Ep 75 Mike Kaeding

Mike Kaeding is the CEO of Norhart. Norhart designs, builds, and rents apartments. They are transforming the way apartments are built and managed by incorporating technologies and efficiencies that have revolutionized other industries and led to high-quality, cost-effective projects. Mike’s parents started their family business. But just a few years after joining the business, Mike’s father unexpectedly passed away. Suddenly, Mike had what felt like the weight of the world on his shoulders. He had to lead this business with no preconceived notion of "the way things are done" in this industry. He was struggling to the point where the city briefly shut him down. This shattered his world. Norhart just naively started to solve problems after that incident. And that led to magic. 

Norhart began changing the way construction is done. Starting with an attractive culture unique to the construction industry, they hired the best talent. Together Norhart solved chronic construction inefficiencies, applied techniques from manufacturing, and integrated traditionally unaffiliated trades. This resulted in higher quality and lower cost projects. Norhart’s mission is to solve America’s housing shortage by transforming the way apartments are built and managed. And in doing so we will improve the way we all live.

Connect with Mike Kaeding:
Website: https://www.norhart.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikekaeding/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/norhart
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Norhart
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikekaeding
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/norhartlife/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/norhart

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

You're listening to the Tells the Leadership podcast. This podcast is for leaders at any phase on their leadership journey to become a more purposeful and accountable leader what I like to call a pal. Join me on our journey together towards transformational leadership. Welcome back to Tells the Leadership podcast. I am your host, josh McMillian, an active duty Army officer and the founder of McMillian Leadership Coaching, and I am on a mission to create a better leader what I like to call a purposeful, accountable leader or a pal and I'm planning to do that by sharing transformational stories and skills. Today, I'm going to be sharing a transformational leader story Mike Cating.

Speaker 1: 0:46

Mike is the CEO of Norhart. Norhart designs, builds and rents apartments. They are transforming the way apartments are built and managed by incorporating new, revolutionizing ways to build, ultimately being able to create a higher quality product at a more cost effective approach for the user or us, the ones who actually buy it. Mike's parents started this family business, which is truly incredible. But just a few years after Mike joined the business, his father unexpectedly passed away and he found himself figuring out how to be a leader without having any past experience to do this, and he really goes through this entire episode being able to share those common leadership attributes that he was able to apply to grow this business into a billion dollar organization, which is truly inspiring. Ultimately, mike was able to turn things around by creating an attractive culture that is unique to the construction industry, and he did that by hiring the right people.

Speaker 1: 2:03

Mike's mission is to solve America's housing shortage by transforming the way apartments are built and managed, and in doing so, he's going to improve the quality of life for everyone in America, and I mean this when I say it. Mike is a purposeful, accountable leader. Let's bring him on the show, Mike. Welcome to the Tales of Leadership podcast, brother. How are you doing?

Speaker 2: 2:29

Doing well. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Speaker 1: 2:31

Yeah, I always love and I say it every time but the opportunity to bring on leaders especially have different backgrounds and passions of me, but we all center around the same thing is leadership and just having a conversation about it, and my wife jokes that I spend more time doing podcasting than I do other things, but it is truly a passion of mine. So I'm excited to have you and I think a great place to start is just have you define who you are to our listeners is a good framing point.

Speaker 2: 3:02

Yeah, so I'm CEO of a company called Norhart. We design, build and rent apartments, but we're focused really on driving down the cost of housing. We're already achieving about a 20 to 30% reduction. We believe we can achieve a 50% reduction. But imagine what that means. I mean. Someday your rent could be half we are mortgage payment could be half, and so for me, deep down, I've always wanted to make a meaningful, positive impact in the world in some way. For me in my life that's my dream is to work to solve housing affordability.

Speaker 1: 3:41

I love that and I'm excited for it, and I need you to do that because I'm getting ready to move to the DC area and the cost of living there it's just absolutely astounding. I would love to kind of start off and I always ask this question, but it's so interesting to me of me just being a steward of leadership of how do you define leadership and how has that changed kind of over the years for you?

Speaker 2: 4:08

Yeah, you know, I think at its core for me at least it's about inspiring and equipping people to live at their full potential. There's a notion which I think a lot about is you want to identify a person's genius and you want to get them in a spot and a role in a place and a culture that can maximize their potential in that genius that they have. But I started out and I really knew nothing about leadership. In fact, I remember in college being invited to talk a little bit about my experience in leadership because I'd done some things prior to that and I kind of looked back and a little bit embarrassed because I had no idea. It was like, well, I just do stuff and people follow and we just kind of make it happen. There's so much more to the world of leadership than just doing something, and so it's very much evolved for me throughout the years.

Speaker 1: 5:01

I love how you talked about inspire, because to me that's that is the one word that I believe that a leader does. They inspire people to do more, dream more, become more. And then you also talked about equipping, because you can't just hire the right person for the team and then not equip them with the tools to be successful. But then you also talked about the whole cycle. You have to hire first the right person, then equip them and then continue to inspire them along the way. And that's where I think how you define it the magic begins.

