Episode 145: Transcript

Organizational DNA: Setting the Code for Unparalleled Success

Speaker 0 00:00:04 Make It Right – The manufacturing podcast, Speaker 1 00:00:10 When you’re looking at your business and its ability to succeed, do you ever consider its organizational DNA? This may be a new concept for you, but this week on make it right. Our guest says that forward-thinking individuals and organizations are beginning to realize they can custom engineer their organizational DNA to a specific genetic code that will unleash the basic human capabilities for creativity, innovation, and problem solving. And the result is unparalleled organizational success. I’m Janet Eastman, Kevin Snook, and I are pleased to have Daniel Edds as our guest today. He is the author of leveraging the genetics of leadership, cracking the code of sustainable team performance. Dan, welcome to the show. Speaker 2 00:00:59 Great. Thank you, Janet. Speaker 1 00:01:01 And did I get your last name, right? Is it N yes. Okay, good. Perfect. I should have asked you that before, right? Speaker 2 00:01:08 No, no, you got it. You did good. Speaker 1 00:01:11 Uh, so you have met Kevin as we just got rolling, but I’m really glad to have you on the show and I found your book really interesting. And so let’s dive right in because, um, you’ve got a lot of stories. I think you can share. So briefly, let’s just talk about this concept of organizational DNA because we know DNA is crazy complex. So this, this can’t be that complex. Speaker 2 00:01:38 Uh, fortunately for us, uh, yes, it’s not that complex. Um, and actually, uh, in coming up with the title and the metaphor of DNA, I actually had dinner with a friend of mine who is a, has a PhD in biochemistry as well as a law degree and spends his days, um, working in the biopharmaceutical industry. And, um, when I sat down with him, I said, I want you to give me sort of the middle school version of DNA. By the time I got done, I was asking for the kindergarten version, but I came away thinking the metaphor fits. Um, but it’s just the idea of the organizational DNA is really about culture and, and designing your organizational culture to us with a specific code to get the results that you do that you want. It’s really all. It’s all, it’s all it it’s about. Um, it’s about building culture. Uh, it’s about designing culture is it’s about creating that kind of, uh, experience for the workforce that will get you the ultimate results that you want with your customers. Speaker 1 00:02:48 Okay. So right at the very start of your book, and I love this story, you have the story about submarine, captain David, Mark cat. It’s a great illustrator story about how can all work. So just share that story of, of how he got to this point. Speaker 2 00:03:05 Okay. Uh, I, I love, love, love his book, love his story. Um, and he had spent his entire Naval career preparing to be the captain of the United States, uh, submarine. He has spent a year, uh, studying every nut bolt valve, um, sailor of the U S S Olympia. I think it was. And like two weeks before he was supposed to take over command, he was reassigned to a different ship. The USS Santa Fe, even though the ships were in the same class of submarines, they were radically different. Um, and, uh, he discovered that the leadership system to which he had been trained would no longer work principally because the system of leadership that the Navy had trained him to was all about command and control. The captain gives the command and everybody else carries out the command. And it’s really based on his superior technical skills of the submarine as he, uh, he had been trained in and in the reactor systems and the acoustic systems, the communication systems, all of the mechanical systems, he had been trained specifically on every piece of those things. So he was the superior technical expert of, of the submarine. So now he’s, he’s onboard a new summary and he, the, the lesson that he learned was, um, I actually love this story. He gave a command there on the first training exercise once with him as captain, and he gives a command all ahead, two thirds. Speaker 2 00:04:48 So his next in command relayed that command to the helmsmen all ahead, two thirds, except the Hellman’s helmsmen didn’t do anything because there was no two thirds dial on the speed control. So the captain had given a command to a subordinate who knew the command could not be carried out to a, you know, the third, the third guy down in the command structure who didn’t know what to do. And that’s when captain Marquette figured out he had to do something different around leadership. He could not lead based on his superior technical skills of the summary. Now we had to actually empower and trust his subordinates if you will. Speaker 1 00:05:39 So I love this story as well because people knew that this thing couldn’t happen. Like you weren’t going to be able to do that. And yet nobody had the, the self-confidence or the trust in the captain to say, we don’t have that. And we can’t do that. Right. So they just went, okay, you do it right. And