s pursued in life, the futility of it all. He’s beginning to ask the question, there has to be more to life than dying in a lake house. There has to be more to life than taking care of my own, and he’s challenged with a simple question. The question comes to him by a very unexpected character. It’s a homeless person on the street who comes up to him and says, “Why do you do what you do?” He goes, “You mean what do I do?”
He goes, “No. What you do is not as important as why you do it. Why do you do what you do?” It brings us all the way back around to the purpose that we have talked about in our conversation. Finding your purpose in life is what fuels happiness. It’s what creates movements of good. It’s what brings value to the workforce. It’s what ties people together with common values and a purposeful mission. It’s at the heart of everything we teach and do.
You have brought it full circle in terms of the new book that’s coming out and it gives people a bit of something to think about when we have a lot of Baby Boomers who are retiring right now and we have a lot of other people who are mid-career and thinking about what’s the legacy they want to leave and are the financial results enough. Usually, there’s something else they want to make a mark on on this earth and this gives them an opportunity to think about what that is. How can people get a hold of you? How can they reach you? How can they get your books? How can they book you for keynote speeches or anything else they want to connect with you about?
I appreciate you asking that. Our books are available wherever fine books are sold. You can get them on Amazon, Books-A-Million, and Barnes & Noble. They are all available there. As far as reaching me personally, our website is Dr. Randy Ross. If you want to reach me personally, it’s very simple, rr@drRandyRoss.com. I would love to assist or complement any leadership development initiatives that organizations may have or help them apply these principles to move their culture in a more positive affirmative direction.
Words Of Wisdom For Corporate Business Leaders
They can have results all the way around, not just on one end. What additional words of wisdom do you want to leave for my community of corporate executive business leaders?
In the front of Fireproof Happiness, there’s a trilogy statement that maybe would be a great thing to leave your readers with. It goes like this, “Joy is the emotional response of hope. Peace is the emotional response of faith, and love is the expression of them both.” Loving people, taking care of people, putting people first in organizational life. It’s what we started off talking about when we were talking about culture, and now we have concluded in talking about hope. The power of hope is that it’s the foundational fundamental building block for happiness, health, productivity, and longevity. If we can build resilient teams that understand the power of hope, then business and life will be much better.
Amen to that. I can see it already. What you said about business and life, every principle that you’ve talked about is relevant beyond business as well. If we live like this, we will have better lives. Thank you so much for being here and sharing your wisdom with the audience.
My pleasure. It’s great hanging out with you and having this conversation, and I want to thank you again for your time.
You are welcome. We are going to close the show with a verse, Proverbs 16:16. It says, “How much better to get wisdom than gold and to get understanding is to be chosen rather than silver?” We have learned from Dr. Randy that those building blocks of wisdom and understanding as he’s unpacked them in the package of hope that if we have that, that’s what generates the gold that lasts in all different directions in our lives. If you just get the gold without the wisdom and the understanding, you’ll probably lose on all fronts. Win today. Go for wisdom, go for understanding, spread hope, and add value to others in your life and your workplace. We’ll see you next time.
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I’m here to celebrate the work of the Bible League, which is a global ministry that provides Bibles and ministry study materials, and through activities like Project Philip also teaches and trains local people and how to share the word of God. The President and CEO of the Bible League, Jos Snoep is with me to share a little bit more about what the Bible League is doing.
The beauty of the local church is that it is the body of Christ and it is the Holy Spirit that is calling the local church to be engaged in the Great Commission. As Bible League, we come alongside those local pastors. I met a pastor, his name is Rolando, in the Amazon, and he has this great vision to reach 200 communities with the word of God. We were able to come alongside them and help them with bibles and resources.
Thank you so much, Jos. We are all partners together. You and the Bible League are the hands and feet to the local people on the ground, and there are partners and donors out there who can be hands and feet to you as you also share with others. Those of you who want to be part of this ministry and I invite you to be a part of it, I’m a part of it, go to Bible League. See more about the ministry and see how you can participate and donate.
Randy is Anchored by Hope and the belief that tomorrow can hold bigger and brighter possibilities than today. Most importantly, he’s a messenger of practical wisdom to help untangle the biggest challenges facing today’s business leader, tomorrow’s workforce and the future marketplace. He engages audiences worldwide, creating value for leaders and teams alike. His keynotes and workshops resonate with transformational truths that inspire elevated performance.
In 2008, Randy founded Remarkable! – a consulting and advisory firm specializing in team development and organizational health. Spending time in both the for-profit and not-for-profit worlds, Randy has traveled throughout the United States and internationally as a speaker, consultant and coach, building teams and developing leaders. A compelling communicator, Randy has the keen sensitivity to speak to the heart of leaders and inspires elevated performance among teams. Randy’s unique understanding of employee engagement allows him to offer practical solutions for increasing both the morale and performance of your teams.
A graduate of Baylor University, Randy also holds two advanced degrees from Southwestern. Randy is the co-author of Remarkable!, a leadership parable that illustrates the power of applied axiology to guide organizations toward the creation of a more compelling and collaborative culture, based upon Value Creation. Randy’s latest book, Relationomics: Business Powered by Relationships, provides powerful insights and practical principles to create relationally rich environments.
Before founding Remarkable!, Randy led several not-for-profit entities in Texas and Florida and served as VP of Recruiting for a large regional mortgage corporation, based in Atlanta. Later, he became the Chief People Officer of North American Automotive Group. He and his wife, LuAnne have four children and live in Atlanta, Georgia.
What business and leadership lessons can you learn from navigating the challenges of travel, traffic, and turbulence? In this episode, Dr. Karen shares insights from her recent trip to Atlanta. While she unfolds her fascinating traffic and turbulence story, Dr. Karen also extracts lessons corporate executives can leverage to effectively lead through business traffic and turbulence.
I want to talk about traffic and turbulence. This is related to some lessons I recently learned on a trip to Atlanta. It’s a reinforcement of some principles we want to keep in mind about life and business. First, I’m going to start with traffic in Atlanta, 13 miles is a long way. I live in Colorado 13 miles is right around the corner. I imagined that it would take me about 30 minutes at the outside to get anywhere being 13 miles away. However, I discovered quickly that 13 miles is an automatic minimum of 45 minutes in a busy city like Atlanta.
On the first day that I had to be somewhere at a particular time, the GPS said, “You’re going to be getting there in 30 minutes.” I thought, “Wonderful.” As we were driving and my husband was driving, that 30 minutes turned into 45 minutes. The next thing you know, we got caught behind a train. I said, there is no way we’re going to make it at exactly the right time, even though we had left some margin in the trip. That was very stressful driving through the city of Atlanta. We learned to make sure we left no less than 45 minutes, no matter where we were going.
My role, since my husband was driving, was to be the assistant driver. The assistant driver is essentially the navigator. This is the person who makes sure that you see things that are difficult to see when there’s so much to pay attention to and so much to see. I would be looking at the GPS. I would be making sure that my husband knew what the next exit would be or what terrain we were about to face if a car was suddenly driving erratically and about to come into our lane because people were driving crazy in the big city.
We had to be alert for all of that. When I think about the navigator, the assistant driver, so to speak, I think about the caddy in golf. You’re an expert golfer, yet you have a caddy who’s alongside you, who’s knowledgeable about the game and can still give you relevant advice and counsel and help you to see things that maybe you might not be seeing or might not be paying attention to. Also on one of those trips, a train suddenly was in front of us and I knew that this was going to be an inordinate delay. In the big city, you just never know what might stop you.
Business Lessons From Atlanta Traffic: Navigating New Terrain
It could be other cars and traffic. It could be trucks. It could be an accident. It could be a train or any other impediment. When I thought about, “What’s the meaning of all of this?” If I think about a business application, if I think about life, here’s what I would say is that when you’re in different places, the same terms may have different meanings and implications. In Colorado, 13 miles is close. In Atlanta, 13 miles is far away. You want to keep in mind about the context of where you’re operating.
You may be starting a business in another place from where you normally live and reside. When you open that branch, what are some of the difficulties or challenges you might face just because the timing may be different, traffic may be different? The way your business operates could actually follow a completely different trajectory because each place has its own optics. You want to keep that in mind. I would also say that you want to learn from your new terrain while you’re there and know about it.
After that first trip, realizing that the GPS was going to continually add time and add time, we learned not to pay attention to what the GPS said at the outset because traffic conditions changed rapidly. We had to know that terrain that 13 miles, that was 45 minutes. That wasn’t an hour. Some of what you already know about how you’ve been running a business so far. Before you’re trying some new things, you will apply that learning to the new place. However, it won’t be all that you need to know. You’ll also have new learning that’s necessary in the new place and everything that you’ve experienced before, not all of it is going to apply.
Not all of it is going to be relevant, though some of it will. Use what is relevant, use what you can, and learn new things along the way. The other thing I would say, it’s important to remember to leave extra time when you’re navigating new terrain. You want to expect the unexpected obstacles and unexpected challenges and things that stop you along the way in that added time, whether they be trains, buses, or whatever else it may turn out to be. Leave extra time on your journey when you’re doing something new in your business, don’t assume that it’s going to be the shortest possible time.
Make sure you pad it, and add some extra time to make sure you’ve got that cushion. I would say in your business, you also need a number of people who are in the role of assistant driver or navigator, your extra pairs of eyes and ears along the way because you cannot see everything all around you or in every department or in every location where you may be operating. You want skilled and talented people who are coming alongside you as your team members to advise you. That’s an important concept in business as well.
You’re not doing it by yourself. You have help and you want to use that help. The other thing I would say is that similar to a road trip like what we were taking at the time and also in business, you have tools that can help you. We were using some tech tools like GPS. Without GPS, we would have been lost many times and I am very thankful for the GPS. At the same time, as most of you know, GPS is not always perfect. There was one highway where every time we would go on this highway, it would route us off the path and then bring us back that wasted a lot of time.
Once we did that twice, we realized, “This is just a flaw in the GPS, we won’t follow that direction the next time.” We didn’t. Again, you’re learning as you go. Learn along the way. You have tools to help you. You have people to help you in your business. Use all of them and know that they’re not infallible. In fact, sometimes they can be wrong and then you make the adjustments. Also, perhaps wherever you’ve been, you’ve never been before or it’s changed. I’ve been to Atlanta a number of times.
However, I haven’t been there lately, and it seemed to be a little different, and we were staying in a very different part of town than we normally would stay. Therefore, the experience was different. Just because you’ve even done something before, been there before, doesn’t mean that it stays static, it stays the same. There may be some nuances of difference. I would also say, take time to appreciate the benefits of each location where you are. In Atlanta, because it’s a big city, there were multiple options, multiple services, and all kinds of restaurants from different ethnic backgrounds that we really enjoyed and that we really liked.
First Flight: Battling High Winds And An Aborted Landing
In Colorado, we have vast open spaces and lots of natural beauty, many occasions unobstructed to see the sunrise, and the sunset, and to watch the mountains and the purple mountain majesty. Each place has its beauty, and each place has its delight, and you want to enjoy the delight where you are and recognize the delight where you are, because there is some, even if it’s different from where you are accustomed to being. Those would be a few lessons that I would share about traffic. Now on that same trip, we also experienced some turbulence on our flight back from Atlanta to Colorado Springs.
We were taking two planes. On that first plane which was going to Denver, let me just mention that Colorado is well known for high winds. We have huge high winds and on that particular day, the winds were up to about 80 miles an hour. Here we are attempting to land in Denver with these high winds which up to this point we’d had a very smooth flight. There was not any turbulence with that particular plane and it was a big aircraft and that’s important because larger planes can handle the wind a lot better than small planes.
