Welcome everybody to The Upstream Leader. My name’s Jeremy Clopton. We have got a great conversation for you here today. We are going to be talking about culture, but we’re going to take it in a slightly different direction. I know many of you have heard me talk about culture over the years of the show and how important it is that leaders set the culture and top-down approaches to culture building. So I thought, you know what? Let’s take this from a different direction. What if we could actually build culture from the bottom up? So that’s what we’re going to do today. And for that, I have with me the co-founder of BetterCulture, Brett Hoogeveen. Brett, great to have you on the show.
Hey Jeremy, excited to be here.
I’m looking forward to this conversation because we do talk a lot about the leader’s responsibility in culture, so I’m excited to say, well, let’s flip it around a little bit and what can employees do to build the culture? But before we do, I’m going to start the show the same way that I start every show, and that is, how did you become the leader that you’re today?
That’s an easy question for me to answer. The leader that I am today is a hundred percent—almost—due to the fact of the influence of my father. My father had the opportunity to start a company over 30 years ago where he went all in on culture, and that company’s called QLI, it’s in the Omaha, Nebraska area. It’s now one of the largest non-hospital-based centers in the entire country that helps individuals rebuild lives after having a catastrophic injury, like a brain injury or a spinal cord injury. But when he was starting that company, he really didn’t know anything about starting a business. He didn’t know a lot about the industry he was getting into, which probably doesn’t sound like a recipe for success other than he decided, Look, he told his founding board of directors and he said, “Look, I’m just going to go all in on culture and I’m going to hope if I can build a fantastic culture, that culture will help me attract and build and keep people that have all the domain expertise, that know how to fundraise and know how to build amazing world-class facilities, that know how to deliver world-class rehabilitation and care, that know how to meet the state’s regulatory environment,” you know, all the stuff he didn’t know. He said, look, “I’m going to focus on culture and everything else will take care of itself.”
I had a chance to work with him at QLI for a decade and, and since we’ve been working with other organizations, but at that organization, QLI was recognized five times in a row as the number one best place to work in a really big metro area, and so he did a lot of things right. His leadership team did a lot of things right. And that’s what I try to help other organizations now learn what it takes to become really a world-class place to work.
Very good. That’s fascinating, to go all in on culture, not knowing the industry necessarily, but knowing that the people are going to be the key to success. I’m going to imagine that is a bit of the basis for BetterCulture and the fact that you’re focused on utilizing employees and an employee-led culture rather than, perhaps a dictated culture. Talk to me a little bit about that transition. How did you go from, hey, let’s run a great healthcare facility—if I recall correctly, your background is actually civil engineering, so you weren’t exactly—
Yeah. How’s that? Nicely connected, right?
—naturally going right into that and then jumping into, well actually let’s not do engineering or healthcare, but instead let’s go help people create amazing cultures. Talk to me a little bit about that jump.
Well, obviously it’s hard for me to keep my attention on one thing, but I was a math and science kind of kid. I like to think I had some personality as well, and some ability to go do some other more human-oriented things. But I just was good at math and science. And when you’re good at math and science, your high school advisors, they say, well, maybe look at engineering. And I didn’t know what else I wanted to do, so I said, sure. And it turns out, by the time I was a junior or senior and was starting to see what actually the career paths looked like for people that got into those science-oriented fields, it didn’t feel like a fit for me. So I struggled for a few years trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and I had a really hard time finding the right career. I couldn’t figure out what was the right career path for me. I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be civil engineering, but I looked at other things. I looked at financial services, business sales, just like a variety of things, and I couldn’t find the career path that was right for me.
And I can still remember I had lunch with a mentor, someone that I had been connected to, and they were just, I think, politely listening to me, sort of, “Oh, woe is me, I can’t figure out what I want to do.” And I think they had a confused look on their face considering they knew who my dad was and his focus on culture. And they leaned forward and they said, “Brett, maybe you should start thinking a little bit less about what career you want to have and think more about what kind of company you want to work for.” And I had never really considered things that way. Like, “Oh, you mean I could do a bunch of different things? If I work for the right company, I’ll love my job?” “Yeah, you will.” And that really ties into culture, right? And so since that moment, I’ve just never looked back on really realizing there’s a bazillion things I would love doing, but what really matters is the type of company, the type of manager I’m going to have, the type of team I’m going to be a part of, and if I figure that out, the job kind of takes care of itself.