it’s like, well, you’re just stalled. Everything is stalled. Speaker 2 00:06:08 Right. Right. Well, and when you read his book, you realize, and he’s, he’s quite blunt about it, that the culture of the summary had been one of, we don’t, we don’t do anything until we’re told what to do. And so here you have sailors who have been, um, have gone through rigorous training, whatever part of the submarine they’re involved with that they’re training to serve on a United States. Nuclear powered submarine is rigorous yet. They’re standing around doing nothing until they’re told what to do. Not, not all that much different from a lot of organizations that we have probably all been involved with time or too. And, um, and, and yet he was, and he, he is funny. He uses the term system, but I had to change the system. Um, and yet my only, my only criticism of him in the book is he walks right up to the idea that leadership is a systemic activity that, that can be systematized, that there is a system of leadership. And then he turns around and talks about personal leadership. But, uh, in two years he changed the culture. And the submarine went from being the lowest performing ship in the, in the us night, in the United States. Navy’s fleet of submarines to the highest one, which means that when you change that culture, when you change that DNA through the way leadership happens, you can, you can experience fast transformational, massive turnaround in your organization, right? Speaker 1 00:07:51 So I want to bring Kevin in here because Kevin, I’m pretty sure that you have worked with manufacturing companies in the past that were just like captain Marquette and that submarine where, you know, the guy just passes it down the line going, okay, you deal with this because we can’t do it. We know we can’t do it. Speaker 3 00:08:10 Well, the thing that I find very interesting about that was one of the last thing she said, Dan, and that was that submarine was the last that who was the worst performing in a, in the Navy. Right. And so that doesn’t surprise me at all that the fact is that system, that very autocratic system would have worked at one point. And it would have been the best form of leadership at one point exactly why it was in place, because it was functional. And it works. I think what’s happened now is that over a period of time, we’ve realized that although you can get a certain amount of results from that over a period of time, then you start to Peter out and that you drop off. Right. And the reason you’re dropping off is because everybody else is finding better and more involved ways of leadership. Guess the key question that pops up for me is what’s the first step. Then what’s the first step of being able to say, yep. I realized that I’ve stagnated. I realized that there is that, that there has to be a better way than this autocratic command and control way. W what’s the first step of moving through that? Speaker 2 00:09:20 Yeah. Great question. And when I started doing the research, um, for this book, um, I really didn’t know what I was going to find. I, I, my, my question was how do high-impact organizations and organizations to perform at a high level for a long period of time, not a year or two, but for a long period of time, how did they approach the practice of leadership? And I wasn’t looking for anything more than just how do they do it. And, uh, but what I found was, um, uh, to a bit of a surprise really is that they start with the experience of the workforce. What do they want their employees to experience working for this particular organization? Whether it be a submarine and elementary school. I even looked at the New York mafia and, uh, just for fun. And, uh, uh, it always starts with the experience of the workforce. Speaker 2 00:10:22 And I found organizations that set the experience of relationship, respect, um, team. Um, I heard words like servant leadership, um, from two senior us army officers, one a full Colonel, the other, a four star general. Um, they spoke, they, they, they first explained to me servant leadership and in the next breath they used a word I was totally not expecting to hear, which was love yet. And speaking with a elementary school principal who had seen a school go from the lowest performing school, uh, out of 18 elementary schools to the highest performing elementary school in five years. Um, she said, um, uh, when I asked her the question, you know, what are one or two words that you would use to describe your approach to leadership? She said, well, this won’t be very popular, but love and grace as a pathway to a culture of collaboration. And, um, when it seemed like everybody started there, what, what do we want our workforce to experience? And then it’s just almost like reverse engineering. Okay. What do we have to do to create this kind of, uh, experience for our employees? And when you get done there, really delivering that same experience to their customers, Speaker 3 00:11:54 What I’d like, I’d like to add a data point to that because in my research of their failures, the word that kept