Speaker 2: 5:36

Yeah, and I love how you start with that hire. You know, one of the most important lessons I've ever learned is that you need to focus on finding the very best people, and when I say best, I literally mean the best. We fly people in from other states to come work during the week and fly them home. One of our employees, steve Jobs, announces the iPhone in 2007. Steve Jobs walks off that stage and following that presentation is our employee who followed Steve Jobs on that stage. That's the kind of caliber of people you need and what I've learned is that caliber of people. They change things, they make things possible that you didn't realize could actually happen. And a lot of people think, well, that's expensive. Well, on a per person basis, it is. But what most people fail to understand is that the best people outperform the average by two to five to 10 times as much.

Speaker 2: 6:33

So, on a per person basis or per unit produced basis. They're actually the most inexpensive inexpensive people you can have on your team. And once we made that change within our company, we went from growing at like 10% per year to doubling in size every year.

Speaker 1: 6:49

That's incredible and kind of brings me to and I wrote this down is the why do you want the best people on your team? If your why is big enough, passion, your purpose is big enough and clearly defined, that's why you want the best people on your team, because if you have those people, they can magnify your ability to extend your influence and success. And then you just basically beautifully sum that up too and I want to kind of make sure listeners understand and to easy to identify as the parental principle that you know, 80% of the people in an organization produce 80, or 20% of the people produce 80% of the results. So if you hire that right 20% people already, where you're going to get 80% of the results, and why just hire normal people that won't be able to achieve those results you need? You got to hire right, train them, and then they're going to get you all those results and at the end of the day it'll it'll just grow your ability to extend your influence and whatever sphere that you're wanting to take on.

Speaker 2: 7:53

Absolutely. I could not agree with that more.

Speaker 1: 7:56

So I would love to really dig into your leadership journey and, and really, where, where did that begin? Was that breaking off and going to the University of Minnesota? I think you got a BA in computer science. I got a BA in criminal justice. So we, we took two different paths.

Speaker 2: 8:15

Yeah, I got a BS in computer science, bachelor of science, but my leadership journey actually started in junior high school. I was really passionate about special effects and we ended up getting a studio. We had blue screens we've created like ships, like a whole, like ship in the stage. All in junior high we had no idea what we were doing. We would come and study like visual aspects and like 3D animation and stuff the night before and the next morning we have all these junior high students in with us as we're trying to teach them how to run this effects. It was very it was very enlightening of an experience, but from a managerial or leadership standpoint, I really I had no experience. I didn't know what I was doing in that regard, but we did some pretty cool stuff, creating some pretty amazing effects that led through going into the school.

Speaker 1: 9:12

Kind of moving beyond that. You know, after, I think, you got your your bachelor's in science, you were able to be a part of your family organization, your family business, working in that space. What were some of the challenges that you had to go through?

Speaker 2: 9:32

Yeah, so my, the business that we run down was originally started by my parents and I grew up with that right. I lived, we'd build buildings during the summer, I would go to school in the winter and then went after college, and I wanted nothing to do with the family business.

Speaker 1: 9:50

That's how it always is.

Speaker 2: 9:51

Yeah, and I didn't want that because I didn't want people to think it was given to me, right, I wanted to make my own way in the world. But what I realized was that, deep down, I really wanted to make some kind of meaningful, positive impact on the world. And so why not take this starting point of my it was a small business at the time, small family business and expand and grow that? And so I got past my own ego and that and realized who cares what people think If I can make the impact? That's what I want to do, and I think there's a lesson in there which is, as great leaders as don't have an ego, right, be very open to feedback, insight and hearing what others have to say which I could dive more into.

Speaker 2: 10:35

But then, after I jumped in the business, my parents, or my dad, unexpectedly passed away. Yeah, and overnight here I am running the small business, and at the time we were building up an apartment building and the city then shut us down. It shut me down twice actually, and they looked at me and said dude, you're some pipsqueak kid, you don't know what you're doing. You're in over your head. You need to hire real management, right? So we raced to find someone.

Speaker 2: 11:04

That was a bit of a disaster.

Speaker 2: 11:05

But toward the end of that project, a few weeks before we were supposed to open, there was a water main that was 15 feet in the ground, thousands of feet long, where we had a pinhole leak somewhere in that water main. Wow, and yeah, I was out there in my nice clothes in the mud digging around helping find this leak. We eventually found it and then, just a few days before opening, the city staff came in and said Mike, there's no way you guys aren't opening this building. And we ended up working through the night, multiple nights, and then the last day, about half a dozen inspectors, half day inspection. They looked at every nook and cranny of that building and at the end the head building official pulled me aside and said Mike, I know we were hard on you, but this is the best project that we've opened in the city. And it's like that moment, for me at least, was the first moment of like I maybe can actually do this right, gaining a little bit of confidence in myself that we can actually do what we're sitting on to accomplish.