Absolutely. When you’re talking about looking for that company, the company you want to work for, to me that kind of indicates that they’ve already got a great culture and that that’s likely the result of leadership. And you said that your dad at QLI was focused on culture. So before we get into the employee-led side, what do you view as a leader’s role on creating culture? Because I know you have the employee-led kind of the focus, at BetterCulture is, is the bottom-up approach. But before we get there, what’s a leader’s responsibility in creating culture?
So, for the last 15 years, we have been working with organizations that want to have better workplace culture, that want to be able to attract and keep people. And for 12 of those 15 years, the only answer we had was top-down—it was leadership development, it was having the right mindset. And so we believe in seven really clear principles of leadership that I could do quickly if you want to go in that direction from a leader’s perspective.
Absolutely.
Good. Okay, so there’s an amazing story to where these sort of came from. But when my father was starting QLI, he had a chance to go on a tour. He was really fundraising. It was a nonprofit organization, but to interview amazingly successful business people that he was trying to raise money from, but he asked them for some business advice too. And out of those meetings, created what became known as BetterCulture’s Seven Principles of Leadership, and for the most part, becoming Best Place to Work year after year after year was attributed to these seven really clear principles that leaders were held accountable to.
Those are things like Principle One, “Always be focused on mission, culture, and excellence.” Principle Two—this is a little unique to us—“A leader’s job is to help make sure that their employees feel proud of their company and know that their company’s proud of them.” So saying no, it is a leader’s job to communicate in a way that you’re building pride intentionally on a regular basis. And that’s something that gets left out of a lot of leadership development programs. Do you want me to go through all seven? What do you want to do here?
Happy to, yeah, I’d love to hear what the other five are now—I’m curious.
Yeah, so Principle Three is all about growth. It says “It’s a leader’s job to help employees be successful, both at work and in life.” So not just professional growth and development, but really taking a whole interest in your people and helping them be successful as a whole person. That really flows through to how an employee feels about their business. Principle Four says, “It’s a leader’s job to protect the right of good employees to work with other good employees.” That if you’re not holding people to reasonable standards, dealing with toxic personalities, making sure that there’s a minimum threshold, if you don’t do that, that’s one of the easiest things to ruin a culture, honestly, is to tolerate people who are bucking it.
The fifth one is about decision making and communication—it’s a little lengthy, I’m not going to give you the word for word, but make good decisions and communicate effectively around decisions, get input, etc. The sixth one says you have to deal effectively with conflict and realize conflict’s not a bad thing, it’s a necessary thing, and sometimes a good thing. The last one says, “People should enjoy their work.” How can we make work more fun? And if leaders will do those seven things, if they can develop a mindset that sees the world that way, that says, that’s your job is culture, pride, growth, standards, decisions, conflict and fun, that all of a sudden you’ll see things to do as a leader that you wouldn’t otherwise see or do.
Absolutely love that. And what it does, in my view, is it makes it really clear, leaders have huge responsibility in culture. And I’m with you. I see the top-down, we talk about top-down leadership as well, and before we get into the employee side, I just wanted to make sure that we did address, so any leader that’s listening, when they hear it’s employee-led, it’s employee-led. Full stop right here: That doesn’t mean you’re off the hook.
No!
What it means is we’re going to talk about how employees can play a role, but you’ve got seven really key, important principles here that you’ve got to do as well, because, at the end of the day, when I think about leadership and I think about culture and all of that, and I hear people complaining about someone within a firm or an organization and, oh, they’re just hurting (us), they’re not doing this, or they’re not doing that. I always want to point out there’s one of two people at fault. Maybe it’s a combination of these two, but it’s either them or it’s us. They’re either the wrong person or we’re not leading them effectively. We’ve got to figure out where is it at there. So I want leaders to understand: you’ve got a lot of responsibility here, even though for the rest of the podcast, we’re going to shift gears and we’re going to talk about what can employees do to lead culture.
Because I like the idea of finding a place that you want to be. Finding the right company. But what really excites me, Brett, is the idea that someone can create the company that they want to be at from within. They don’t have to necessarily wait for the leaders to create the culture. I think sometimes leaders would like employees to take more of an ownership in creating the culture. So you all have 20 tenets of culture, and as I look at those, they’re behaviors, they are attitudes that employees need to embrace. Those that are familiar with Upstream, when you look at these, and Brett’s got a great resource for you, we’ll talk about later, you’re going to see what I would describe as 20 things that make you high yield, low maintenance. Because some of these are going to be yield-based, and some of these, “don’t be high maintenance.” And that’s what a lot of these behaviors do, so, ease me into these tenets a little bit here, Brett. How can an employee drive culture if leadership isn’t driving it necessarily? Maybe they’re taking more of a laissez-faire type of an approach. How does an employee drive culture?