coming up for me was fulfillment. And we wanted people to feel fulfilled at the end of the day and look forward to coming to work the next day. And that translated for us into that main aim, which was aimed from the heart and people in manufacturing office say aim from the heart. That’s a really sort of wooly soft word, right? No, it’s absolutely critical because if you, as a viewer, as a leader, don’t feel inspired about where you’re going, a love, the journey and the people around you can’t possibly feel inspired. Right. Right. It sounds like we’re, we’re talking exactly the same. Speaker 2 00:12:33 Exactly. The same thing. Yeah, exactly. The same thing. In fact, I was, um, I did a podcast with a group, uh, I don’t know, maybe three or four weeks ago. It’s a technology firm. Yeah. Offices in Texas and India. And I’m the CEO, uh, almost, uh, ruined the company. Um, at one point, um, he had to lay off half of his employees, um, massive debt. He had to sell his house just to make payroll. And I realized it was him. He would create, created a toxic culture and the word that they use. And they’re actually now doing consulting around this word of love, bringing love into the strategy for doing business. But yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s the exact same thing. It’s that idea of some place. There’s a heart connection that we have to realize is there, and, and frankly, that idea of love and that sort of soft mushy, you know, feeling it makes me nervous. It does, but, Speaker 3 00:13:38 Well, I think it, I think it makes a lot of people nervous. Right. And that’s why, that’s why it’s not, it’s not in the manufacturing language at the moment, but on our podcast last week, we had a chap and he was talking about again, Maxwell. And he was talking about, it’s not business to business or business to consumer anymore. It’s person to person. Yes. And I’d say another way of bringing in that it’s a relationship. Everything that we do in a business is a relationship. And the best way to open yourself up in a relationship is to open up your heart. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 1 00:14:08 Well, and you know, I, I have to say that the best job I ever had, I worked with, um, an organization about 20 or 30 people and the feeling that we had, there was family, it was family. And you always had somebody else’s back when they needed it. You know, like there’s a radio station in it. Somebody wasn’t showing up for their shift, you’d give them a little bit longer because you knew it was a Friday night and they were probably out with their friends and just trying to get there, to do their shift on air. Right. So you just, you know, you’d throw their song on and you’d wait and then they’d show up and then he’d be like, okay, see you later. Thanks for saving me. But that it was a collaborative family environment. And then when a big corporation came in and took it over, that feeling was lost. Yeah. And everybody basically jumped submarine or jumped ship and went somewhere else because it was not the same place anymore. And that was respect and trust and love. Speaker 2 00:15:14 Yep. So Speaker 1 00:15:16 I want to throw in here too, that something that captain Marquette had said, and I’m quoting, he said, instead of one of, instead of one captain giving orders to 134 men, we would have 135 independent, energetic, emotionally committed and engaged men thinking about what we needed to do and ways to do it. Right. So my question for you, Dan, is how do you build the self-confidence in each individual? And that trust that they can say to whoever it is, whether it’s the captain of the submarine or the CEO of the manufacturing company, this, we can’t do this. Speaker 2 00:16:04 Yeah. Yeah. Well, Janet, that’s a great question. And there’s, um, there’s several different ways I could, I could address that question. Um, one way though, is to understand the nature of power when, um, when we are given a command, if you will, or a position in an organization, there’s a certain amount of power that comes with that. And, uh, I don’t know. It might be just, you know, us humans when we get power, we think, Oh, this is, I like this feeling. It makes me feel good. It makes me feel strong. It makes me feel, you know, bold or whatever. And so we want to hang on to that power as if the power is contained in a cup, and there’s no more power inside that cup that it’s, uh, you know, it’s a zero sum game. It’s a limited commodity to reality though, is when we give power away to employees, we don’t, we don’t lose power. Speaker 2 00:17:13 We actually gain power. So, you know, think about the mathematical equation that captain Marquette had on that submarine. One senior executive officer giving orders to 134 others, as opposed to 135 committed, confident, energetic, engaged sailors, where, which, which equation produces more power for the submarine is when you have 135 totally sailors on board, that submarine. So I referenced the elementary school principal. Um, she was a woman who actually want to ask her. I, when I said, I want to talk