Speaker 1: 12:10

That was your moment of where you kind of broke through that imposter syndrome of who am I, as this young kid to lead my father's business, and I can only imagine how tough that would be to lose your father. Kind of like you're, I always call accountability tree someone who's deeply rooted, that you can lean on, that it provides shade but also kind of pushes you to be more, do more, become more, and then that accountability tool, tree person, is gone and then you're. You're having to go through those challenges and struggles all by yourself and what really helped you transition from working on the business with your father to becoming the leader and having to create that vision to move it to the next level.

Speaker 2: 12:59

You know, I think for me, the fact that, like all of my life, I've wanted to make a meaningful, positive impact has really driven me. So, even before my dad passed away, I thought I started thinking a lot about this and how, how could we have that kind of impact? And so I don't know if there was a magical moment, but I fear. Well, there was one magical moment. I'll show this story. I remember sitting down with a leader much more experienced than me at the time and he, he sat with me across the table at lunch and I was so thankful he was willing to take time to talk to me, and he asked me a simple question. He said dude, mike, what is your mission? At least the way he defined mission.

Speaker 2: 13:41

I said, well, or so he asked me what is what the purpose was of organization? I said, well, we build apartments. It's like, mike, no, that's not your purpose. What are you talking about? It's like that's your mission, that's what you do. We can talk about that in a bit, but before you even get there, we need to know your purpose or your. Why Don't have a? Why? I don't know what that looks like, right? So that really made me start to think okay, what is that? Why for us? And it takes time to deeply understand that, but eventually we came to the understanding. It's about solving housing affordability and creating a better way for people to live.

Speaker 1: 14:21

That's a great point, because with me I had to start with with my why of going through this whole leadership journey.

Speaker 1: 14:29

Why am I going to spend time away from my family when I already work super crazy hours and military? And it took me a while to bound that down. I'll be honest with you. It took me about two years to really to really narrow it down and find the pain points in my life that I could turn into purpose and passion. But how did you work through that and bound down your why to Galvanize your mission that you're on right now? Because that I truly believe that that is like one of the most critical things, especially in strategic level leadership or being casting a vision is that you have to get your why right, because that is the genesis of where everything starts and if that is off kilter the mission statement is off kilter well, then everyone's going to be working down the wrong path, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2: 15:20

Exactly. I could not agree with you more on that. You know, what's interesting is it's not only about defining the why right, which I think is critical but it's a why that you truly believe in, that it's like in your core. Because unless you deeply have the mindset of that, why really ingrained to your depth, others notice and and You'll never create the kind of culture you want unless it's at your core. And so Part of the journey is your own transformation. Right, because you need to understand what that it looks like. But I think a key part of it, for me at least, was being comfortable in being uncomfortable and realizing that I there's this tension here, I've got to figure it out, and Bouncing ideas off of others.

Speaker 2: 16:05

I remember when, as we were trying to figure out that why, like, maybe I would talk to people, I would be on podcast, I would be in different kinds of scenarios and I'd be testing things out and seeing what resonated. Is this, is this actually Connecting? Is this actually solving a worldwide problem? And I went through a ton of stuff trying to figure out what that looks like for us, but it takes time, but once, once, I finally started to get it. It's like when I started talking about solving housing affordability, you could see the lights like open up in people's eyes and like, dude, you're onto something. You're gonna change my world if you can solve that problem, and that's that's when it really started to resonate with me.

Speaker 1: 16:45

Yeah, I think. Until you find your why it, the best analogy that I always like to think of is that you're in a dark room.

Speaker 1: 16:53

Yeah, and until you're able to find your why, which is that light switch, you really are just operating kind of with a flashlight, you can't see everything, but the moment that you find your why, it's so Bright that anyone that you're around it just becomes an infectious. That you learn. And I always go back to a rule that I read about and I heard from a good friend of mine, jerry St Pierre. He's a chaplain in the Air Force and he talks about the rule of three H's head, heart, hand alignment and it's a cycle that I've seen through anything. You can apply it to almost any area, it doesn't matter what your profession is, but it all starts with the head.

Speaker 1: 17:36

We have to be able to see it, we have to be able to know where we're going and then, once we have that, we have to create the heart alignment emotional, invested. You have to be emotionally invested to that and Then, once you can see it and once you feel it and you have that burning desire to go do it, you have to put your hands into it and then, once you do it, you start it. Now you have accountability or buy-in, and that just needs to be replicated with everyone within your organization. And I think the why is is getting the head in the game, but the why is also so deeply passionate that you have that emotional connection and I think, with you being a family business, having your father pass away, you knew, and I already kind of see a theme here is that you had some areas that you you knew you weren't an expert in and and you were able to go seek advice and mentorship from people and then start asking questions from people of like how do I do this, how do I do that?

Speaker 1: 18:37

And I'll tell you. Like that happened to me is and it still happens to me every day. When I was a brand-new Lieutenant, especially in Afghanistan, I had no clue what I was doing. But, great leaders let go of their egos and they're able to ask powerful questions, and then, through those powerful questions, you can make powerful, decisive decisions. I love that and I wanted to make sure I go back and state that, because that that was. That was beautifully said.