Here the plane is landing, starting to land, nothing unusual about that. It comes all the way down to the ground for the landing. Suddenly, the plane pulls up and it starts going real fast straight ahead and pulls back up in the air and it’s not landing. It goes all the way a long-distance straight ahead first. I was like, “What is going on here?” I’ve seen many planes that circle in the air for a long time because the conditions aren’t good for landing and then eventually they’ll land on the ground. I have personally never been in a plane that came all the way down, about to touch the ground, and then suddenly pulled back up.
That’s after more than a million miles in the air flying. I am a frequent flyer. I’ve got more than a billion miles in the air and I’ve never seen that. I thought that was unusual. I was not sitting by the window. I asked my husband and said, “Were we really at the airport? Was that the proper place because it looked like we were over a lot of farmland?” I said, “Were we trying to land at someplace that was not an appropriate place?” However, it looked like it really was the airport and somehow we just weren’t landing.
Now the pilot did not get on the loudspeaker right away to give an announcement about what was going on. Given that this first landing was aborted, I figured in this case, “They’re busy in the cockpit right now. They don’t have time to give an announcement just yet.” However, it wasn’t too long after that experience, the pilot did get on the loudspeaker and he indicated that there was significant wind and we were going to make a second approach to the airport and land the plane. Now, mind you, his voice was very calm.
There was no sense of crisis or emergency. The plane was flying fine, smoothly, no sense of crisis or emergency whatsoever. He was acting as though, “We do this every day. This is not a problem whatsoever.” I’m sure that he had to make a split-second decision about whether to land or not and then he opted for not landing, figuring it would be safer to continue the flight and to come back. I was glad it wasn’t dark. It was not dark yet. Even though it was in the evening, it was still light outside.
Perhaps he had to go further straight ahead in the distance because of the air traffic and other planes coming in. Perhaps because of the wind, he had to go a long distance straight ahead before he was able to circle and come back. In any case, my husband and I, we always have a practice. We pray before every trip. Before we left Atlanta, we were praying over our safety, over the trip, both on the ground and also in the air. At this moment, I said, “We have some challenges here and the pilot’s got to make some difficult decisions. I’m going to lift up some extra prayers on his behalf.”
Not in fear, there was no fear. I thought, “It was just different, yet extra prayers are always useful because we know who holds our lives in his hand and that’s God himself.” That was what happened on the first plane. The second approach was successful. We landed fine. A lot of time was added to the flight as a result of having to make the second approach. It was a mad rush to the second gate and we had to go from one concourse to the other, take the train, and so on. All of those things were somewhat significant and challenging.
Second Flight: Turbulence, Rough Landings, And Unexpected Delay
By the time we got to the second gate, it was really time to board the second plane. Now the second plane is going from Denver to Colorado Springs. It is typically and often turbulent on those flights because they have to fly at lower altitudes because it’s a very short flight from Denver to Colorado Springs. This particular day, the wind was even worse than usual, so more turbulence was expected. Thankfully, again, there was a large plane as opposed to a small plane. Larger planes, again, can handle these kinds of crises a bit better.
When we first started off, it was a rough takeoff, very rough. In fact, in my mind, it sounded like the plane was falling apart. I thought, “I sure hope they’ve done maintenance on this plane because it’s not sounding very good.” That was the first thing that was a little bit concerning. Of course, when we got in the air, it was up and down and turbulent as is often the case, but not excessive. It was quite reasonable for the normal trip going from Denver to Colorado Springs. I decided no need to worry about that. I took a nap on that plane. What woke me up was the rough landing.
The plane felt like it was slamming into the ground when we got to Colorado Springs. I think everybody was jilted by that. I certainly woke up from my little nap and the taxi into the gate was fine. It was no problem. We got down to baggage claim and it seemed to take an inordinately long period of time for them to even be thinking about bringing the luggage out and the luggage didn’t come out. We were there with our driver. When they suddenly announced that they were not going to be able to bring the luggage out because the door to the luggage compartment of the airplane was jammed and it was jammed because all the luggage had slammed against that door and they had tried multiple methods to open the door.
They felt that they tried everything they knew already that was safe to do and anything else they tried would not be safe and so they had to call in for extra help and reinforcements. A company that specializes in circumstances like this for someone to come to open the door. That would take a minimum of an hour and a half and probably longer. We had options. We could wait for the luggage, we could come back for the luggage, or we can have it delivered to our house. The driver ran upstairs and got in the line for us.
We came up and then when we replaced him in the line, he took the luggage, the hand-carried luggage that we had to the car and we registered to have the luggage delivered the next day. That’s what happened with that. Next, however, was walking to the car from the airport. Mind you, I said it was incredibly windy, very windy. When there’s a wind report in Colorado, typically, I try to stay indoors, stay home, and not be out in the wind because people have been knocked over from the wind. You could be hit by some flying debris.
It’s not necessarily the safest thing to be out in the wind. As I’m pressing against the strong wind trying to walk to the car in the wind, when hitting me in the face, I cannot barely walk an inch. It is that strong. I’m exerting a lot of energy to go forward and I’m not going forward very much. Maybe like I said, an inch or so along the way. My husband is standing at the door of the car waiting for me to get there so I can get in the car and he can close the door. However, when I get right to the point where the car is, suddenly this gale-force wind just stops.
Now, I don’t know if much about physics, but if you’ve been exerting a lot of energy and pressure to go forward and the wind suddenly stops, I kept moving. It propelled me at that same high speed and threw me into the car. That had never happened before either. When I got thrown into the car, I ended up hurting my left hand somewhat. I thought, “What a day this is that that was unexpected.” I didn’t have experience walking in the wind because like I say, I normally stay indoors when they have the wind announcement. Here we are.
Lessons From Turbulence: Navigating Life’s Challenges
I’m sitting later on after we get home and I realized that my hand really needs to be iced. I put a nice pack on my hands. I’m sitting there and reflecting over all these experiences of traffic and turbulence and the lessons that can be learned from this. I’ll share with you the lessons from the turbulence. That is, first of all, some trips that we take are rough. It’s not always going to be smooth flying, or smooth sailing, and some turbulence is actually quite normal in life. It’s not meant to be smooth sailing all along the way.
Turbulence is normal. Takeoff and landing can be especially challenging and difficult so because these are regular occurrences, this is a normal part of life. You want to be ready in the sense of having the right equipment for such occasions. I was thankful for the big plane on both flights because if we had had a mini plane from Denver to Colorado Springs, the flight probably would have been canceled. I doubt if the regional jets really could have handled the level of wind that we had that night. Even though the big plane was tossed a little bit, a miniature plane gets tossed in such a way you feel like you’re going to crash and die. I’ve been on those planes many times.
This was not a day for a small plane. Also, I would say it’s important to have experienced personnel. On that first flight, the pilot was unflappable. He knew what he had to do. He had trained, I’m sure, for conditions such as what he experienced. Therefore, when he saw whatever he saw when he got down close to the ground, he said, “I’m opting for safety.” He pulled up and said, “I’m doing a second approach.” Which is another important aspect, is you want to keep safety in mind. In your business, as you’re doing new operations and new places, maybe you’re in a manufacturing environment.
Your personnel can be hurt if you do not make the right decision. You want to have a mindset that’s safety-focused. I know that my airline, that’s what they care about. They always talk about safety first. I would also say bring in specialized help as needed. When you need it, a delay is better than death. With this door being shut, someone could have been severely hurt if they had opened the door, not having the extra expertise and skills for the conditions. If someone had been harmed like that, that would have been unfortunate. It’s inconvenient.
We had to wait for our luggage and it wasn’t available right away. We had to get it delivered the next day. I’d rather see than have a situation where someone’s hurt, harmed or killed because the extra specialized help was not there and safety was not at the forefront. I would say going back to the first plane, there are situations that will occur in your business, such as not being able to land or things are turning out different than you thought. When you can, and as soon as you are able, speak to your people and provide information about what’s going on and maintain the appropriate calmness for whatever it is that’s going on.
If you are in that crowded theater, as it says, even if there’s a fire and you’re yelling and screaming fire in a panicked way, that’s how people get trampled and killed. Even though there may be a fire, there is a more appropriate way to exit, if you will, the movie theater in a fire. Similarly, this pilot had a very calm voice saying what was happening, and what they were going to do about it. He was not at all worried in terms of the voice tone that he used and giving us the information.
Now, suppose it had been a much more severe situation and maybe he was concerned that the landing was going to be particularly tough or whatever, then he could provide direction. The same thing in your organization, provide direction to your people even after you’ve given the call message, “Here’s what’s happening. Here’s what’s going on.” If we needed to be in a brace position to prepare for impact, the pilot could have talked about that.
Again, he could have remained calm. He could have said, “We may face some significant turbulence. It could be a rough landing. We would like to ask all of you to assume the brace position and he could have described it. He could have had the flight attendants describe it. He could have referred us to the card on the plane for the aircraft.” All of that to say, “We are doing everything we can to have a safe and smooth landing. In cases more turbulent, we want to make sure that no one is hurt. Please do this for us and for yourselves.”
That could have been announced if necessary. In our case, it wasn’t necessary. In your company, sometimes the information alone is enough, and other times you need to give direction and you still want to maintain sufficient calm and yet reach everyone with the direction that you are given. Keep in mind that lots of events are going to be new and will be unexpected as you go along. No matter what’s happening, keep in mind that you can pray and take a nap because we know that God is the one who holds us in his arms.
Trusting God Through Life’s Storms And Challenges
I want to just read a scripture related to this. This is Philippians the fourth chapter and it’s verses 6 and 7, which says, “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” I peacefully took a nice nap on that second plane in spite of some minor turbulence. It wasn’t anything to worry about or be afraid over.
When we give issues to God and we pray to him, we can trust that he is in charge and in control along the way. All of these are new experiences. I’ve never been on a plane, got that close to the ground, and pulled back up. I’ve never been on a plane that landed and couldn’t get the luggage off the plane because of the door being shut. The third thing that I never experienced was a wind force so strong that when it stopped suddenly, it just slammed me into the car unexpectedly. I’ve never experienced that either.
Keep in mind that even though turbulence is normal, sometimes it’s going to have a different impact or a different way of operating than what we’re used to and you want to know what are the proper strategies in each situation. Before I’m out in the wind again, I’m going to do a little research to figure out, how do you keep yourself maybe from being thrown into the car unexpectedly and possibly being harmed or hurt? I’ll do a little research to figure out what’s necessary. Of course, since I had a minor injury, when injuries occur, hopefully they’re minor such as mine was take care of them early and right away so that they don’t become worse so that they don’t become major.
When I got home and I saw that this was really a problematic, I started the icing up right away and the next day I had no swelling even though it was still a little bit tender. If I hadn’t intervened early could have been worse outcomes. Same thing in your business. When something is small and it’s a challenge, handle it then before it becomes something big. I hope you’ve gotten something out of traffic and turbulence that you can use in your business. Be prepared, rely on people, rely on equipment, and yet know that all of these things are fallible. Make sure you pray through everything because God is there to help us in a time of need.
I’m going to read from Matthew the chapter as we close. This is a picture of Jesus who was on some stormy seas. In my case, I was in turbulent air. Sometimes it’ll be stormy seas. Starting with verse 23 in chapter eight of the book of Matthew, it says, “Now when he got into a boat, that’s Jesus, his disciples followed him and suddenly a great tempest arose on the sea so that the boat was covered with the waves but he was asleep.
His disciples came to him and awoke him, saying, “Lord, save us. We’re perishing.” He said to them, “Why are you fearful? You of little faith.” He arose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm. The men marveled saying, who can this be that even the winds and the sea obey him?” Take that with you this week and know that even the winds, the waves, and the sea obey our Lord. We can trust him. We can be asleep in a boat. We can be asleep on the airplane because God is watching over us at all times. That doesn’t mean you don’t take necessary and appropriate action as you need to and as we’ve already talked about. However, when you’ve done what you’re supposed to do, it’s smooth sailing. Let Jesus take the helm, be in the cockpit, and fly your plane to safety.