to her about leadership. She, she looked at me kind of like I was from outer space. And she said, I don’t know anything about leadership. Speaker 2 00:18:09 She then went on to describe for me the most eloquent, detailed thought out system of leadership that I’ve found possibly outside the United States army. Um, but she was one the way I would describe her approach to leadership is okay. I have a position of responsibility for 75, uh, educational leaders as, and 450 students plus their families. And plus because of the ethnic nature of the, of the neighborhood they’re grandparents as well. And, and her approach was, it’s not, you know, my power, it’s our power. We have collectively power to change the lives of students and that school, not only did it become the highest performing school in the district, it also went on to close the achievement gap, which is, which is the difference between majority and minority cultures, um, uh, uh, economic status and lower economic status that would put that school in a classification, all of its own. It wasn’t about her power, though. It was about the total power that could be used to drive educational academic performance of, of children. Speaker 1 00:19:39 You know, the, the image that I get in my head, when you say that is, I’m thinking, okay, if you have the leader and they are the power cell, and then there’s just all these connectors along the line, and it’s just this power, self fleshing out this way until there’s like no power at the ends. Right. But then you describe the, the, the principal of the school, she’s the power cell. And then there’s two more little power cells and two more little power cells. And they’re all like this. And then you have this massive power. Speaker 2 00:20:07 Yes. Yeah. That’s a great illustration. Speaker 1 00:20:10 Like that’s, that is why it works because there’s power cells, Speaker 2 00:20:15 Right. When, when you give power away, you don’t lose power, you gain power. Speaker 1 00:20:22 Okay. So you, weren’t talking about, uh, this, this CEO in this company in Texas, that he was the problem and the way he leads, how, and I don’t want you, maybe you want to use him as the example or whatever, but if that’s the leader of the company and he was the problem, and then you want a culture change, Speaker 2 00:20:43 How Speaker 1 00:20:43 Do you shift that? So that all of a sudden people can see him differently and have that trust and be confident that they can trust that, man. Speaker 2 00:20:54 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Great question. And, uh, this was one of the, um, um, surprises when I was doing the research, um, high-impact organizations I found put as much, if not more emphasis on the behaviors of their leaders and managers as they do their core values. So, you know, it’s, it’s, uh, it’s common for organizations today to have a set of core values. You know, it’s sort of unethical not to have a set of core values. Everybody posts them on a poster someplace. They put them on the website someplace, here’s our core values, but there’s seldom that connection between the core values and behaviors. So, um, I’ll use one hospital that I, that I, I did a fair bit of research on, um, from what I could tell, they only had one core value and it was a value of respect, respect for the worker, respect for the work and respect for the patient. Speaker 2 00:22:04 Everything was driven off of that singular core value, but then they also had, I think it was 10 foundational behaviors. Things like, um, listen to understand, um, they train every leader and manager to not be a problem solver because they want problems to be solved at the lowest possible level by the people doing the work. And Kevin, I’m watching your express in there. I’d love to get your, your reaction that, but they’ve codified that into a rule and a, and a training mechanism for their, for their managers and for their leaders. You are not to solve problems. You can help your employees understand the problem, get a scope of the problem, but ultimately your job is to help your, your employees learn how to be problem solving solvers themselves. And when they do that, guess what happens? The self-confidence of their employees, skyrockets. Speaker 3 00:23:15 Yeah. Dan, I love that. And you know, I’ve often said that it’s the frontline employees that are making the decisions every minute of the day, that determine where the company is going to be a success. So, um, job as leaders is to help them make really good decisions. And that whole idea around, um, you mentioned this, that, that idea of, as we all gain power, we as individuals gain power, we give power away. Then the overall power growth, that’s exactly the same as love, right. You know, run out of love. You share love with people. And so, in fact, there’s this absolute synchronicity between the two, uh, the, the idea of the frontline employees being the key ones and, and our job as leaders is not to solve their problems, but to help them solve the problems. Unless of course they’re not capable of solving that problem, in