Speaker 2: 19:04

Man, yeah, I, I can do great more with that if you, if you think you know everything, you're not gonna know much at all.

Speaker 2: 19:13

But, one of the most important things I learned early on is how little I truly know. But once you, once you are honest with that, it's incredibly freeing, because now we actually fly in some of the world experts at different niches and We'll be a part of different masterclasses and in a variety of trainings. I learn as much as I can from people far smarter than me and if very honest with my weaknesses because then I can work to improve, to get better. Often tell my team I don't want to be fake good, I want to become actually good. But to do that means I need to be honest with my own weaknesses and failures so we can have a discussion about it, so we can work to improve it. Hi, I'm Mike. I have problems right.

Speaker 1: 19:56

I love that and it's true too. Weaknesses and strengths is great leaders that I've ever worked for are open about what their weaknesses are. But that also in the Military, because I always convert everything to the military because that's kind of my background. But we have this concept when we do mission planning of dead space, and it is terrain that we can not easily access, it's not maneuverable, we can't put fires on it, we can't control that area, so it's it's blind to us, it's invisible to us. Well, the same is true as in leadership, as we all have that dead space that is invisible to us. But if, if we know that that's a weakness of ours or whatever area it is, and we can communicate that and articulate it to our team, they have strengths that are outside of ours and that can naturally just cover our Dead space or our blonde space. And I love how vulnerable you were and you are with that. Where does that come from? How? How are you so vulnerable but confident with it? Because that is a hard trait for leaders.

Speaker 2: 21:02

You know, part of it's learned, but I think I Think what I started realizing is it's so incredibly freeing, because when you're trying to Pretend to be better than you really are, you're always a little bit on edge like someone gonna find out. If you're honest with where you're at, you can it. Here's one of the magic things I found is that if you try to hide your weakness, everyone still sees it and they actually get almost more angry with you. But if you're honest with it and have a discussion about it, people give you a lot more grace Because they want to help you improve and grow past that weakness. You know, one thing we started doing as a company is we do what we've always done this but surveys For our employees to get feedback.

Speaker 2: 21:51

But part of the survey results this is a nationwide survey is a secret report that only gets passed into the CEO. Well, guess what? Most of these reports I've heard CEOs don't offer it out. It's embarrassing, right? It's the feedback that people are giving me. Well, guess what? The first report you see when we go through our employee survey results, it's my results, and then we share all the results openly and honestly. You can read every single comment in this past. It's about two years ago now. We then open up the results to everyone Worldwide. It's actually on our website. You can see the latest set of comments that people gave on our Employee survey results and it's not all perfect, right, there's. There's some juicy stuff in there if you want to go read it. But I think that's important, because the first point of actually improving something is to be honest with where we're at.

Speaker 1: 22:43

All right, team, let's take a quick break from this podcast and I want to personally invite you to our private Facebook community that I call Purposeful Accountable Leaders, or PALS, and PALS is a community dedicated to inspiring and developing servant leaders by sharing transformational stories and skills exactly what tells the leadership is all about. My goal is to build a community of like-minded Leaders that can share lessons, learn, ask questions and celebrate wins when it happens. And my mission in life is clear I will end toxic leadership by sharing Transformational stories and skills, and you will find countless transformational leaders in this group, many of them I have had the honor to serve with in the military. If you want to find a community that can help you grow both personally and professionally, we would love to have you. You can simply search purposeful accountable leaders on Facebook or click the leadership Resources tab in the show notes to join. I am looking forward to seeing you guys and continuing to grow together on our leadership journey.

Speaker 1: 23:45

Back to the podcast. I love that and in the military we have, and it's always. It's just a check the block, but you have to do a command climate survey and you take it whenever you take over an organization, and then you have to do it, you know, in the middle of your time as a commander and then the end, but it's about it. It's an annual requirement and Every time we do it the same feedback is, the same can questions of you know how's the organization doing, how am I doing, how can we improve? And soldiers put in what the command teams put into that. And I learned that is that if you think of it as a check the Block, where you're gonna have one word answers good, bad, great, you stink, type thing. But if you genuinely custom-build the, the questions, powerful questions.

Speaker 1: 24:35

Then you're going to get the powerful content that's needed to make the change. But when you do get that, and and you make it public, which kudos to you, because that that's truly a transformational. What matters is that you implement changes based on that feedback. And how have you done that?

Speaker 2: 24:56

Yeah. So what we do is we synthesize all the feedback we get. We then identify what is the most Common feedback, what's the most important feedback out of that, and we take the top items and then we'll work on that over six months. We'll say here's that it was a work on, here's the specific things we're doing, and we come back six months later we say, okay, how did I actually go right? Because then you get to fill the survey out again. So that's, that's the leadership team level. But even within all the teams what we do is they sit down, they review the results that they had and I'll join a lot of those meetings but then the manager you know I model at first, but then each manager then takes and says, okay, here was my feedback, here's what our team is doing, and the very best managers take that very seriously and then they work as a team to figure out okay, what steps can we change as a group to make the experience better for us all?