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This is Dr. Karen Wilson-Starks, president and CEO of Trans Leadership, Incorporated. Did that workplaces can make a significant difference in the lives of people and that you can create a positive culture that gets positive business results and also produces positive life experiences for your employees and your clients and customers? You can make a significant contribution to the world by creating a culture where your people can bring their gifts to provide the most relevant and excellent products and services to your marketplace.
What the research shows is that companies with excellent leadership are also more profitable. As you flourish and as you grow in the world, you can do more for yourself as well as for others. If this is resonating with you and you want to create a positive, profitable, and powerful corporate culture and you care about succession, leaving the organization in a better position than when you found it. Do keep in mind that that legacy is something that’s intentional, and I am happy to partner with you to take your organization to the next level and create that positive leadership culture. Reach me at Dr.Karen.TransLeadership.com.
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This is Dr. Karen Wilson-Starks, President and CEO of Trans Leadership, Incorporated. I want to let that I am running a special promotion right now. If you are a CEO or executive leader in a medium to large size company, and you care about how your people are treated, and especially if you share our biblical values, and right now, you may be facing difficult decisions where you want some additional perspective.
You may be planning for succession in your company and developing people and preparing the organization for that succession or perhaps right now you’re going through change. You’re leading change. Maybe there’s a merger, there’s an acquisition. Whatever you’re facing in terms of leadership, including developing your executive team, contact me. Give me a call so we can do a discovery meeting to see what’s going on.
Here’s the special promotion. The promotion is that in addition to your discovery time, I will interview up to three people, additional people from your executive team so you have even greater context and feedback about where to go next. Reach out to me at Dr.Karen@TransLeadership.com or phone me at (719) 534-0949, extension one. I look forward to hearing from you and to coming alongside you to complete and continue your leadership journey with positivity and profitability in your organization.
Neal Frick, the CEO of CyberCore Technologies, a government contractor that specializes in secure IT infrastructure and supply chain management, leads his company with empathy and compassion. Neal’s business results include restructuring and reducing overhead by 2.5 million, tripling headcount and revenue within 2 years, and reducing attrition from 35% to 8% within 12 months.
The author of the book, “The E Suite: Empathetic Leadership for the Next Generation of Executives,” with co-author Tina Kuhn, Neal grounds his approach to leadership in the power of empathy and investment in people, a methodology he learned from his father who is a general contractor in the insulating business. With previous corporate and government contracting roles, Neal has seen empathy leadership produce successful and profitable businesses in other sectors. His father’s leadership instilled a lifelong conviction that investing in people leads to inevitable profits.
Today Neal speaks with Dr. Karen about employee hiring and retention, responsible downsizing, leading millennials and Gen Z, the role of diversity for business success and innovation, and how to protect yourself in a cyber and AI environment.
With insights sharpened in the crucible of personal experience and professional success, Neal is on a mission to build a community of empathetic leaders.
Neal Frick, CEO of CyberCore Technologies: The ROI for Empathy in Corporate Businesses [Episode 471]
What if there is a profitable return on empathy in the corporate work environment? My guest will share his insights on how a culture of compassion enhances the bottom line, the value of creating a diverse executive team, and how to unlock millennial magic to attract bright young minds who will drive the future. Neal Frick is the CEO of CyberCore Technologies, a cybersecurity company that specializes in secure supply chain management. He has also held other corporate and leadership positions in retail business and government contracting.
Neal’s business results include restructuring and reducing overhead by 2.5 million, tripling headcount and revenue within two years, and reducing attrition from 35% to 8% within 12 months. The author of the book, The E-Suite, Empathetic Leadership for the New Generation of Executives. Neal grounds his approach to leadership in the power of empathy and investment in people. His father modeled this ethos when he took personal responsibility for an employee grappling with drug addiction, paying for the employee’s rehab and welcoming him back to work once sober.
His father’s actions deeply impacted Neal, instilling a lifelong conviction about the inherent value of people over profits and the understanding that investing in people leads to inevitable profits. With insights sharpened in the crucible of personal experience and professional success, Neal is on a mission to build a community of empathetic leaders. Welcome Neal to the show.
Thank you so much, Dr. Karen. I appreciate you having me on.
Neal Frick’s Father As A Model Of Empathy In Leadership
I am delighted to have you on. I love what you’re doing in terms of empathy in the workplace. It fits with my notion of positive leadership in the workplace as well. You and I really share something in common or on a similar page in that respect. I want to jump right in, Neal, and just start asking you about this backstory with your father, because he was your number one role model for empathy in the workplace. Tell us a little bit about your father’s business and a little bit more about what he did for that employee who was struggling with drug addiction.
Certainly. My father is an insulator, a general contractor and started his own business, very small, him and a few other guys. One of those employees of his over the course of their working together, developed a drug addiction and was having some pretty significant personal issues after going through a divorce. My father really valued this individual and not just his work, but also just him as a person. From a very early age, I saw what it was like when a boss takes a genuine interest at an employee and helps them through a difficult time. It would have been very easy for him to just say, “Thank you so much for your work, but this is no longer working, and move on.” Instead, he modeled a very different approach.
What ultimately happened to that employee that he helped in the workplace?
They are still working together 25 years later.
What a blessing. That’s a great testimony of the value of the empathetic approach. What other examples did you see from your father in his business? What else does he do to show empathy in the workplace where you saw that modeled for you?
I think he has a very community-centric approach to his organization. He decided to stay small, partially because he wanted to spend more time with his family. He didn’t want to get out over his skis, but partially also because I think he really appreciated the personal touch that he was able to have, not just with his team members, but also with his customers. He knows each and every one of the people that he contracts for very well and typically very closely. They were in and out of our home when I was a child. He became friends with a number of them. His approach, I found after I got into a more traditional business setting myself, was not the typical approach, and was somewhat surprised by that. I think that is how he really modeled that for me when I was younger.
How Neal Applies His Father’s Leadership Lessons Today
Let’s talk about that a little bit. How you’ve taken what you learned from your father and taking it to the next level. Talk about how your father’s example impacts, how you lead today. What are you doing as a result of seeing what he did and how have you extended it?
I think I have tried my best to live up to the example that he set in that there is serious opportunities within business, especially within the United States, to help high performers continue to be high performers. Everyone goes through significant personal issues. Not one of us has not been impacted by something terrible especially after coming out of this pandemic and seeing what terrible situations people have gone through and the impact it’s had on their work life. We let people struggle when we could extend a hand in help. I think that is something that we miss a trick on and something I try within reason to do when I am leading an organization or leading a team.
It’s challenging, I’m sure, because sometimes it may not always work out in the way that you hope it would work out. Say a little bit about that, because there are some people who are wondering is this empathy thing really profitable. Is it the way to go? To what extent do maybe some employees exploit the system rather than benefit from the empathy?
I think it’s important to define empathy in a business setting and really empathy is about understanding another person’s emotional state and contextualizing that to make decisions. It’s not sympathy and it’s not niceness. It is another avenue of information for you to gather before you make it informed decision. It can be misapplied.
What I find that nice bosses tend to misapply empathy because niceness comes from a desire to avoid conflict and make everybody like you, whereas empathy comes from a desire to understand what someone’s going through and then see if there is a reasonable way to accommodate them and make their situation better. Where I think people get that negative impression of empathetic leadership is that they see it misapplied and they see people use it to give people who are acting poorly another chance and another chance. That’s really not what it’s about.
Say a little bit more about that, about not giving another chance, another chance. How do you determine when to use empathy in a certain situation? Maybe when you’ve extended enough and it’s time to do something else. That’s a tough call for a lot of business leaders. How do you know?
It’s a bit of a gut check, I’ll give you an example. I had a high performer, someone who was incredible, did wonderful things for the organization from a revenue standpoint but ultimately was incredibly disruptive to the culture within the organization. He was going through a very tough personal time. He had a lot of demons that he was fighting. I let that go on for too long, one, because of my natural inclination to try to help a top performer continue to perform, and two, because we had built a very strong friendship. What I found was that my sympathy for him and my kindness were overriding what I knew I needed to do, which was to find an exit for him from the organization.
Empathy gave me knowledge of what he was going through, but it also gave me information about what his actions were doing to the rest of the organization. The niceness, the sympathy is what overcame that and said, “That’s not as important, and I’m going to make sure that he continues to perform well.” From my perspective, empathy is contextual. How you apply it is you have to look holistically at your organization and make sure that everyone is driving in the same direction and you’re not allowing one person to override what is fair to others.
It sounds like you’re making some decisions that have to do with the climate of the company in general. In other words, he was a person who was performing well in terms of the business metrics, however culturally they were doing some things that didn’t fit. It sounds like there are multiple buckets you have to evaluate to determine is retention the best choice in this case or are there some other options that maybe I need to consider. Maybe help us with that a little bit. When might you decide that retaining the employee is really not in the best interest of the company or other people in the company and that perhaps even with empathy in place, the better choice and decision is to help them exit, as you were saying?
I think it comes down to whether or not the individual is willing to make the changes that they need to make to offset the challenging situation. If they are causing cultural issues within an organization because they are not getting along with their peers or they’re overly aggressive in their salesmanship, if they’re willing to have a conversation around it, if they’re willing to be led and to be mentored, then I think if they’re a top performer, you owe it to them to give them an opportunity. You also need to rigidly bound that with performance metrics. If things do not improve within a certain period of time, action needs to be taken.
In the specific case that I mentioned before, I failed, frankly, in setting those performance metrics. Had I, from the beginning, used my understanding of his emotional situation through that empathetic leadership to craft a performance improvement plan that included those cultural touch points that I needed him to hit, perhaps it would have had a better outcome. I think termination and moving someone out of an organization is really your last, hopefully, your last solution. Realistically, some organizations just don’t work for certain people. Sometimes people reach the end of their lifespan within an org and everyone needs to accept that and gracefully move through it.
Recognizing And Investing In Salvageable Employees
Wonderful. I think a lot of executives out there hearing this is like, “We agree with what you’re talking about. That’s probably what we would do too.” I think the flip side and maybe some of what you’re talking about is that there are people who can be salvaged and in a lot of organizations, those people would be thrown out to pasture, so to speak, maybe prematurely. Talk a little bit about how do you tell when maybe salvaging a person is the better way to go. What are the signs that you look for to determine when to make that investment?
I find that when performance starts to drop from someone who has historically been a strong performer, or even not necessarily the strongest, but a consistent performer, and there are no changes in tools in the environmental situation within the organization and it tends to be an issue of morale or an issue of personal challenges.
What we tend to do as leaders sometimes is come into that situation with preconceptions about what the issue is. We may think it is someone who is just skating. They’re not as interested in performing anymore. We may think that their personal situation is overwhelming their professional situation and make judgments. I would recommend to leaders going in with a more open attitude and fostering an environment where people feel comfortable about mental health issues, family issues, and situations that they have going on because we all go through them.
Have a human-to-human conversation around, “What do you need to be successful here?” We’ve noticed that things aren’t going as well. If your personal situation has changed, is there something that we can do? Offer more flexibility, and change your hours. More than not, people want to be successful and they want help to be successful. If we offer that, we can salvage those people rather than pushing them out the door.
I love that because when you think about it, I mean, human resources are very valuable and it’s like, I know this is going to be a weird analogy, but let’s say you could even have an older car. Like I love older cars that you want to preserve. You could throw it out the pasture if you want to, or you could take good care of it. You can get it repaired and keep for a long time and it can still be of great service.