which case, you know, I find that sometimes the, the, the one place has changed is, is when people come to you with an issue, it’s an interdepartmental issue that that person doesn’t have the scope or capability or whatever. And sometimes they just need help getting over that barrier. Right. So there’s certain, there’s certain problems that the leaders need to step in on. But I think the vast majority of the, of the role of the leader is to help the organization grow. Speaker 2 00:24:32 Yep. Yeah. Um, you know, and when, when we do that, you know, what happens is employees the rank and file workers, the ones that are creating that experience for our customers, the ones that are creating the value for the customers, their self confidence grows, but also their engagement level with the, with, uh, with the company, um, uh, something you mentioned triggered a thought with this elementary school. Um, they intentionally, uh, uh, wanted every one of their teachers, what here in the States are referred to as educational leaders. And they designed, they came up with this phrase on their own. At the end of the day, they wanted to feel optimistically hopeful. That was the feeling that they wanted to go away with every day. Because as you can imagine, when you’re dealing with, you know, uh, students from five years old up to, you know, nine, 10, 11, 12 years old, you don’t always feel optimistic, hopeful every day. Um, but they wanted to be optimistically hopeful that they were in fact making a difference in the lives of young people, as well as their families, because this particular school was in a, a place of fairly high ethnic and economic diversity, which is a nice way of saying, um, fairly impoverished. Speaker 3 00:26:03 Yeah. Well, and the other thing that stood out for me is you talked about the behaviors of leaders being called out. And I find a lot of times organizations are shying away from talking about behaviors. It’s almost like fear is that if I, if I rate you based on your behavior, then there’s something wrong with that, but it isn’t, it isn’t it, the behaviors that we want to be, um, modifying and adjusting in order to be able to give us a more, a better growth environment. Speaker 2 00:26:35 Uh, yeah. Kevin, uh, um, gosh, so one of the other hospitals I looked at, um, as a hospital in Mississippi, I had the opportunity to speak with the, uh, CEO is a couple of years after he retired. Um, and he was all about servant leadership. He, he intentionally went about designing a system of servant leadership, but front and center were, were the behaviors, uh, of his leaders. And, um, he put in a system of accountability, if you will, every year at a minimum, every one of his leaders and managers had to go through an evaluation process, performance evaluation, a big part of that was their behaviors. And they had clearly defined, I think, eight foundational behaviors, um, things like, um, uh, when your team has a failure and your team doesn’t perform, you will accept the responsibility for your team. And when your team has a success, you will give the credit for that success to your team. And every leader and manager was evaluated at least once a year. And it was done through a, a, um, a small number of subordinates wouldn’t he was a 360 degree evaluation essentially, but every leader was, was evaluated by a number of subordinates, a couple of peers and a couple of supervisors. And part of that was their behaviors. And if they didn’t perform, uh, actually the, the, the, the target was the engagement level of their team. Speaker 2 00:28:26 If their team didn’t reach certain thresholds on engagement, that leader would be evaluated not once a year, but twice a year. And they would be assigned a coach. So it wasn’t just a, you know, you’re, you’re a bad leader leave. They would be assigned a coach. And, um, you know, consequently, uh, their, uh, employee engagement scores were up in the 96th percentile against national standards. Um, but they took, they took behaviors extraordinarily seriously. And I found that almost every place I went, some place, some, somewhere, there is something that set up, you’re a leader in this organization. Here’s the behaviors we expect you to model. Speaker 3 00:29:10 Now, it would have been the behaviors of the CEO of the tech company that had led to the, uh, the difficult situation was, was that CEO able to adjust those behaviors or her behaviors, or was it a case where, um, that the person had to be replaced and you had to bring somebody new in, Speaker 2 00:29:33 You know, that’s a great question because, um, you know, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m talking to this guy, you know, through, through zoom, uh, again on a, on a phone conversation that we had. And then I took part in, um, uh, in a, in a three and a half hour, uh, training exercise that they went through just to observe. And I’m, I’m, I’m watching this guy, listen to this guy, I’m thinking you were, you created a toxic culture. You’re like the gentlest, kindest, most respectful guy I’ve ever met. Um, yeah, he was pretty