Well, I love the way you teed that up, that leaders aren’t off the hook, right? Leaders play an outsized role in building culture. There’s no way to get around that. But a lot of leaders, you only have so much time in the day, right? And so what we asked ourselves is we said, even our best clients, even the organizations we’ve integrated most deeply with, we only get to train or work with maybe 15% of their employees, you know, the leaders in that organization. And we asked ourselves the question, well, how else could we help? What would it look like to empower every employee to be more accountable for creating a healthy culture, and to share some of that responsibility with leadership and to say exactly what you said, which is if you want this to be a better place to work, here’s how you could help, right? Here’s what you could do.
So we set out on a journey from a research perspective to figure out what were the attitudes—I love the words you used—what are the attitudes and the behaviors that would describe a star employee, a fantastic culture fit in any industry, any organization? Across all of our best clients, we asked, describe a star for me. Go beyond your core values just a little bit. Give me the attitudes and the behaviors that if you see someone that does these kinds of things consistently, you say, thank goodness they work here. Describe what types of attitudes and behaviors you love to see. And they talked and we made notes and we made this into a pretty big project where we probably started with 80 or a hundred attitudes and behaviors, and we thought we were going to get it narrowed down a little further than 20, but we had to stop about there because what we were finding was research that said if people will do these things, of course it’ll build healthier teams and cultures—that’s what we started with. The cool thing is we kept finding parallel research that says if someone will do these 20 tenets, we call them, and I’ll share some of them in a minute, not only would they be contributing to team health and cultural health, they’d be contributing to their own success and happiness.
So we found that, so for instance, tenet number one says, “Be coachable.” Understand that feedback is a gift. Ask for feedback, ask for growth. Look for ways to grow and change consistently. Now, most managers would say, yeah, I love having people that take feedback well, you know, or that are coachable. It’s one of the top things we hear in what organizations are wanting in new hires, new employees. We want people that are open to growth, people who are coachable. But what’s really interesting when you look at research on—forget work, forget culture—if you show me someone in life who’s coachable, who’s always learning and growing and reading something interesting, or developing or appreciates feedback from people, those are people who are going to be in the 90th percentile of career success and happiness. They’re much more likely to learn new skills, to find new opportunities, and it compounds over time. If you’re someone that’s coachable, well, you’re kind of with everybody else when you’re 20 years old, but when you’re 50 years old, you’re like a mile ahead of the competition of everyone else, because you’ve been learning and growing for 30 years, you’re coachable, right? And so those people tend to be way more successful, way more happy. So what we stumbled onto with these 20 tenets is it started as a culture program and it’s kind of ended up in a personal development program as well, where if employees can do these 20 things, it’s good for the culture and the team, but it’s also good for them. And that motivates people to say, actually I want to do these things because it’s good for me and my company.
Well, and I look at those 20 things and to me what jumps out is that just makes you a good person. Like that’s somebody that people just generally want to be around. You’re going to be just a good human being. And I’m wondering, do you think we overcomplicate culture sometimes? And somebody’s going to say, “Jeremy, I mean, he’s got 20 tenets. Isn’t that overcomplicating?” But when I look at these 20 things, these are like just be a good human being things. They’re not, you know, overcomplicated. Do you think sometimes we just try to make it way too difficult on culture, and get so deep into it that when I look at these 20 things, it’s actually no, that’s just kind of being a good person?
The short answer is yes. We dramatically overcomplicate it. One of the biggest compliments that we get about the work that we do at BetterCulture, and it doesn’t feel like a compliment, is people will say, “Oh yeah, BetterCulture, what they do is just such common sense.” And when you’d kind of like your content to be described as profound or earth-shattering or one of a kind or something, when you dig under the level a little bit, it’s because we work really hard to say, don’t overcomplicate this, like if you can get your employees to show up and be coachable, to be helpful, to assume positive intent, to know how to have friendly disagreement, to be upbeat. Like one of the terms we’ve been using lately is these really are core human competencies. It’s the types of things that every parent hopes that their kid is learning growing up to be a, just a good human, like you said, which is why our content is actually resonating in high schools and in colleges and universities, because employers are saying, this is what we want in a finished product, when you come into the professional world, and so some of these types of organizations are saying, huh, we’re not doing a lot to build these social skills, professional skills through our curriculums. Huh, tell me more.