Sometimes we’re in a throwaway culture that doesn’t think about how can something be salvaged and utilized still, even though it may be older or it may have issues. It can still be of good service. What you’re saying is it’s almost like recycling or it’s like in that vein, how can we still get value here and build the person up to at the same time is what I hear you talking about.
I think it builds loyalty. I think it builds trust in the organization. People talk a lot about the great resignation post-COVID. They talk a lot about how the younger generation doesn’t have the same loyalty to organizations now. A lot of the reason that they don’t is because organizations don’t have the same loyalty to them. As you said, we have a throwaway culture now. If something isn’t working, we don’t expend the energy to fix it. We just say, “We’re going to get something new.”
When it comes to people, if someone wants to be successful and they have the aptitude, that is all a good leader needs. If you can take someone and give them the hard skills, you can take someone and teach them what they need. You can mentor them, you can refine their communication style, but you cannot create ambition within a person. If you have someone with good raw materials that’s not even empathetic leadership. It’s just common sense. You want to try to foster and give them an environment in which they can thrive because it helps the bottom line in the organization.
Here’s something here that makes me think about the partnership between the leader and the employee. In this sense, the employee is bringing some skills and abilities, obviously, as you’re saying, they learn on the job as well, they can be taught some things. However, there’s that motivation part where you said most people want to do well, they want to do a good job. The people you’re investing in this way, they at least have that as the core or the nucleus of their motivation. You can build around it is what I’m hearing you say. This empathy thing, it works especially if people have some internal motivation and they’re willing to do their part of whatever the fix is to get to a different place.
It is certainly a two-way street. People do have to realize that they have an obligation to themselves to better themselves, to seek out mentorship, and to grow. Not everyone is cut out for a traditional business role. That’s fine. It takes all kinds but for those who are interested and who are willing to put in that work and are willing to have those conversations around what they need without fear, which usually takes an environment where they can feel that way.
They are the ones who you want to reinvest in and make sure that you’re growing because they’re going to be the ones that will stay with your organization the longest and be the most successful. The organization I’m running now, CyberCore, we have great success with an internship program that has taken people from helping out in the IT room all the way through into software and systems engineering, where in ten years they’ve completely changed the trajectory of their career and we’ve created a program to do so. Those kinds of things are what make companies successful these days.
CyberCore’s Mission And Client Services
I love the fact that you are sharing ways that you’re building into people. You’re talking about CyberCore. Let’s deviate just a little bit. We want to talk about CyberCore for a minute and then I want to come back to some of the people things. What does your company do? Who are your clients in the sense of who do you help? How do you serve them? Tell us a little bit about cyber security.
CyberCore is a government contractor. Our primary customer is the intelligence community of the United States. A lot of the three-letter agencies. We do cyber security, infrastructure security, and supply chain security for those customers. Essentially purchasing, safeguarding the IT infrastructure, the systems that do some really cool and interesting things in the national interest safeguarding our nation’s security.
AI Challenges In Cybersecurity And Practical Cybersecurity Tips
When we think about cyber security, one of the big issues nowadays is this whole thing about artificial intelligence, AI. Recently in the news, there have been some videos that came out that were fake and that were false and given a message that those real individuals would not have wanted to put out there. Talk to us a little bit about what some of the challenges are that are new or front and center in cyberspace particularly as it relates to AI.
I think that the internet is a wonderful thing, but it’s also somewhat of a dangerous thing. Our adversaries overseas, people who want to do harm to the U.S. and really in any country, anyone’s adversaries, they look at the internet as a battleground, as a way to leverage information to sow dissent, to cause division, to push their end game forward.
AI has allowed for a lot of disinformation that would have been significantly more manpower intensive twenty years ago. To fake a video of that quality would have taken a team of individuals quite a long time. Now it’s pretty much a push of a button. I think one of the challenges we’re going to face as video and photo technology advances and artificial intelligence advances in writing and citing sources, verifying factual information is going to be really key.
I have said for a long time, don’t trust anything you read on the internet. Never have truer words been spoken than right now. This is one of the most dangerous times for information. I’m sure you see it you read an article and you go, “Is that real? It seems real.” It seems to be written by someone, but it’s entirely possible that all of the sources are created artificially. There’s no verification or validation of information. It is definitely something that we have to be very vigilant about as we move forward and keep ourselves informed.
Thank you for sharing that information. Maybe share a couple of strategies that people can use to keep safe in a cyber sense. You mentioned about verifying information. Maybe give some examples. How can they verify information? What are 1 or 2 other things they can do that would make a difference?
Some of it is obvious that never open an email from someone that you don’t know. Never even answer a phone call from someone that you don’t know. Make sure that your voicemail is set up that doesn’t give out your full name. You want to try to restrict the information that you have out in the world as much as possible. You don’t put personal identifying information out onto social media. I don’t allow connections from anyone who you do not know on social media.
There are somewhat common-sense solutions. The more nuanced ones are more complicated. There are a number of organizations out there that can safeguard your computer equipment with antivirus software and anti-spam software, but where people tend to fall into the trap more often than not is in that human-to-human communication to get you on the phone and they have this much information about you. You certainly start to feel comfortable and then all of a sudden you give them more and they have what they need to steal your identity.
They sent you an email and the name of it is a very good friend of yours, but the actual email address itself is spoofed from overseas and they’re trying to get information from you. I would just say when it comes to communication and anything that you are reading online, just take the extra step to verify. If you’re reading something that seems odd, look for other sources that are reputable, that you can trust, whatever your personal, if you’re a New York Times reader or a post reader, whatever, verify that information before you take it as truth.
Those are very good tips. I already heard a thing or two that I can change. Thank you for that information. One of the things I’ve noticed is that those who are sending the fake emails, they’ve gotten better at it than what used to be the case. In the past, it was so easy to spot them. They weren’t written very well, and there were all kinds of other telltale signs. Now you have to really be careful in order to detect that there is a fraudulent email in the inbox. Thank you for reminding us.
Especially as a government contractor, we are targeted quite often for cyber attacks. We’re certainly targeted from a lot of phishing scams as well. The most recent thing I’ve seen is a lot of Adobe e-signature documents that look very real. They look like they come from your auditor or from your CFO. You have to be very vigilant about those links because, as you said, they’re much more creative these days. With artificial intelligence, the writing is now much more cogent because it has much more to pull from. It is not people whose English is not their first language, crafting these. It’s getting harder and harder to tell them apart from real legitimate emails.
Achieving Profitability Through Cost Reduction
Thank you, Neal, for keeping us all safe and what you do every day, and even what you just shared right now. I want to take a step back and go back to this whole notion of business people, business executives especially, really do care about profitability and business results and so do you. You’ve had some stellar results and I really want to unpack a few of those. One of the things I mentioned earlier is that you restructured and reduced overhead by 2.5 million. Tell us how you did that.
When I took over as CEO of Cybercore two years ago, we had experienced quite a lot of challenging times during COVID as most organizations did. It was really time for a full restructuring and reorg. Personally, my least favorite part of my job is anything to do with personnel reductions. We looked at tools, efficiencies, and redundancies. Are there individuals within the organization that if they had a new toolkit, could take on additional responsibility?
What we ended up doing was taking individuals who were overhead, and shifting them into revenue-generating positions where possible. You get that twofold of you cut your overhead costs and you increase your revenue on the back end. That really took understanding where people were and what they were willing to do and then working with them to find more efficient solutions to challenges that they were facing.
What I love about that is you didn’t just take the easy answer like so many companies do. Let’s just chop this many people, this many heads, so to speak. You’ve looked a little more deeply at where could people be redeployed. How could they be adding value to the company, which probably took a little more time? Yet at the same time, you are preserving talent and you’re using that talent in a profound way and increasing, as you said earlier, the loyalty of those personnel because they certainly know they could have been cut or they could have been chopped instead.
It took a good year, I would say, which is a little bit longer than I think most people like to take. I felt that thorough analysis, division by division, was really important. Now, don’t get me wrong, we did end up doing some layoffs as part and parcel with the reorganization, but those were very informed. They were not siloed decisions based solely on financials. We took the cultural impacts into account.
We took potential problem-solving issues into account. We took people’s personal situations into account to some degree. As a result, even though we did conduct a series of layoffs, we had no turnover as a result of it from people tend to get scared after layoffs and they move on. We didn’t experience that. I feel like our culture is stronger than it’s ever been. Our revenue continues to go up quarter after quarter.
I think the easy thing to do is to come into an organization and look at, “Purely by the numbers. Here’s the revenue. Here’s the cost. Here’s what we can eviscerate.” I’ve had consultants come in and make those recommendations. In a vacuum, yes, the next day, you go from not profitable to profitable. Six months later, a year later, your corporate team is left. Your customers are unhappy and you’re experiencing a significant amount of brain drain because you didn’t do it the right way. I think that sometimes going slower and making those more deliberate decisions are really important.
It increases and engenders the trust of your people in you. If they see you just come in with a hatchet and chop overnight and nobody understands that, that’s frightening. As you said, people will be less loyal in that situation. When they see you be careful and deliberate and make wise choices and really consider options, which engenders a greater sense of loyalty rather than the fear of I could be next tomorrow. I think transparency is also very key there.
We created a leadership team within the organization and employee-led culture committees that were empowered to make real change within the organization. We walked people through our thought process when it came to the changes that we were making. There are some things, obviously, that have to be held behind closed doors. Where we could, we shared that information, both from a solicitation of creative ways to problem solve, but also so that people knew where we were coming from and knew that we didn’t make the decisions lightly.
There was a thought process behind it, we did it for a reason, and they could see what the end game is. Often, you are in a situation where you are part of an organization, but you don’t know how you’re contributing, aside from this much of the value that you bring. When you are all driving in the same direction, it’s much easier to feel that connection, and then want naturally to stay longer and work harder.
I think that sharing the information you could share also addresses fear in an organization. When people don’t know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, how you’re doing it, and they don’t have enough information, fear increases. Of course, we already talked about trust being eroded. As that happens, they start making up their own answers for what’s going on and 9 times out of 10, those made-up answers are worse than the reality of what’s going on.
That is absolutely true. Fear thrives in darkness and the only way to really do anything about it is to bring all of it into the light. We had a situation somewhat recently. It was a cow evocative of different situations. A lot of the executive leaders had PTO at the same time. We also had a couple of new contract wins. We were not as accessible for a period of about two weeks and at the end of those two weeks we had a pretty big customer come through and walk the building and because there was a shift in our behavioral pattern, even though it was slight, all of a sudden there were these conversations around, “The company’s being acquired. Something’s up. There’s something new.”
We realized we have to be very cognizant of what we’re doing, how we’re talking, what we’re communicating. We cannot really take a couple of weeks and just do things differently. We have to be consistent because when we don’t, people start to get a little concerned. It was really instructive for us to understand the power of that transparent communication.
Scaling And Retaining Talent: Neal’s Business Results
The predictability, because if you start acting different, then they think something different is going on even if it isn’t. Very powerful concepts. You also had some other business results to Neal about tripling headcount and revenue in the two-year period of time, and you also reduced attrition from 35% to 8% in the year. That was a pretty remarkable kind of result. Share more with us about how you did some of those other pieces as well.
Those were, I think actually when I came on board CyberCore, initially I was the head of talent acquisition. My background is in recruiting and talent acquisition. We created a career path. I think we called it compass basically setting your own direction. We set up certification incentive plans, the education reimbursement programs. An internal lab where people could come and play around with technology that they hadn’t experienced before to get hands-on exposure to how things work.
We then looked at our benefits and compensation plans and said, “They need a refresh.” Hired a few individuals to come in as employee liaisons and program managers whose focus was mobility within the organization and then growing individuals. We’ve really tried to make this a place where, like 40 years ago, when you could go to a company, you could work there for 30 to 40 years and retire from it with all of these new skills and experience.