was, he’s pretty blunt about the kind of person that he was prior to creating this tall, toxic culture. And, but he was smart enough to say, okay, uh, nobody, this, this issue is nobody’s fault, but my own and take an owning it. And, um, you know, he had to go, uh, I think he said eight months without a salary until the company got, uh, back on its foot. Speaker 2 00:30:39 Again, what he discovered. I think it was later, he discovered that his chief financial officer understanding what he was doing said, well, then all four go my salary as well. And other, you know, the salespeople said, you know, I’ll give up my bonus for the good of the company. And so, yeah, there is a triple effect or, uh, you know, that, that, that ripple effect, but, you know, that’s an organization, you know, 200 people downsize to a hundred people. How do you do that with a company of 10,000? That’s a whole different dynamic. You can’t rely on the, the demonstrated modeling of the CEO, if there’s just too many layers in between. And that’s where you have to think about leadership as a system and creating a system that will produce top to bottom, respect, relationship, uh, love grace, forgiveness, uh, team, family, you know, whatever you want that experience to be you, then you have to design really a system because it’s just, it’s just too big to rely on modeling. Speaker 3 00:32:00 And it does feel like a huge challenge, right? Because I know that it takes, in my experience, it takes at least 18 months to start having an, an ongoing impact on the culture, or to be able to see the result of some of the cultural work that you’re doing. You might get some results quicker, but overall, you know, a longer period of time, um, I’ve seen the approach of small pilot projects work well. Is that something that you would, you would advise companies to do as well? It’s like, okay, we’ve got these theories. They kind of look like they’re going to be right. And it’s the way we want to move, but that starts small and, and figure out what those behaviors look like. You know, that’s, I Speaker 2 00:32:40 Have struggled in my own consulting career. I, I have, I have gone back and forth on that, you know, start small, you know, pick the low hanging fruit, you know, et cetera. I’m not sure that that is the best way. I mean, it might be sort of, you know, um, you know, whatever’s the most appropriate to the organization. Um, so the, the hospital system that I, that I just referenced actually, um, where the CEO had intentionally, I think he’s one of the few few in the country that actually went out, knew that he was intentionally designing a new system of leadership. Um, when he started a rule it out, um, I asked, I said, what’s the, what was the re the response of your, of your senior leadership? He said, well, you kind of laugh. He said, well, half of them got up and walked out and you said the other half thought I would eventually get up and walk out. Speaker 2 00:33:39 Um, but I, I think that the biggest issue, and when I, when I did this with a healthcare client a few years ago, um, and this was a fairly small healthcare organization, it was like 600 employees. And I forget what their, what their annual revenues were. Um, uh, but they recognized, in fact, I’ll tell you quick story. Um, when I first sat down with them, I was with their three senior executives, CFO, COO, and C E O. And I said, okay, what do you want this system of leadership to produce? And we went back and forth and over and top, and came up with all kinds of ideas and had stuff up on the wall. And, and finally, um, Eileen, who is the COO. And she had been quiet the whole time. And I’d been around her, I’ve kind of read the body language. Finally. Speaker 2 00:34:38 I said, Eileen, what are you thinking? And she said, um, you know, we can’t produce the kind of experience for our patients until we’ve, our employees feel empowered to our employees, feel like they have the support and they ha they can take the initiative. They have the continents to make that extra phone call to ask that extra, extra question, to take that extra moment with a patient. And she said, it’s the same thing with our, with our patients. They have to feel a certain amount of empowerment. We don’t want to do, uh, do healthcare to them. We want to do healthcare with them. Same thing with our community. We are a community owned hospital. We serve at the pleasure of the community. And so they came up with this, this concept of empowerment, which is kind of a common word. It’s like, okay. Um, but then they went and then they defined that by some of the, by, uh, I think it was nine critical behaviors that every leader and manager would have to model to, to thoroughly build out that, that genetic DNA for the organization, what they, what the CEO did, which I thought was really, really smart. Speaker 2 00:36:00 He didn’t just say, this is now what we’re doing. He rolled it out in phases with their senior, uh, senior leadership first, and then the, the next level down, but giving everybody the opportunity for input. So it, wasn’t just a thing