Yeah. So it really is, what I’m getting from this conversation is to create a great culture, an employee-led culture, you really need to get employees that are committed to becoming better versions of themselves, and if everybody’s committed to becoming just a better human being, you’re going to have a great culture. You may have then the quirks and everything, right, that are company specific and in our industry, firm specific. But is it fair to say that these 20 tenets, every group of people—I’m not even going to say organization—every group of people would be made better if these 20 tenets were adhered to? I don’t know if that’s the right word, adhered to, seems so restrictive, but followed.
Yeah. So adhered to, I’ll give you the way I would think about that. The answer to your question is yes, it would be good for every group, and the reason is, is not because I want them to be adhered to, but I kind of want them to be aspired to.
Ooh, I like it.
I want people to say, “I know I’m not perfect. There’s no one I know that does all 20 of these things perfectly all the time.” But if the goal is to say, “You know what? There’s a few things on here that I know I could be better at and it would be good for me and it would be good for my team, I want to work on it.” The goal is when there’s this mindset of continuous improvement of self-development, of team development, that’s how you build a better culture, is, everybody’s got to be working on something. And if I could, something you said a little bit ago, I want to go slightly deeper on: We don’t tell our clients “You made it too simple.” We want to keep it simple, but not quite as simple as you said. You said if everyone could just be a good human, like I like the direction that makes sense. The way we say it is, it’s really two steps to building a bottom-up culture. Step one is, know in detail the culture you want, and that’s attitudes and behaviors. And we’d encourage people to use our 20 tenets. Like it’s a darn good recipe for the culture. I promise you’d love it. If you do more of these things, you’d love it. But if you have great behavioral, descriptive, core values, awesome. Those are great. But be clear, describe the culture. Know what you want. That’s step one. And a lot of companies, even if they have core values, they’re not all the way there on really having a clear picture of what they really, really want from a culture. And then step two is do something to influence it. Do something to help people grow into that aspirational view of culture. And that’s really all it takes is two steps: Know the culture you want and then do something consistently to influence it.
Something I think could be really helpful for leaders that are listening into this would be to take the 20 tenets, as I look at them, they immediately jump out to me as if I were going to come up with the culture that I aspire to. I agree, I think these 20 are a very great starting point and a firm or a company may then say, well, we’re going to add five or 10 that are unique to us.
Yes.
And I know somebody’s probably thinking good gracious, 25 or 30 behaviors, Jeremy what are you doing to us here? I want your thoughts on this, and I think I know the answer, but I want to hear it from you: Let’s say they add five or 10 of their own to make it really unique. 20 is the foundation, five or 10 that differentiate their culture from other cultures. So now they’ve got, let’s go with 30. Do I put all 30 up every single day and say, “Hey, we’re all aspiring to all 30 of these, keep all of them in mind,” or do I pick one or two to try to get better at each month? How do you help somebody aspire to all of these when it may feel like I’m still trying what number 17 is, how do I work on all of them at the same time? Should they, or should they actually, instead of working on all of them, narrow it down and pick an area to focus in each month.
So there are two ways that organizations tend to use our 20 tenets. And method number one is, I’ll use a simple one first—this is less common, but it’s the simplest. They really don’t have a great set of core values that they’re wedded to. They know they should be doing something related to culture, but they’re not doing a lot already. And so all of a sudden they say, oh, your 20 are perfect, let’s just go. Let’s just take what you’ve built, we can use these, it’s a universal description of a great employee and it takes them from essentially zero to like 80 overnight. And we have prebuilt content that maps to these, and so it’s the type of organization, typically a little smaller type of company that knows they should be doing something and they don’t have a lot of internal resources around culture and leadership development, we can make their life so easy by just saying, here, it’s plug and play. Take it and go, you’re a light year ahead already. So that’s number one.