We really wanted to make it a company where you could do different things at and experience the full breadth of cybersecurity. As a result, yes, we were able to hire over 100. We had about when I started with maybe 160 people, we grew to 300 in about two years. As a result of our services business growing, we tripled that revenue and we went from close to 40% at one point attrition all the way down to single-digit attrition.
That is truly amazing because you made your workplace interesting for the employees where they could continue to grow and develop. They weren’t going to be doing the same thing all the time every day. They didn’t have to move to another company because, within the company, they had an opportunity. I think that’s brilliant. More people probably should do more of that in order to have success.
I agree. I think we have this tendency when someone’s really good at their job, we don’t want them to go anywhere because they’re so good. How are we going to replace that person? How are we going to find somebody who can do what they do? They’re going to get bored. We’re humans. We need stimulation. We need new things. They’re going to move on. It’s more risky to an organization to lose someone talented than to promote or move someone talented. It also costs us more money to hire than it does to retain. From a purely numbers standpoint, it makes sense to reinvest in your employees because they are what’s driving your customer satisfaction and they are what’s driving your profit.
Engaging Younger Leaders In The Workplace
That is the truth. This is reminding me of another area where I know you have expertise and that is in really engaging the younger people in the organization, the millennials, the ones who are going to be the leaders replacing the baby boomers and others sometime soon. What have you learned about engaging those younger leaders in the workplace? What has worked? Think about what other companies aren’t doing that makes a difference.
Something that I’ve realized, millennials and especially Gen Z and the newer generations that are entering the workplace have experienced somewhat of an unprecedented level of access to other people. All of this social media, TikTok, and all of that. They have the ability to be heard by hundreds if not thousands of people on a daily basis. There’s an expectation that they be heard but when I was growing up, children were to be seen and not heard. Now kids today and young adults today have a very different perspective. I think there’s some pushback from older generations about you’ve got to earn your place in the organization.
You have to earn your voice. Those are still valid but there’s also no harm in opening the aperture to new ideas and experiences from someone who is entering the workforce or a younger leader. Give people the opportunity to have their voices heard. Give them the opportunity to contribute. Help them understand and give them boundaries so that they can be successful but don’t say, “Be quiet and color for six years,” and then you can start to have an opinion. The world has changed a little bit. They’re very used to being heard. I think we can foster that. We can boundary it, but we can foster it.
I think it’s so huge. I’m thinking now this is a long time ago, but many years ago when I was on active duty in the army and one of my assignments was with the cadets at West Point. In the summer, we ran a mental health operation for a cadet basic training and I had first-class cadets in essence by direct reports. Now the way offices led at the time would be simply to just tell them what to do and that was it. I said, “Look, these guys are about to graduate out of the academy. They’re going to be leading people in real life and they need to exercise their brains and thinking through tough decisions because we have very tough decisions every day.”
In our morning case conference meeting every day, I would solicit. “What would you do here? How would you handle this?” While I’m there to be the mentor and also help them see what they wouldn’t see, they’re also stretching their brains and learning how to analyze and make tough decisions as leaders. If you don’t practice, then you’re not going to be good when you first get out there and you could have been practicing under safer conditions. I think it’s important.
It’s teaching critical reasoning and critical thinking skills. It’s helping to expand their confidence, which is incredibly important. The reality with the exception of the military or organizations that are doing active health care, there’s not a lot of risk in letting someone fail. Obviously, in certain organizations, there is some risk. In most businesses, failure is not a terrible thing, especially if it’s a boundary. I think back to when I was young in my recruiting career, I had a lot of ideas about what would work. I learned over time what did and what didn’t. I see young recruiters coming in with a lot of similar ideas to what I had when I was younger and my inclination is to shortcut it and tell them, “Here’s why that’s not going to work.”
Sometimes if there’s a cost investment that’s what I’m going to do because I’m not going to spend the money but if there’s no cost investment or there’s not a lot of risks, I’m going to let them find out on their own and then help build them up afterwards and reinforce that I did the exact same thing. The reason I got that question was, “Why did you let me do it?” “First of all, it’s been twenty years since I was a recruiter. Things might’ve changed. Second of all, that’s how I learned. That’s how I got to where I am is because I fell on my face and then I got back up.”
That’s really important. Really being willing to let people learn from mistakes because it’s all part of the process along the way. I also think we can help them by asking some really good questions that are open-ended and it’s based on the experiences and knowledge that we have. Questions they may not have thought about and we might say, “What are your plans or what would you do if in implementing this X, Y, and Z happens?” At least they’re thinking about it and they’re coming up with a pathway forward if X, Y, and Z happens. They might not have even considered that X, Y, or Z could happen. I think that’s an excellent way to go to.
There’s no harm in listening to someone’s suggestion or opinion. Even if they’re not right, that’s okay. You have then an opportunity to have an educational conversation around why it won’t work. If you’re a transparent leader, it gives you teaching opportunities every single day but it takes maybe two minutes to lend an ear. The trust that you build with that person when they see that you are trying to help them and that you’re really giving them a chance to express themselves, it’s enormous.
It’s why a lot of companies are having significant attrition issues with millennials and Gen Zers is because they’re applying archaic business practices that they’re just not tolerating. There’s a lot of opportunity out there. We need talented workers. We need to grow them. We need to advance their careers because we’re not going to be around forever. We need to be able to pass the torch to a generation that has critical thinking skills, that has critical reasoning skills, and can do what we do because that’s the legacy that we should leave behind.
Anything else about the millennials or the Gen Zers or younger generation you haven’t mentioned yet that you think other executives really need to think about?
I think the only other thing I would say is I hear a lot of these younger generations have a lot of entitlement issues. They think they deserve something. I would challenge executives, because it’s something I go through myself, to ask yourself why you think you didn’t deserve that when you were younger. Looking back, you probably did. You probably did deserve a voice at the table. You probably did deserve fair and equitable wages. You probably did deserve a second chance if you made a mistake.
Just because we were brought up in certain environments, just because we were taught a certain way, doesn’t necessarily mean it was right. Now I will caveat that with, yes, sometimes there are entitlement issues and sometimes that can be frustrating. I’m not invalidating that, but I would just challenge people to be a little bit more open because I think there are things that we can learn from this generation. Their connectivity and their knowledge of how other people and other organizations do things have given them a wider worldview than we had at their age.
The Power Of Diversity In The Success Of Organizations
That’s great. I’m so glad you talked about that. Neal, I also know that you are very committed to diversity and to the power of diversity in the success of organizations. When you came to your company, you had an executive team of six white males. Tell us what you did to transform that team and what’s been the result.
I will say it was made up of men and women, but yes, it was. We were all, all Whites. First, as part of the reorganization, we reduced our executive team, but then we eliminated it. Instead, I opened it up to a leadership team that I think is more representative of the world at large. Men, women, and people of different ethnicities, backgrounds, and socioeconomic classes. Personally, I want to see the organization that I work for represent the world around me.
People of different races, colors, genders. It’s important to me that the company is more reflective of my worldview. I’m also really interested in diversity of thought. People who are raised differently, who think differently, who problem solve differently, because that really lends to creative solutions to problems that organizations miss out on when they homogenize their culture. People talk about fitting into an organization’s culture and I would challenge people to look for individuals that expand your organization’s culture.
From what I’m hearing, making the team broader and more diverse, it’s actually led to some unique thinking and the ability to solve tougher challenges is what I’m hearing.
I will say that I think people who are part of marginalized groups have had to work harder and work differently in front of obstacles that people who look like me do not have. Whether people agree with that or not, I think it’s inarguable that they have to approach things differently. That gives you a different set of tools for solving a problem. That is critical to an organization. You need to be able to attack something from all sides. If you have 5 or 6 people who are all coming from the exact same background, you’re only going to have one solution to that problem.
Neal’s Book: The E-Suite And Its Leadership Insights
That’s just well-stated and well-said. I know your company has the profitability results to talk about the value of becoming more diverse in today’s world. Neal, tell us a little bit about your book, The E-Suite, Empathetic Leadership for the New Generation of Executives. What’s in there that we haven’t talked about yet, let’s say, and who did you write it for? If somebody reads it, what are they going to get out of it?
It is a labor of love between myself and a coworker, a previous boss of mine, Tina Kuhn, who’s my co-author. We wrote it because we realized that while we had very different approaches to problem-solving, they were both rooted in this people-first empathetic leadership. In the book are practical solutions to commonplace business problems, everything from tactical issues of how do you recruit and retain? How do you sell? How do you market, and all wrapped up in that people-based empathetic leadership approach?
There’s also how do you transformationally change an organization but maintain some level of sanity during it. How do you make sure that your team stays on board? How do you manage difficult people? How do you have confrontational conversations while still maintaining everyone’s dignity and making sure that you are communicating effectively, knowing as much as you can by leveraging that empathy? There are a lot of really practical frontline solutions. I would say it’s for anyone who wants to learn how to connect more deeply with their employees to make a positive change. Anybody who wants to connect more with their customers and anybody who wants their companies to experience revenue growth.
That’s a lot of people.
Exactly.
That sounds like a great book. How can people find out more about you and get the book?
The book is available on Amazon, and Barnes and Noble. The website is TheESuite.com. Me personally, I’m on Instagram @TheAnxiousCEOOne. I use that moniker because I talk a lot about mental health. I’m an anxious person and on Medium @Neal.Frick, where I write more short-form articles about mental health and leadership, business ethics and diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Final Words Of Wisdom For Corporate Executives
You have quite an influence on a wide swath of subjects that you are covering. I’m glad you’re sharing that with people so that they can go to those sites and learn more. Neal, what additional words of wisdom do you want to leave for my community of corporate executives? Maybe something you haven’t said just yet.
I would say that it takes less time than you think and it takes no money to have a conversation with someone and understand where they’re coming from. It really is not that difficult to operate empathetically. Although people think of it as a softer skill. There is real evidence around the power of it in growing your business. The first thing that you have to do is you have to put your ego aside because you’re going to have to have conversations with people who have different viewpoints than you do, who think differently, who approach things differently, who have different opinions.
If you allow them, they’re going to challenge you. That will help you grow as a leader, it’ll help them grow as an employee, it’ll set them up for leadership. Depending on the industry that you work in, businesses tend to be a very ego-focused area because it’s very about what I can contribute. As your leader, it’s about how I can change an organization. Open that aperture, let more people in, grow your community, diversify your community, and you will see results.
That’s wonderful guidance. What it reminds me of is the two-way process of learning. Just because you may be the executive doesn’t mean you cannot learn from the millennial or the Gen Z or whoever else is in the workplace. I think if everyone has that learner’s mind and attitude, the company is going to grow and be more successful rather than to think it’s just a one-way street. It’s in both directions is really what you’re talking about, Neal.
Absolutely. I am a firm believer that no one is an expert. They say 10,000 hours and anything makes you an expert. I don’t believe that. If you are truly an expert and you have nothing left to learn, then in my opinion, move on to something new because if you’re not learning, what are you doing? There’s always, especially when it comes to our businesses, as the world evolves, we have to evolve. Listen to someone who is maybe not someone that you would typically take advice from. If it doesn’t resonate, throw it away, but give someone the opportunity in the same way that you are trying to teach and mentor, give them an opportunity to teach you something as well.
Thank you so much, Neal. Thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing so much wisdom that’s practical and that people can use today and really marrying empathy with the profitability of the company because they do both go together.
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. I enjoyed our conversation.