Speaker 1: 25:49

you said something critical there. That Kind of want to make sure everyone understands modeling and it starts with you, the leader.

Speaker 1: 25:58

Yeah, there there's a rule that I've kind of learned, the rule of mirrors, that it, within an organization, individuals on your team will replicate the Words that you say and the deeds that you do your deeds and your words. So if you take it serious and you start implementing changes, well, then you're subordinate leaders directly under you are going to take it serious, they're going to identify the areas that they need to grow in and they're going to make those changes and then the leaders below them will see it. And then, because culture starts at the top, yeah, of how the leader views and does things, and if they don't take it as a priority or to check the blocks, like, yeah, I know I need to do these things, but I really want to delegate that to you. Well, there's certain things that leader can't delegate.

Speaker 1: 26:45

And I love how you take that feedback. You own it, but from a vulnerable standpoint, which is hard, letting go of your ego, but purposely, I think it's being courageous. And and then you inspire how you define leadership for other people in your organization To continue and it's all working on your mission of trying to improve housing. I love it. I get excited when, when I talk to the leaders that are doing amazing jobs.

Speaker 2: 27:14

When you think about it. If, if, all I'm here on earth to do that I really want to solve for the solving for housing affordability, then ego and and you know all this, the people stuff, all that like you can put ego aside, because I'm here just to solve housing affordability and my ego is getting in the way of doing that. It needs to go aside, right?

Speaker 1: 27:36

So I would love, before we kind of get to where you are right now, what are some of the leadership lessons that you've taken from your past that you're kind of applying now within, within, your leadership journey?

Speaker 2: 27:49

You know, I think one of the interesting things, as we've gotten bigger, that I've really started to take to heart, to understand, is that the little things you do actually have a ripple effect in the organization and this is right, I'm gonna go back to.

Speaker 2: 28:05

It starts with your mindset, because your mindset dictates the behaviors in your life that you don't even realize you're doing, but others are reading. Do give an example of that. One of the things that we're working on right now is to improve something called batch percent, batch complete, but the number wasn't really getting any better. We were having some issues within that, but then I had kind of a Someone had a good conversation with me and said Mike, you know what?

Speaker 2: 28:34

Why that number is not getting any better is you don't really care about it, do you? What do you mean? I do care about it, are you? Are you touring the plants, looking at that specific thing? Are you having dialogue with people with that thing? Like, are you engaging people at the level of passion that you do with other things for that particular line? I don't. And look at I'm saying not right, and like I had to do the deep work internally, like I need to care about this number more deeply so that that people see it and feel it through my little actions that go out from there. So that's been one of my bigger lessons recently.

Speaker 1: 29:08

And another area that I see from from Norhart, your company is is really striving to One of the key words that solves revolutionizing, taking innovative ways from other industries and kind of applying that to your mission set why is? Why do you believe innovation is so critically important?

Speaker 2: 29:30

Just look at the data. If you look at the past 60 years, things like manufacturing have improved productivity by 760 percent. Air culture has improved it by 1500 percent. The world of construction has done virtually nothing at 10 percent.

Speaker 2: 29:46

Wow well, if we can just apply the lessons from these other industries into our own, we can have a radical improvement. And the the reality in the world of construction has tends to be a rough and tumble and a challenging environment. Cultures aren't always great. I've heard so many horror stories. But Also what happens in that space is that people are like dude, my granddad is done it this way, my dad has done it this way. By golly, I am doing it this way as well, and so there's not a spirit of innovation and change. The reality is us as a society, as a culture, as a world. We can't stand. We can't put up with housing costs continuing to rise faster than income. Someone's got to change that, and so we're just hiring and finding people that are willing to make those changes. They're scary, they're painful, they're difficult. We got lots of scars to prove it. But you need that level of change to have the kind of impact that we're hoping to have. And then the foundation it's about innovation.

Speaker 1: 30:50

Innovation kind of allows you to weather, I believe, storms.

Speaker 1: 30:56

And you said something and I just recently completed training through the Army. It's called RBLT Training Resiliency-Based Leadership Program Training and one of those modules talk about status quo and I remember reading a book and I can't remember what it was. I believe it was the innovators dilemma of where they're going through. Why are these major companies that a Huey Packard, for example that were so disruptive in their time dying, and why do companies make it to the S&P 500 and then get replaced within 10, 15 years and increasingly getting replaced Before? I believe this and don't quote me on this, this is probably off, but I think the normal time of a company being in the S&P was probably like 30 years. They were there for a while, but I remember in that book saying it's not gonna be uncommon to have a company in for five years and getting replaced and it comes down to being able to adapt.