Number two, which is probably a little more common, is there’s an organization that’s put some good work into what their culture is already, right? And so they have core values, they have things that they’re already doing that are important to who they are. And in that case, what I would suggest is those core values, you said an extra five or 10, I would suggest, let’s say you have five core values. That’s your tier one culture description. Like your core values are still you. Our 20 tenets will map to those, I promise you, like 80%, right? There’ll be a few things that are very unique to you that isn’t in our 20 tenets, and there’ll be a few things in our 20 tenets that aren’t related to your core values. But overall what they do is they say, “Look, our core values matter more than ever, and we’re bringing on these 20 tenets as resources to bring life, to go deeper into our core values, to sort of operationalize them.” And so in that case, you can deprioritize some of ours, you can emphasize some of ours, you can use ours as a responsive toolkit to help you bring your own sort of unique core values to life. And so those organizations, they use our 20 tenets, but they don’t forget who they really are and what their core values are. And they use them just to make it easy to reinforce what they’ve already built.
And do you recommend that they address all of the tenets or core values at the same time? Or do they take more of a stairstepped approach that we’re going to provide education on a regular basis about what’s important to us? But we’re going to have areas of focus, maybe monthly, quarterly, whatever it might be. Or is it a no, it’s all of them. All the time, and you just have to figure it out.
No, not all the time. A little bit at a time. Definitely a little bit at a time. And you know, so a couple answers to that. We built our 20 tenets, there’s a software that goes along with them. So if you run the software product, the way that works is people take a pre-test, they rate themselves, and then everybody picks two that they want to work on over the course of a year. And then every two weeks we auto-drip content to the whole company or a team or however many licenses you buy. But it’s an easy way—you mentioned early on: “high yield, low maintenance.” And that’s exactly what we’ve tried to build 20 tenets to do. If you want to put culture on autopilot, there’s an onboarding process for all your employees, and then every two weeks over the course of the year, we send the same content to the whole company to make it easy to have conversations about one of these 20 tenets. And then quarterly throughout the year, we nudge everyone to work on the two things you said you wanted to work on. And so everyone’s got two things they’re working on and the whole company just gets content dripped over the course of a year, just one thing every two weeks.
What happens is some of them, the company says, ah, this one’s not that important to us. And, but when something is really important, then senior leadership sends an extra message. They tell a story, they run an all staff, they do something. And so you can customize on top of our base platform. But the big thing that I want people to hear, regardless of if you’re using our system or others, is if you’re not doing something little, consistently, to influence culture, you’re not going to see progress. And so that consistency is the most important thing. So one thing at a time with consistency is the biggest way to move the needle on culture.
Okay. And a couple other things that you said there that I want to make sure that everybody heard. First, there’s an assessment. So in order to improve culture, you first have to know where your culture is, and that’s something that is so critically important. One of the methods that we use, and we’ve had some articles on this and folks have heard me talk about it before, we call it the all rid metric, which is on a scale of one to 10, how much do you look forward to Monday morning? And it’s because our founder, his favorite day of the week was Monday. He loved Mondays, which I always found amazing, because I know a lot of people that don’t necessarily love Mondays, but he loved Mondays. So, you know, he’s since retired and we have that metric, which is, it’s a pretty simple way to look at it. What’s your viewpoint of going back to work on Monday morning? And if you’re dreading it, that’s not great.
It’s a fantastic metric, Jeremy. I love it.
Yeah, love the simplicity. So you’ve got to have a base of where it’s at and then the other two pieces there that you mentioned, and I want to make sure that everybody caught. So once you’ve assessed it first, everybody was committing at an individual level of something they want to improve. That is super important because that is individual action, and individual action is required to create culture. You can’t have a culture—well, you can have a culture by accident, it won’t be what you want. To create the culture you want. It’s got to be intentional. That commitment is helpful. And then the other is that ongoing education, and I love the consistency in education. So often, we stop talking about culture or we don’t talk about it. We never begin perhaps talking about culture because we think, “Oh, well it’s, it’s just going to happen.” again. It could, but if you want a certain culture, you’ve got to talk about it. You’ve got to keep it top of mind for employees, and that doesn’t mean tons of social events and all of that. Like you said, it’s dripped content, it’s consistency. It’s, let’s always make sure our employees know what we view as important to culture.
On the 20 tenets—go ahead.
Well, yeah, I just, I guess I want to just reinforce what you said, and I guess, I think when we started talking about employee-led cultures and bottom-up cultures, I don’t know if I ever appropriately said that, you know what that really means is every employee knows what they could do to show up just a little bit better for the team consistently over time, and that’s what it means to have an employee-led culture. It’s like, yes, leadership top-down, that’s all really important. But is everybody on the team have a growth goal too? And if then if you support that growth, you make it safe, you give people something to actually do to change their behavior, that’s how you build a bottom-up culture.