Leadership Wisdom From First Kings
Me too. Thank you again. To everyone out there in our conversation with some scriptures that come from First Kings, the 12th chapter. This is the situation where a rare poem who was the son of King Solomon is now taken over as King because his father has died. He has an opportunity to lead the Northern tribes as well as the Southern tribes if he makes the right empathetic choice. What we’re going to read is what really happened, what he decided, and a little bit about what happened. In First Kings, the 12th chapter, and it starts off by saying, “And Rehoboam went to Shechem for all Israel had gone to Shechem to make him King.”
It happened when Jeroboam, the son of Nebat heard it, he was still in Egypt for he had fled from the presence of King Solomon and had been dwelling in Egypt. Keep in mind. Jeroboam is the de facto leader of the northern tribes, but he’s in exile in Egypt until Solomon dies. Now that he hears a Rehoboam, Solomon’s son in place, he comes back on the scene. Here’s where we picked that up and then he says, “That they sent and called him then Jeroboam and the whole assembly of Israel came and spoke to Rehoboam saying your father made our yoke heavy.
Now, therefore, lighten the burdensome service of your father and his heavy yoke which he put on us, and we will serve you.” He said to them, depart for three days, then come back to me, and the people departed. King Rehoboam consulted the elders who stood before his father Solomon while he still lived and he said, “How do you advise me to answer these people?” They spoke to him, saying, “If you will be a servant to these people today, and serve them, and answer them, and speak good words to them, then they will be your servants forever.”
He rejected the advice which the elders had given him and consulted the young men who had grown up with him who stood before him, and he said to them, “What advice do you give? How should we answer this people who have spoken to me, saying, lighten the yoke which your father put on us?” The young men who had grown up with him spoke to him, saying, “Thus you should speak to these people who have spoken to you saying your father made our yoke heavy but you make it lighter on us.”
That’s you say to them, “My little finger shall be thicker than my father’s waist.” Now whereas my father put a heavy yoke on you I will add to your yoke. My father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scourges. Jeroboam and all the people came to Rehoboam on the third day as the king had directed saying, “Come back to me the third day.” The king answered the people roughly and rejected the advice which the elders had given him.
He spoke to them according to the advice of the young men saying, “My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to your yoke. My father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scourges.” Now you can read the rest of this, but what do you think those people did? The people from the Northern kingdom ran away and said, “Forget it. We’re not serving you.” At that time, Rehoboam ended up being only in charge of the house of David and the Southern part of the kingdom. He lost the ten Northern tribes.
This choice of whether you choose empathetic leadership or harsh scourge leadership makes a difference in terms of the success of your organization, the success in this case of the kingdom that Rehoboam was in charge of. I think that Neal has done a great job of sharing with us the business benefit of empathy and how it leads to loyal employees and increases trust in the organization and profitability. The choice is yours. Decide for empathy and the success of your people and your company. See you next time.
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Combating Loneliness And Depression: Dr. Clarence Shuler’s Insights
In some parts of the world, including the United States, loneliness, depression, and suicide are at an all-time high. With me is Dr. Clarence Shuler, President and CEO of Building Lasting Relationships. He personally experienced a bout of depression. Dr. Shuler, tell us a little bit about what you learned in your experience and what resources you have available for us.
Mental health is a really big thing in America today like you said, and African American men are the number one depressed group in America. I think men in general would come into that. When I went through my depression, it was really a thing about ideology. I hate to say that, but I was trying to validate myself by how much money I made or my success. I was fortunate enough to have a Christian counselor, Dr. Monique Gadsden who helped me work through that.
Now I’m managing my depression more effectively. One of the resources that we have is our book, Finding Hope in a Dark Place: Facing Loneliness, Depression, and Anxiety with the Power of Grace. I hope you will use it as a resource just to see where you are emotionally. It’s not a sin to be depressed. I just want to encourage you and give you hope that your depression can be coming into control.
Wonderful. Thank you so much, Dr. Shuler. What I want everyone to know, as he already said, this is a book that was co-written with his counselor. It is the real deal. If you want to know more about the book or more about services that are available to deal with depression and loneliness, go to Dr.ClarenceShuler.com.
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The Mission For Family Discipleship At Victorious Family
I’m here with Terence Chatmon, who is the president and CEO of the non-profit organization Victorious Family. They are committed to family discipleship and transformation. Thank you for being here, Terence. Tell us about your big goal. What it is that you’re going for at Victorious Family.
By 2030, we see reaching 9.2 million families here in the U.S.
That is wonderful. You’re reaching these families because you really want to see children grow up and truly continue their faith in Christ. Tell us about one of your resources. Do your children believe the book you’ve written?
Ephesians 6:4 says, “Fathers don’t exasperate your children, but to bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” We’re just being faithful to that calling. In order to do that, we train coaches and we provide workshops and content to train parents on how to discipline their children.
That is phenomenal. How can people find out more about the ministry and the other tools and resources you have available and also how they can donate to support the ministry?
There you have it. You want your family to be victorious? Go to VictoriousFamily.org.
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Spirit Wings Kids Foundation’s Global Impact And Permaculture Farm
This is Dr. Karen here, and I want to share some important insights with you about Spirit Wings Kids Foundation, a 501c3 organization that’s doing wonders across the globe and especially in Uganda. I have with me Donna Johnson, who’s the founder of Spirit Wings Kids and a member of the board. She’s going to tell us about the permaculture farm that they have started. Donna, tell us all about it.
Thank you, Dr. Karen. For decades, we’ve been supporting the orphanage and family network in Uganda. In 2018, my son is a permaculturist, and we had acres that we dedicated to his planting. It was just amazing. He also taught them how to do permaculture. It’s flourishing. In fact, during the pandemic, it saved lives. 203 families were fed during the pandemic. It’s such a miracle that God just called us to plant that garden at the time that we did.
Thank you so much, Donna. Thank you so much for your work in Uganda. A couple of other things I want people to know, as a permaculture farm is self-contained in many ways, depending on how they’re growing the crops. You don’t have to use pest control. You don’t need fertilizer. It’s a very sustainable way to provide food for the community. That’s a blessing. If you want to be a part of this wonderful work out there, 100% of all of your donations goes to the people in Uganda to help feed them and their families. Go to SWKids.Foundation and give, make a difference in the world. Thank you for doing so.
Dr. Karen, the President and CEO of TRANSLEADERSHIP, INC. celebrates the 29th birthday of her company with a new painting by Cheltenham, UK-based artist, Louis Parsons. They take you behind the scenes to experience the collaborative process to co-create a commissioned art piece through Parsons’ unique SoulScaping approach.
Through his talks, workshops, and art, Parsons unlocks the emerging art movement he terms “The Soul Renaissance and our ability to see the unique symphony of light that resides inside all of us. He brings simplicity and clarity to empower his audience to find greater energy in their lives.
Louis’ art commissions reside all over the world including with celebrities, world-class surfing athletes, and leading-edge philosophers such as Karren Brady, Tom Curren, and Ken Wilber, and now also with TRANSLEADERSHIP, INC. For the last nine years, he has been the Guest Artist for The Four Seasons, Kuda Huraa, Maldives, and Four Seasons Serengeti. One of his favorite achievements is having one of his artwork pieces auctioned for charity, raising £120,000.
Louis seeks inspiration from all the color and vibrancy in the waves when he surfs and scuba dives. Join Louis and Dr. Karen as they talk about how a corporate painting can clarify and reinforce corporate values and culture.
Write to Dr.Karen@transleadership.com to Name the painting and choose your favorite orientation: Vertical or Horizontal.
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Listen to the podcast here
Corporate Painting Reveal With Louis Parsons On TRANSLEADERSHIP’s 29th Birthday [Episode 470]
This is Dr. Karen Wilson-Starks, President and CEO ofTRANSLEADERSHIP, Inc., and your host for the show and forDr. Karen Speaks Leadership. My company Transleadership, Inc., turned 29 years old on the first of April. As part of the birthday celebration, I’m unveiling a new artwork specifically and especially designed commissioned and painted for Transleadership, Inc. by UK-based artists and prior Voice of Leadership guest,Louis Parsons. I am delighted to have Louis here to celebrate the Transleadership birthday with me.
Louis Parsons uses the power of art to inspire people and organizations to co-create a world of deeper harmony and success. He passionately believes there is an emerging movement which he terms, the Soul Renaissance. Through his talks, workshops, and art, Parsons unlocks our ability to see the unique symphony of light that resides inside all of us. He brings simplicity and clarity to empower his audience to find greater energy in their lives.
Louis’s art commissions can be found all over the world, including with celebrities, world-class surfing athletes, and leading-edge philosophers, such as Karen Brady, Tom Curran, and Ken Wilber and now also with Transleadership, Inc. For the last nine years or so, he has been the guest artists for Four Seasons, Kuda Haraa, Maldives, and Four Seasons Serengeti, where he’s still active at.
One of his favorite achievements is having one of his artwork pieces auctioned for charity raising £120,000. When he isn’t painting, Louis loves to surf and scuba dive seeking inspiration from all the color and vibrancy of the ways. He lives in Cheltenham, UK, at the foot of the Cotswolds Hills with his beautiful wife and family. Louis, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for celebrating the 29th birthday of Transleadership with me.
Thanks, Karen. It’s great to be here and it’s great to see you color coding yourself with the soul scape that we created.
Undergoing Soul Scaping When Creating Art
It is Amazing. I love that. We are coordinated and aligned. Maybe we’ll put it that way. Louis, what I’m hoping we do is we’re going to take our guests backstage so that they get to hear how we created this art piece together and also get to learn a little bit about the meaning of it, what it means and they can also add their two cents worth and we’ll go over that in a little bit. First, I know that when you’re creating art, you go through the soul scaping process with your guests and you went through that with me. Let’s remind people about the definition of soul scaping and then, let’s talk about what you did with me in terms of soul scaping.
Thank you. The first step, only ever know the first question I’m going to ask, which is, imagine you have the perfect work of art and it lights you up. What would you want to experience in that painting? That can either be with reference to an individual, a couple, a family, or some moment in nature or life. It can be the soul of an organization or an company. I start with that question and then I never know what the next question is until that person’s responded.
Often there’s like a couple of intuitions that come out. At first, you might feel like we don’t know the answer to that question, but it’s amazing to me how much there is inside this and just how much a single question can unlock that power or potential in us. From that place, I will then create a small oil pastel and acrylic piece which reflects back what the essence of that person has shared. That’s the first hit. It’s like a soul impression, if you like.
It’s the impression that I got while someone was sharing. I’m intuitive and I’m tuned in and what I want to do is pay attention to you, to the space between us, and what’s coming up in me. I see that in terms of color and light as someone who’s speaking. It’s not necessarily about the words that someone says. It’s something about their presence or the presence of what they’re sharing and the colors and patterns that come through that.
I honestly don’t know how or what happens. Sometimes, I think I know and then something happens. I have no idea what’s happened. I just enjoyed that it does. I’m very happy for that gift and then the stage beyond that, assuming you completely love the first soul impression, which you did. I, then end up creating it as an oil on canvas piece. Any size. It can be on the smaller end of the spectrum or far larger, depending on what’s required, what’s required of you, at the space, and where you want to travel to. Sometimes, a larger piece can help you travel in different ways and sometimes a more intimate piece can be quite nice and very personal. That’s all the process in a nutshell.
Basking In God’s Heavenly Presence
Thank you, Louis. Let me share something. As you’ve been talking about that question about imagining that the artwork has already existed and what would my experience be. I’d like to share the words I said to you. I said words like inspiration, attraction, transformation, hope, power, energy, calling, enthusiasm, and possibility. Those were my words and what I was thinking about, Louis, and for those who are reading, I was thinking about the fact that in the work that I do, which is based on transformation. The company’s name stands for leadership transformation and it’s based on the Bible verse 12:2 which talks about, “Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.”