Speaker 1: 32:00

And what a beautiful time to talk about this, with AI blowing up everywhere, innovative principles or disruptive technology and trends and applying that to your work position. And if you don't do that and you just continue to go with the status quo, it's like well, this has always made us successful At some point. It doesn't matter how big your company is status quo thinking will kill your company unless you have a new disruptive technology. And it's true in warfare. If we go into battle, if you think about this like how we've always done things, look at what's happened into Russia and Ukraine right now. How is that playing out for Russia? Not very well, and how's it playing out for Ukraine? They're embracing those type of technological advances, and that's just one extreme example, but it's true in any profession that you find yourselves. I love that innovation. I don't know, have you ever read the book Innovators Dilemma?

Speaker 2: 33:04

I think I have. It's been a long time, if I have, but I think I have.

Speaker 1: 33:09

Yeah, another area that I before we kind of get to where you're at right now is investing in people. I know that that is so critically important to you. How do you invest in people? What is your secret?

Speaker 2: 33:25

I think the first thing is creating the right culture. It's critical, In fact. I was sitting down with a team the other day and we can do training and support and all that stuff, but really to build a person up, the best thing you can do is build the right people around them. Because we were, this team was struggling because they're dealing with a variety of problems. They're taking on a new process. It's painful. And the guy said did Mike, his problems are, this isn't an art. Later, this has been. This is tough. It's tough coming into work for these problems, but honestly, I would never leave this company. And do you know why?

Speaker 2: 34:03

Why, he pointed to all of his team-overs and said I have never worked with a group of people of this caliber in this industry before and I love working with them. Right, it's that kind of energy, and so if you can pour into people the mental energy, the spirit, the positivity, the encouragement that they need to be effective in a really amazing, incredible group, there's a lot of power in that. As far as educational things that we pour into people, we take a little bit of a unique approach here in that we wanna hire people that ask for they pull, they want to learn and grow, and so we don't do what we do with some training that we push down, but the vast majority of training that we have is actually pulled from the team members. So, for example, the plumbers they wanted to master their code book. So this code book is like hundreds of pages along. It's this boring text and so. But they're the ones telling their foreman that, dude, I want classes every single week, every single after work. They're not even paid for it. We do pay it in a lot of cases, but in this case they did it on their own time and they're studying the code book.

Speaker 2: 35:20

It's incredible, and we had a plumbing trainer come out to work with them for a little bit as well. And when they first came out, they looked at the team and they said, dude, a lot of you are apprentices in their first year and he couldn't believe the experience and knowledge that they had. In fact, we went to the state because there's a rule for apprentices that they can't become dirty mentally. They've got four years of experience. We went to the state and said state, I understand why this rule is here, but our apprentices, dude, after a year they're as good as many journeymen. Can we give them that credential and the pay? And all that as a result of because of their learning? The state said no, unfortunately, but that's how much we believe in the team, and when you get team members wanting to learn, it's just a much better approach to learning, in my opinion.

Speaker 1: 36:08

So I kind of summarized that to three key points that I've kind of heard throughout. And it's beautiful, because I never thought of it that this way is that in order to invest in people, it starts with inspiring. You have to inspire and that's how we interact with people, that's how we communicate both orally and writtenly, and how we have just normal conversations with people, having conversations that are outside of the normal professional realm, just being authentic. And then modeling as a leader, being able to model the principles, the core values of investing in people, because then it becomes almost the rule of magnetism it just grows.

Speaker 1: 36:51

And then the last one is equipping, and I love how you talked about you don't necessarily have an education program that you feed to the team. You hired the right people but you give them the latitude to chase those types of qualifications that they need. So you're equipping the right people. So you inspire, model the way and you equip them. And I think from what I'm hearing is that you allow individuals within your team to fail, which is okay, and I think fail is a dirty word. I like to use the word learn, because when you learn well now you can improve every single time and incrementally we can continue to grow, and what caused us to fail in the past won't cause us to fail in the future. So I summed it up how I saw it and how I heard it, and I love that.

Speaker 2: 37:42

Yeah, that's so good. I love you. Touch on failure too. There's something in our human psyche that as we get older, we start to think that, well, we can't. When we start something new, we should be good at it. Right? The reality is, anytime we start something new, we're terrible at it. And that's okay, that's human nature, right? We're born that way. We can't walk, we can't talk, we can't add, we can't do hardly anything. So why do we get older and think that it needs to be more perfect?

Speaker 2: 38:11

You know, there was one study I was looking at recently that talked about how they broke two groups up into separate teams. The first team was in charge of making a clay pot, but it had to be the nicest, fanciest clay pot that they could possibly make just one. The other team their job was to make as many as they could, with no emphasis on quality. Well, the team that made the one pot did a good job and certainly better than the first pots of the second team. But the second team, their later pots, were way better than the team that tried to make one good pot, and there's so many examples in my life where it's so much better to get into it and start and fail and fail fast and fail repeatedly, because you will learn. You get regular feedback from the market or the wider environment or from other people that helps you become a heck of a lot better.