So regardless of, you know, our content makes that easy, but any organization can do that if you just answer the question of do your employees have any growth goals on their behavior, something related to your own core values? And most companies are like, “No. I mean, we do sometimes evaluate people on it at the end of the year, but we don’t do anything to say, okay, 12 months from now, are they going to be better at your core values?” And if you’re not saying yes to that right, then you don’t really have a plan to make your culture better. You know what I mean?
And we keep using the word employees. So my question is, executives, leaders, partners, and accounting firms, who are the owners that are also working in the business? Do they have to follow these same things? Do they have to have a growth goal as well?
Yeah. You know, the cool thing about the 20 tenets is they’re for everybody. And you know, you mentioned earlier, not just businesses. We have a volleyball team. They came in national runner-up in the NAIA level of volleyball just this last year, and the coach uses our stuff. Like, she says, “Look, we have to build culture on this team and we have to get our players, you know, connected to each other and building this strong, healthy culture,” and all the stuff that they’re running into on their team that’s causing challenge or dysfunction, she’s like, “It’s all culture.” And she saw our 20 tenets and she’s like, “This is what I need.” And we were surprised. We were like, really? It’s the same on a volleyball team? And she said, “Oh my gosh, this is the best culture content I’ve ever seen for sports.” And we’re like, what? You know? So it’s very universal. I regularly tell people, you know, this is what people would love to see from a good neighbor. Or someone on a volunteer group. Like if you show up with these things, you’ll be noticed and people will appreciate it.
Absolutely. Well, as you say that I can, I can see, as many of the listeners know, I coach one of my daughter’s softball teams currently, and all three of my girls play, so definitely something I’m going to be passing along in talking about some of these. They’re a little younger, 11 and 12, 13 year olds, so, you know, maybe a little bit different, but never too early to encourage this. Well, Brett, I’ve got one more question for you as we wrap up the podcast, but before we do that, you’ve put together a resource page for listeners. Talk a little bit about that and what they can do to get in contact with you if they want to talk more.
Sure. So a couple months back we put together—because people don’t really understand what these 20 tenets are, regardless of sort of how much I try to explain. And so the best way to learn more, we put together a free resource, it’s a really nice premium-level resource. All of the tools and stuff that’s inside of our full enterprise product, we stripped out all of those cool premium tools for two of the 20 tenets. And what it essentially is, is if you’re a manager or if you’re even just someone on a team that wants to help invest in people and culture, it’s sort of a pre-built, it’s like two amazing team-building workshops with all this, all the, you know, videos and assessments and discussions and activities and cool stuff, and it’s called Our Culture Kickstarter Pack. It’s a hundred percent free if you’ll go to BetterCulture.com/UpstreamLeader, we’ve put that on a special page just for your podcast listeners, and so hopefully that’ll be in the show notes, but otherwise, it’s BetterCulture.com/UpstreamLeader.
Thank you so much, Brett. Yeah, we will definitely put that in there. We’ll also put contact information for you so I can connect with you on LinkedIn to reach out to you as well. Let me ask you one question before we conclude—this is my new, as everybody knows, I start the show the same way and in our second hundred episodes, I’m looking to end the show the same way we started off talking about how you became the leader that you are today. I’m curious, who is it that you are working to become as an individual, as you move forward every day?
Yeah, that’s a good question. I have become heavily a believer—you know, I only shared one of the tenets at any deep level today, and it’s “coachable.” And it’s number one for a reason. It’s number one because if you’re anyone in life and you want to be better, you know, tomorrow or the day after or the day after, you’ve got to embrace growth, learning new ideas, new perspectives, etc. For me, I consume a lot of content and I learn a lot of things, but I’m not as good as I should be at putting those things into motion. Applying them, trying them. And so for me, that’s my number one. I don’t know if I can describe the leader I want, but if you think about these 20 tenets or the seven principles or a lot of other great stuff that’s out there, my goal is to become less of an academic and more of a practitioner. More of somebody who is increasingly doing the behaviors that we’re talking about. And I do okay, but if I want to be successful, the goal is to do more. So I guess that’s my answer, is to be someone who is pushing these things out into the world to really impact others on a bigger and bigger level.
I love that, Brett. Thank you so much for that. And thank you for everything that you’ve shared and a great resource for our listeners. I really enjoyed having you on the show and perhaps we’ll talk again soon.
Yes, fantastic. Thanks for having me.