of Eric, the CEO, rolling out this new idea of how to do leadership, but it was the entire leadership team rolling it out. And it took, um, it took nine months just to develop the model and they’re still, and this would be now probably three years later, from what I hear, they’re still working through all the nuances. But one of the things that they recognized early on was that they had some leaders who would never be able to function and the kind of culture that they’re trying to create. And they had to be willing to say, that’s okay. We will bless them as they move on, we will help them move on if they want to, we’re not going to fire anybody. We will support them. We’ll, we’ll encourage them, but we recognize that there’s going to be some people who just won’t be able to function this way. And that’s okay. Because then they are able to replace them with people who, you know, one of the onboarding conversation was, this is how we do leadership in this organization. Is, does this fit with you? Right. Speaker 3 00:37:33 Right. And one of the things I love about your organizational DNA, uh, model, or, or even terminology is that this is not a cookie cutter that you put in place in every organization, right. Everybody’s DNA is a little bit different and it has to be, so you can take some concepts and you can reapply them, but you have to reapply the right ones in the right places with the right people, right. In order to be able to make it fit. And I love that idea around it be being DNA. And I’d heard this term a while back around being less of an organization, a more of an organism. And then as you become more of an organism, you start to function in a way that actually is, is very multifaceted. Um, yeah. So I just wanted to call out that, that idea about the organizational DNA being a little bit different, depending on who you’re working with and where you’re working. Speaker 2 00:38:24 Yeah, absolutely. Couldn’t agree more. In fact, uh, just to illustrate that point, one of the early people that I interviewed in the, in, in doing the research is a young man. He’s a brilliant, uh, civil engineer. He’s leading his company’s, uh, uh, entrance in using, um, virtual reality and the design and manufacturer really large public works construction projects. And, um, one day when he was about 33 34, they said, Oh, and by the way, you are now a leader, you are managing not just your team, but multiple teams across multiple disciplines across multiple markets. Yeah. And he had been identified by his company of 19,000 employees as, um, uh, as an emerging leader. And of course they sent, they gave him absolutely zero training, no coaching, you know, the typical sink or swim, you know, if you, if you swim great, if you sink well, sorry. And, um, and so he did all kinds of research, uh, about, um, what leadership was all about. He just sort of intuitively understood that leadership was different. So, uh, when I was having lunch with him and he said, Oh, I said, okay, so what’d you, what’d you conclude? He said, exact quote. I concluded from my research, remember this guy’s an engineer. I conclude from my research that leadership is fundamentally a relational enterprise. Speaker 2 00:39:54 So he went about developing relationships with his team, what a novel concept yet at the same time, one of the other organizations I looked at is a native American, um, uh, uh, healthcare organization that operates out of Anchorage, Alaska. They provide, uh, healthcare for 200 native American tribes in the sort of the South central part of Alaska. They stretch from the Canadian border to the Aleutian islands out way out in the, in the end of the end of the, um, North Pacific bearing sea. Um, and they focus everything on relationship and story because relationship and story is central to native American culture. Now they understand relationship different than my friend, Brian, the civil, the civil engineer, it’s the same basic concept, but they have adapted, you know, their individual leadership DNA. If you will, to what is appropriate for their particular organizations, the engineer did it the way you would think an engineer would native American healthcare organization does it in their particular way because it’s culturally appropriate. Speaker 4 00:41:15 That’s Daniel Edds. He’s the author of leveraging the genetics of leadership, cracking the code of sustainable team performance. Kevin Snook and I had a fantastic conversation with Dan that went on for well over an hour. And we’re going to share part two of that conversation next week. So I hope you’ll join us, then Make It Right. Is brought to you by Kevin Snook. He’s a manufacturing leadership advisor and author of the bestselling book, Make It Right – Five steps to align your manufacturing business from the frontline to the bottom line. I’m Janet Eastman. Keep in mind, you can find, make it right on Twitter and LinkedIn. And you can listen to the shows from iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and YouTube until next week. Thanks for listening to make it right, Speaker 0 00:41:59 Right.