Speaker 1: 39:02

I always kind of sum it down to and I love that story and I think I've heard it somewhere. But I think perfectionism and as we get older and I will tell you, I'll be honest with you, mike, that's an area that I need to improve on because I am a perfectionist, especially in the military, with what I do, but that story just beautifully sums it up is that if we can kind of break those toxic trends of being a perfectionist but just going out and doing and being okay with it and allowing our team to go do and being okay to fail, but to take that and then how we do in the military, we talk about after action review, what was supposed to happen, what did happen, and then how can we improve to make sure that doesn't happen and then to move the ball just a little bit farther down the field. I love that. I can keep talking about that probably for forever.

Speaker 2: 39:55

Love it.

Speaker 1: 39:56

So kind of, where are you at now currently on your journey, especially with Newer Heart? I'd love to kind of dig into where the company is right now of getting after the mission and if you could state the mission again, because I think it's really powerful.

Speaker 2: 40:13

Yeah. So for us we're really working to solve housing affordability, and today we're already about 20 to 30% less. I believe we can actually hit a 50% reduction in cost. Imagine what that means. I mean. Some day you're rent or mortgage payment could be half, and it has been a wild ride in getting there, because so many things have to change as a result.

Speaker 2: 40:38

Today we're about a $200 million company producing about 500 units per year, and we've been doubling in size more or less every year.

Speaker 2: 40:47

Our dream over the next 10 years is to reach 192,000 units, with a 60,000 unit per year pay us. But at that point we're starting to produce so many units and in the marketplace in the United States that we can start having a meaningful impact on supply and demand to start driving down the price, not just for our own residents but for everyone nationwide. And so today the things that we're working on are things like supply chain, which in the military you have quite a bit of that, but we're building on a whole international supply chain infrastructure. We're also working on things like manufacturing. So we have all the trades, all the infrastructure, under one roof right now. But now we're moving into wall panel production. We've moved into precast concrete, which not a lot of people in the world do that, and we're expanding out those capacities as well and really just hounding on any other avenue, every single path we can to drive down costs out of the system.

Speaker 1: 41:48

One thing that you've talked about before but is kind of the strategic decisions within the company. How does the mission impact how you lead and make strategic decisions? And then kind of second question to that is how is strategic decision making critical to your leadership?

Speaker 2: 42:11

I think the core, as you've alluded to earlier, is understanding your why, your mission. For us, it's our values. We have a few other things habits, principles and goals. Having all those incredibly well defined, understood by everyone, becomes a super powerful tool. It's not only just the strategic decisions at a high level, it's also the strategic decisions at a micro level. I was talking to one of our employees last week and he said to me Mike, it's so powerful having that as a resource, because we're in the field and this is an electrician and they're doing some work on an electrical box. And one of the guys came up and said dude, we had a little bit of air here. Should we just patch over and move on? And he framed it back and said what's our mission? What's our purpose?

Speaker 2: 42:59

Our purpose is to create a better way to live. It's about solving housing affordability, and immediately it made it very evident that we don't want to just skimp past a minor issue like that, like go back and fix it, do it right. We want the right solution in the end. And it really guides a lot of decisions. We're dealing with some kind of gnarly tax issues and our tax accountants came back and said well, mike, here's how everyone handles this tax situation. They said, well, that's fine. What's the right way? What's the spirit of the law? How do we make sure that everything's morally right? I want to sleep well at night, right? And that changed the nature of that conversation. It re-guided things. We make sure we're actually doing things as well as we can, and so, yeah, I think it starts with mission and vision and then, a lot of times, decisions become quite obvious once you've got that right frame.

Speaker 1: 43:58

All right team. Let's take a quick break from this episode and I want to share a leadership resource with you, and that is the Resiliency-Based Leadership Program. Rblp's vision is to create a worldwide community of practice committed to building and leading resilient teams. So why do you need to build and lead a resilient team? Resilient teams are the key to individual and organizational growth, regardless of being in the military or in the civilian workforce. Building collective teams allows for exponential growth and the team's ability to overcome adversity, adapt and, most importantly, grow. And in bottom line, upfront, resilient teams are just stronger together.

Speaker 1: 44:37

And here's the fact 99% of the people who take that course recommended to others, and I'm one of them. I just completed my certification and I highly recommend this. And the great news is it's most likely free to you, and if you're in the military, it is 100% free to you. And if you want to learn more, you can look in the show notes for this episode and find the link and use the discount code J-M-C-M-I-L-L-I-O-N, and that is also in the show notes. Back to the episode. There's a concept out there that great leaders do the right thing regardless of who is watching.

Speaker 1: 45:18

But I think one of the hardest things to do as a leader is to get that type of performance out of those that you lead. How can you have individuals that you lead ensuring that they're doing the right thing, especially when no one is watching? So kudos to you, because I think that is one of the hardest things to do, because it's so easy to look past those like, yeah, it's okay, it's a minor little wall, that's a snowball effect, and then that'll continue to grow and continue to grow and then it'll ultimately erode the mission and the vision, the core values that you're setting for your organization. But you're confident in your organization and you've hired the right people of where. Hey, we're not going to overlook these small issues. We're going to do the right thing when we identify these issues and whatever issues we come up with. That's okay. We're going to find the right way to kind of navigate that. So that's amazing.