I wanted to have a painting that captured this process of God coming in with a heavenly light. That’s important because I’m working out of a Christian mindset and frame of reference. We know that when God created the world, it was in total darkness and then he’s the one that brought the light in. The light to me just reminds me of a heavenly presence. That’s what I was thinking about and I wanted to have the world lit up by God’s heavenly presence.
It’s amazing hearing you say again the words and what those words mean to you then to look across to the painting behind you. It’s interesting. At this stage, it almost feels as though someone else’s created it. I often feel like these artworks are created through me I suppose. As I look at that, I can see some of the words. For example, the light and the inspiration. I’m almost reminded of that quality of the light coming down through water and the water can often represent the mind.
It can represent that realm of fluid being that we relate to that thought. Some parts of that mind can be darkened. It can be in dark places. Sometimes, the deeper we go, there can be darkened areas and places that we weren’t aware that need to be brought to the light. To see that life, you’re like piercing that water or not even piercing but sometimes just gently emanating into that water and revealing those depths.
That in itself is something of a transformative experience. Who hasn’t been transformed in some small way when you dive into emotional or a river? Let alone when someone’s presence or someone’s words or maybe even just a coaching phrase or something unlocked. Something within you. Many of us can relate to that experience.
In my case, I was thinking more of a celestial thing, the heavens and most of like a water scene. I know we talked about that in this sense because often, you will represent the depths of the water with much darker colors. I wanted to have more of a heavenly scape where the colors were a little lighter and a little bit brighter. We know that even a small amount of light chases away the darkness when we’re thinking about from a heavenly perspective or a heaven viewpoint. That was one of the things I was thinking about.
We also talked about what metaphor would this be in the sense. You sometimes paint figures or people or images of people in the painting and I want one that would be more of a metaphor. You could assume some things about the transformation of people without having people in the picture. That was also a part of how we talked about it, what it might look like and what the message that would be conveyed.
In my case, one of the smaller paintings, because of space above me is smaller and I also have what I’ll call a carrying size version of it, so that if I go somewhere and I’m meeting with a client or whatever and if I want to show them this. I can take a small picture with me and we can talk about that as well. I was thinking about a small scape as opposed to, let’s say, if you were in a big huge gigantic office building or museum or someplace like that. That was part of it as well.
The heavens are often associated with the sky, air, heavenly clouds, and light pouring through clouds. There’s a paler almost ozone color associated with that, which we carried across to your piece, which is nice. It brings those realms together to have that very celestial presence. The notion of inspiration as well. That light is like a carrier or it’s a transmission of something imbued with inspiration and light. That’s what words at their best can be. They’re like a frequency that can just transmit something golden from one place to another.
Artwork and music can be like that too when coming from the right intention. It maybe a prayerful intentional. Some other intention but the quality of that, I remember in a delicate trying to translate into the camera, especially in the staining process. You build it up on patterns and layers. Some of the beautiful thing about that is layering the happy accidents that happened that you are not in control of or something beyond you start to take over it. Things happen that are a surprise. A beautiful spontaneous surprise, but that’s also part of inspiration. That’s also part of letting light come in through you, your words and an artwork and crystallize and take the form of something that, hopefully, you would want to share with your client, your organizational or someone else.
It’s interesting you say about the figures because the moment you put a figure in a piece, then it changes the whole dynamic, which can be right and powerful and beautiful to do so. It changes the whole thing into some landscape or seascape or soul scape. The nice thing as well about just having something purely abstract is it opens. Especially if you’re going to use it in the way you’re going to use it, which is asking people how they will personally respond to this.
They can put their own feelings and their own thoughts into that and it’s amazing, the power of an image to unlock what’s inside someone. I’m intrigued as well. Now, it’s been in your space for a while and you’ve had the image with you. I’m just intrigued to know what’s changed or evolved or lit up in you? What’s changed now that those words have become? As many people, we can have a written mission statement and something written down but it’s very different than to have that translated into something like an artwork. I’m intrigued to know what’s changed with you as a result of that.
You may know that every year, I have what I call the word of the year. I think that the painting influenced the word of the year this year because the word I selected was light. I talked about the trifecta of light, how light leads to God’s love and love leads to life and life even in an eternal sense. You’ve got the three Ls, light, love, and life.
The painting is the picture of that. It’s a reminder of what I am doing with clients, which is to accelerate, elevate and impact for them and their work and how their going about things. Many times, my clients are in a situation where things look dark and they don’t see the way through and the way out of it. I want them to be inspired that the light of God is shining on it all the time. We can connect with that and we can go from where we are to a different place. It connects with that picture of light that’s important to me.
That’s amazing you say. I’ve been thinking a lot about light. It’s beyond thinking. You start to experience the notion that everything from the very subtle, from the heart of God and through to all form is made out of light. Various layers of light and various layers of density. To consider that, I like that trifecta. That’s gorgeous. There’s light, love and life all interacting. It’s like they’re all woven together into that light. The love and the life is woven into it. There’s a powerful intelligence in all of that light that has made everything around us and put satellite of inspiration in us. That’s a beautiful thought.
The Power Of Transforming And Transcending
They’re a couple of other words that about that are also important in terms of the work that I’m doing and one of the words is transform. Transform is you’re changing. Something is shifting and then transcend because you’re rising above even some of the Earthly planes of what’s going on. You’re transcending, I would say, getting past the Earth’s atmosphere. The pull and the drag that pulls us back down sometimes.
You transcend through that and once you go through that barrier, then you ascend. When you ascend, the kinds of thoughts that can come to you are the possibilities that we wouldn’t necessarily think of on our own without God showing us a greater possibility than what we can see which is totally in an Earthly space. When you engage in some heavenly light, then you’re going to see and experience greater options because With God, all things are possible and nothing is impossible. As he says, his thoughts and his ways are high above ours. When we’re connected with God, we see what we don’t see if we’re not connected. I see that part transform, transcend, and ascend as well.
That’s beautiful. It’s funny because again, sometimes this happens in our conversations. They sometimes run in parallel to the things that we’ve been previously considering. One of the things that’s been important with my art and for some of my healing processes is the realization that like descends as well. It actively reaches in to touch and surround. In fact, there’s a beautiful and incredible metaphor that was shared with me about how we perceive light. The center of the eye is completely dark.
It’s a theater of darkness, if you like. The only way we’re able to perceive any light is because of that darkness. Even taking that thought a little further, darkness in a sense is very dense light. It’s another quality of light. It’s not even dense. It offer ability to measure. When we look up at the night sky and we see this darkness and we think there’s a vacuum but there’s no vacuum at all. It’s packed or full of intelligence, information, waveforms, and particles. Things that are beyond our way of perceiving and way of seeing.
Something beautiful happens in that process of transformation. When light and darkness connect and they touch one another. It’s like the light gets Earth and becomes even more real. If it was all light all the time, I wonder what would happen to life, where this beautiful synthesis of combination of all of those in a wavelengths of life if you’re together? That just makes me marvel at the design, the creation, the intricacy, the joy, and the astonishing building of any form of light.
The thing is, humans, we have this beautiful way of participating. If you’re like this God-given ability to create this way to bring almost more light into the process. That word transformation can be many things to many people, but the sense of the light touching in and then folding around and changing the darkness. I love that picture very much. The color is the filling in one wavelength between those who opposite. Its surroundings the whole time. We would have no debt perception unless there was shadow a long side the light.
How God’s Light Transforms Our Lives
That’s certainly true in an Earthly sense. What I like about what you said and I’m going to build on it when you were talking about the light of God coming down. That’s very relevant because in a Christian perspective, we don’t have the ability to go from where we are up to God in and of ourselves. In fact, when the people were building the Tower of Babel in the Bible and trying to reach God, he stopped them. It’s like, you can’t reach me and he already knew he was going to reach us by sending Jesus, the Messiah to come down as that ultimate light.
God comes to us so that we can then assess him and then join him. It’s if to say, God becomes our vehicle to go to the heavens where he is and we can’t get there apart from him, so to speak. Some other words that I reflected on later like I mentioned the inspiration attraction, transformation and hope and so on. Later on, I was thinking about this notion of God coming to Earth. I was thinking about heavenly light, celestial light, light piercing the darkness and this notion that the Bible describes where God himself dwells in unapproachable light.
The light in heaven is so bright that there’s no need for a son there because God is the light of heaven. God himself is the on. Now, we have the seasons and the cycles of light and darkness. Our bodies probably need that because we have to rest here in various other things. When we get into the heavenly space and we have our supernatural heavenly bodies, we will be able to handle light all the time. Whereas here, maybe we could do that.
The light of God is going to brighten up the heavens in a way that we haven’t seen before here on Earth just like when Jesus was transfigured on the mountain with his three closest associates with him. The light of his clothing was so bright. There was no color white or light like that even of available on the earth. Even if you had bleached something. As white as it could be or light as it could be. It would pale in comparison to the light that was shining on him and this transfiguration experience. We are the royal priesthood of God and the Darkness has transformed us into not just a royal light, but I even think of royal blue of sorts because we are part of that Kingdom of priests.
I love blue. I tend to create something to say for me. There’s a natural gravitation to the realm of blue. I love all the colors. Don’t get me wrong, but there’s something about the blues of the oceans. It’s just that beautiful viscosity of waters and heavens. It’s interesting because I wonder as well, whether that moment of transfiguration is also, again about the possibility of us having that light inside us whilst being here. In fact, it seems to me and especially using that picture from the book of revelation that heaven seems to descend to earth.
Depending on how you feel about the gospel’s, there’s an amazing phrase that Jesus uses, which is the Kingdom of Heaven or if you like the Kingdom of God stretches out over this Earth, but men can’t see it. There’s something about when you see how he walks and how he operates in these moments, where there’s these incredible wonderful things that he’s so filled with that light that it almost reveals this world of light and it’s possibility of participate with a world of light that’s already here but that we can’t currently see. That excites me.
That excites me as an artist, as a creator, and as someone with imagination. One of the, if you like, the scourges of our time is anxiety, levels of anxiety and worrying depression. That’s partly because we don’t unfold the wings of our imagination into the full possibility of what they’re here for, which is this, if you like, God give him the ability to be able to see, feel, and experience these incredible beautiful realms of light that are in beautiful synchronicity with the world that’s here.
We’re not just waiting on a rock to just pass on to another place. There’s always that promise but part of our participation as artists, speakers, coaches, or whatever it would be, is to bring more and more of that light into this realm and to do anything we can. It’s a lot of flame towards it. Whether it is painting or speaking or loving or looking an eye or touching someone’s hand in a certain way. Those are the sole qualities. Those heavenly qualities that get transmitted from one another when we do that.
The fact that we’ve lost touch, generally speaking. There’s more and more people that are more in touch with this than ever before in certain ways but I’d like to see that network of light and to know that we can be held and supported by it. That light is love. That light is life. It’s an extraordinary revelation and it changes the way you look, feel, and experience everything around us.
That is completely true. In fact, in the language that I would speak, I would describe it as the more we’re in tune with, in touch with and filled with the spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, the more ability we have to connect with the light that you’re talking about and to experience the divine and the supernatural here on Earth.
I do think that’s a reality. Some people are more connected than others. Some people get to see more that others. As you say, it’s here. We just may not always have as Jesus was saying, sometimes in the Old Testament was saying, “Eyes to see and ears to hear.” All that is around us and that’s giving in the spiritual sense. Those abilities and our ability later. Jesus demonstrated this when he was resurrected from the grave that he was able to do amazing things. He could walk through walls. He could transport himself suddenly for one place to the next.
There is a realm that we are not as in touch with, most of us, every day. Some of it is possible now, and they’ll be even greater possibilities later because we don’t even have the bodies that can handle all that God can do and manifest until later. We’re going deep with all this stuff. I’m going to share something. It’s in the form of a course to a song because I remember in childhood, we used to sing the song in church.
I’m just going to sing a little bit of it just to get into the vibe of it. It went something like, “Heavenly sunlight, heavenly sunlight, flooding my soul with glory divine. Hallelujah. Singing His praises. Jesus is mine.” That song was written in 1899. It’s an old one, but we used to sing that. When I think about the painting, I was thinking to day. When I woke up, I was thinking about heavenly sunlight and that song came to mind. That’s just the chorus of it but it has a number of different verses and so on, just to remember that we have access to God’s heavenly sunlight. It’s just beautiful thought to me.
That’s beautiful. You’ve got a beautiful voice.
Diving Deep Into Louis’ Painting
Thank you. Anyway, as we’re thinking about this and one thing I haven’t done, Louis. I have not named the painting. I haven’t named it yet or given it a name. We know that it’s about transformation being transformed. It’s about the light and reflecting the light in God’s light. I want people who are reading to write in and write to me and let me know, what do they think the name of this painting should be in light of everything that we’ve been talking about? It can have a number of different names.
I also want people to think about the orientation of the painting. We’ve got a picture of the painting and it’s a little bit easier to see because we’ve got it on the screen. When you look at the painting this way, you can see that the light is pouring in, if you will from heaven. You see the deep strands of gold that are coming down. One of the pictures in my mind that I see, I don’t know if you remember these or if you’ve ever even been to them. They are these old homes owned by ancient millionaires from the United States.
They have these houses off in New England up in Rhode Island, and other places. Europe has a lot of buildings like this too where the ceiling inside the building is painted in this heavenly color. You’ll see little angels and cherubs and all that built in. You’ll see the different shades of the yellow, the gold, clouds, and sky. Often, you’ll see that in like a dome to build building right above and the ceiling is made that way.
When I think about these colors and the way it’s shining, that’s one of the images that comes to mind when I look at the painting. This is the primary orientation of it. This is the way in which you painted it, Louis. Maybe you might just share a little bit about what you were thinking about when you painted at this way. I know it’s based on everything we were talking about in the soul scape experience. Maybe share your insights.
Again, it’s just that little of the descending light. I wanted to have a certain orientation almost look like you were following the light in a dance. You’ll looking in and downward as you following it from the top right down to the left but it’s almost folding in a little bit to the center.
You and I discovered together that the painting also could have a horizontal orientation where the light is coming in from the left side. In a minute or so, we’re going to change the views so people can see the painting in the horizontal format. Louis and I are talking about this painting in vertical and horizontal. Some of you normally read this show, this might be a day, you might want to watch the show onYouTube or possibly on Raven International Television, so that you can see what we’re seeing.
If you are connected to us by email or on social media, we will include the visual as well so that you can follow along with what we’re saying. Now, we can see from a horizontal view. The light is coming from the top left and coming down into the earth realm. This is a powerful view of the painting as well. I thank you, Louis, because you gave me options. I could hang it in both directions if I want because we were looking at it in both directions and we liked it in both directions. What else emerge for you when you saw the horizontal version?
I feel as though, you can see the curvature of the earth and you’re zooming and finding into it like from the light to some delicate horizon at an angle. I could because I’ve been watching a lot of Sci-Fi. I love the qualities of light that comes through in this. There’s something about reaching in towards a horizon of possibility but it is making me want to tilt my head.
Does that suggest that you personally prefer to the vertical way in which it was created?
I think I do because that was the way I was creating it but it’s not the first time that I’ve created a painting and then changed the orientation and thought, “I like it this way, too.” Some I’ve even turned upside down. Although, there were figures in the center and reflections of the figures, so it worked quite well. I like it this way, I’ve got to say. I’m surprisingly so. It’s probably a certain amount of bias because I was so focused on creating it the other way, but I could easily get used to seeing this way. It’s got a lot in it this way for sure.
It’s quite dynamic in this direction as well. Those of you who are watching and reading, I’m going to invite you to also weigh in on that. You get two things you can weigh in on. What do you think the painting should be called? We haven’t it named it yet. Do you prefer the vertical or the horizontal orientation?
You can let me know and reach out. You can reach out to me on Dr.Karen@Transleadership.com. You can also reach out on social media. Those of you who get my social media messages and postings, you know where to reach me on all of those channels as well. Tell us what you think, vertical, horizontal, what name comes to mind and we’ll have a naming ceremony at some point and talk about it.
I think the painting can be vertical or horizontal. Somedays people may come and speak with me and see it horizontal and on other days, they might see it vertical. It’s because I’m able to relate to both. I wanted to just mention something but this is the Transleadership card. You’ll see the royal blue on the far left and then there’s gold. That’s gold foil in the middle.
What’s interesting is that it’s a movement from darkness into light. That goes with the theme of the company moving from darkness to light. I just wanted to also mention that. It goes with who we are and who we’ve been over the last years. Louis, let me ask you this. You do souls scape all the time. What was it like for you to participate in and do the soul scape with me about this particular painting in work of art?
That was a real ease in connecting with you on this. Sometimes, it can take a little while to answer themes that want to be brought into a piece but there was a real clarity there, so that was a lot of fun. For me, if there’s any sense of spirituality in depth and what’s being shared, then that greatly aids my inspiration, too. It was a effortless creation and this happens sometimes.
Sometimes they can be quite challenging, which I quite like to be challenged and pushed by. It’s like, you’re in conversation with the painting. It can push you in different directions, but this was quite different. It just blows quite effortlessly. Even the way the painting dried certain times, it was almost just a bit of a gift how it landed itself. That stands out in my mind.
What was fun for me, Louis, is I’ve never had a commission to painting before. It was fun to be able to share ideas and to know that somehow, it would be represented in the painting even though I’m not a painter. I don’t paint but we were co-creating it together, the words that we shared, the thoughts and the experience. You are representing everything that we talked about in the actual painting itself. That’s fun and I know that you do this type of work for many people. Let people know how they can reach you and if they want to get their own commissioned painting, what they need to do and what’s the process.
I did between 5 and 10 commissions in a year, typically. The best way to get in touch is by my email address. That’s Louis@LouisParsons.com. You can contact me on the website as well, LouisParsons.com. as paths and calm. The first part of it is to have an initial conversation and see what feels right for you. If you’re drawn to the artwork, it’s on the website. I see those as flowers. They will attract the kind of people that drawn to this work or not. Following that first conversation, if it feels right, we can go into the process together. It’s got to feel right for you and for me as well. I wanted to make sure that my energy and your energy is connected in wanting to create something beautiful. That would be amazing.
How A Painting Can Change A Business
What I hope I’m able to do, I haven’t figure out how to do this yet. I’d love to create some note cards that have this image on them and then I can write to people from my own Transleadership painting. In wrapping things up, Louis in what we’re talking about. What else would you like to share with people about anything that we’ve been talking about? As you’re thinking about the members of the audience who are corporate executives and what a painting might even mean to their business. What might you share?
Especially for those who are in the corporate world, you might not initially think paintings going to change things. It’s way more than a painting. It’s more the exploration with that which is truly valuable and truly important to you and your organization. If you’re like those soul qualities that are often permeate the culture and to have something that captures the heart and soul of those, which is good upon. Maybe not just with you but a number of people that are, if you like the key perspective holidays, then have something creative that then enables you and those around you to get behind, to see your place in the bigger picture.
You can have quite powerful effects. Certainly, it seems to have had something of an effect with Microsoft to certain extent with some of the leadership workshop work I did with Google. I’m not the first to shout from the rooftops about it. I prefer to let other people share their experiences of it. All I can say is that this realm of light is very real. The more you’re in contact with it, the more it can only bring huge amounts of benefit, inspiration, and abundance to those who want to connect with it. It’s just a real joy and honoring to engage with people who are willing to participate in that process.
I love what you said because you can go beyond just the words on the page from your vision statement, your purpose or your mission statement or whatever it is that you’re conveying in the organization. If it has a visual like a picture to go with it, when we think about vision, it’s something that you can see. This adds to the depth of that message.
Different people will, I’d say connect with them message to a different portal. Whether it be through words or images. You’re involving both the left and the right side of the brain if you will for a more total experience when you have both the words and the images together. That’s a powerful way to think about what the possibilities are for corporations.
Thank you. I love that you used the word portal. In their pure respond, that’s exactly what soul scapes are there. They’re portables of light. They engage us and our imaginations. They can take us to places but we can also bring ourselves to those artworks and let that light get built enough. Thank you for that.
I would even encourage people who might want to think about how could they make a painting or do a soul scape experience that’s even for their family? Who is our family? Who are we? What do we stand for? What are our values? There are endless possibilities about what people can create and have something that’s meaningful and that in a case of a family that’s passed down and last many generations.
When the children are thinking about, who are we? What’s our family about? They can reference painting and have that conversation with someone as their sharing. I see multiple applications. Louis, I hope that people will contact you and have a wonderful experience and explore what their soul scape is and what the message is that God is transmitting to them. I want to thank you for my experience and the creation of the painting. I will keep you posted on what people end up saying in terms of their reflection and what they ultimately shared with me.
Thank you. It’s been a real joy to going through this process with you.
Thank you so much, Louis. This birthday would not be special or the same without you being here sharing it with me for 29 years of Transleadership. I just thank you for sharing this space and for creating something wonderful and beautiful that we can celebrate going forward. Thank you so much. I would like to close with a Bible verse that I think is very fitting for everything that we’ve been talking about with the painting.
This comes from Psalm 19:1 and it says, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork.” Every day as you look up in the sky and see what God is painting for us, I hope that you will enjoy his handy work and His glory. We’re just capturing a little sliver of it in this painting, but he is the painter who paints every day. We get to experience God every day if we would take the time, have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. Have a blessed day full of the light of God. May he continue to lead and guide you in the way that he would have you to go. See you next time.
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Dr. Karen’s Special Promotion
This is Dr. Karen Wilson-Starks, President and CEO ofTRANSLEADERSHIP, Inc. I want to let that I am running a special promotion. If you are a CEO or executive leader and a medium to large sized company and you care about how your people are treated. Especially if you share Biblical values and you may be facing difficult decisions where you want some additional perspective.
You may be planning for succession in your company and developing people and preparing the organization for that succession or perhaps, you are going through change. Your leading change. Maybe there’s a merger. There’s an acquisition. Whatever you’re facing in terms of leadership, including developing your executive team. Contact me. Give me a call, so we can do a discovery meeting to see what’s going on. Here’s the special promotion.
The promotion is, in addition to your discovery time, I will interview up to three additional people from your executive team so you have even greater contacts and feedback about where to go next. Reach out to me at Dr.Karen@Transleadership.com or phone me at (719) 534-0949 extension 1. I look forward to hearing from you and to coming alongside you to complete and continue your leadership journey with a positivity and profitability in your organization.
Did that you can mind the lessons from your own life and work experiences to inspire your teams and your people. In my book,Lead Yourself First: The Senior Leader’s Guide to Engaging Your People for Greater Performance and Impact. I only share snippets of my life experiences from childhood all the way up to adulthood. I also share what I learned from these experiences, how that learning informs how I lead today and some examples of how I facilitate my clients success with these same principles.
I invite you also to apply the same methodology to your life with reflection questions at the end of each chapter. When you lead yourself first, you then have a foundation for leading others. In Chapter 2, which is called Run Your Own Race, I share some stories from my days as an active-duty army officer when my approach to running the two miles for the physical training test and also my approach for the 12 miles forced road march had to be different from what other people did. What I would say is dare to be different. Find your own success formula. Sometimes, what works for you is different from what works for others. Remember, to run your own race and remember to get your own copy of Lead Yourself First and you’ll find resources on how to run your own race.