Speaker 2: 46:13

You know, it really starts with hiring the right people, and then it's also being very aggressive about identifying people that might be good but they're not great, and being clear, like we're very clear in our organization, like a lot of companies know not to hire the bad people. They know they want to hire the great people. A lot of companies are okay with the average. For us in our company we're just not and we're very open about that orientation. We do a lot to support people, but if you're just in the average camp, then we're going to help move you on, because we really want a team of the best people that are most aligned with our mission, vision and values. So I think it comes really back to people. I will say this though there's a piece of communication, there's a I'm a part of every single orientation. Every single week we have a new batch of people hired on. I'm there engaging with them, sharing the vision, sharing the culture, and one of the stories I tell them is we hire great people so that and then we get, we empower you to make decisions and we get out of your way. You can make decisions that are quote unquote against the policy of the company, if it's truly, if you believe it's the right thing to do. And I give an example of we know we hand out credit cards like their candy. Anyone can have a credit card that almost has unlimited spending potential. Actually, they say it's unlimited spending potential. Yeah, I haven't actually tested it, but that's what they say.

Speaker 2: 47:41

And I say imagine for a moment, that's a really hot, awful week. And I came down and me the CEO said dude, you and your team now have to shovel hot, heavy rocks, and it's 90 plus degrees. And you're like dude, this is awful, that's not what I signed up for. Maybe you're swearing up my name underneath your breath. And then, come Wednesday, your shovel breaks. You're like, oh man, this is terrible. Well, luckily you have a company credit card, so you go to the local hardware store. You get to the shovel aisle, you find the shovel 6000, you know the one that can actually handle rocks. You then get to the checkout line, but that's, when you see it, the ice cold bottle of Coca Cola. And you think to yourself dude, mike's an idiot. This place is crazy. I've earned this. This week is hot, I deserve the Coca Cola. And so you've take that Coca Cola and you put it on the company credit card.

Speaker 2: 48:35

That's scenario one. Scenario number two same hot awful week. You get to this, your shovel breaks. You get to the store, you see it in the aisle. But now you think to yourself my team has been struggling, my team has been dealing with this hot awful week. My team could use it. Pick me up and see by the Coca Cola on the company credit card for your team. See, the thing is I don't want the first person, but I love and adore the second person, and this is why I can't create enough rules and procedures and policies. I need to hire people who have the right heart and energy, because I care far more about where your heart is at than almost anything else the thing that's a core of a servant leader and any great leaders.

Speaker 1: 49:25

I think you're really creating a organization that is producing great leaders, a pipeline.

Speaker 2: 49:31

And.

Speaker 1: 49:32

I have six phases how I see leadership With. The fifth phase of leadership is shaping leaders and creating an ability within the organization to produce other leaders, because as your company grows, you're going to have to have that ability to produce and replicate other leaders because naturally it's just going to grow and grow and grow. The responsibilities are going to grow. But another thing that I love that you said allow your team to make decisions within the left and right boundary and then do, and it comes down to the military.

Speaker 1: 50:07

There's two concepts. The first one is that it's preached all the time mission command, and mission command essentially means that we give a clear task and purpose. With a left and right boundary in an in-state, I want you to go do it. How you get to that in-state, as long as within the scope of what I've told you, I don't care how you do it. But there's another concept that I heard from General Milley when I was at a force comp competition, and he talked about discipline, disobedience. As the speed of war is increasing, the amount of decision making is going to be more and more decentralized at the lower levels of soldiers.

Speaker 1: 50:48

And what does that mean? We need discipline, disobedience, soldiers knowing what the right thing to do and being okay to go against the mission, go against the order from the leadership If they know it's not going to help them get to that in-state. And I love that because you're replicating that same type of culture within your civilian business. And I think one of the things that's so important with that is transparency, and I know that that's really big with you as transparency. So how would you define it? And I was going through your website, by the way, and I saw a fully downloadable engagement report that shared and open to the public.

Speaker 1: 51:28

So if you could kind of walk through that too, because I think that was so interesting yeah you know, I think you know we talk about within our business.

Speaker 2: 51:38

I say everything is shareable. There might be some very nuanced small cases that just is right by the employee not to share something, but it almost never comes up. Everything is shareable with an organization. You know, I look at cases like Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes. I think part of the reason they failed was because they were so segmented. People can talk to the other person and have the proper dialogue.

Speaker 2: 52:00

I think that's completely wrong. We need to have open, honest dialogue across the board. We need to give each other feedback. I tell people it's you know, be good about receiving tough feedback, but I think what's even harder than receiving tough feedback is giving it. I see so many cases where people are like just hesitant to share that because they're afraid it might, might look badly or people might get feelings, get hurt. But you got to be open, transparent in order to make progress and so, yeah, so we have that report now which is actually part of our survey results from the employee survey, and it's it's everything. It's the good, it's the bad, it's the ugly. You get to see the gnarly negatives, right. But again, I don't want to be fake good, I want to actually work to be good and the first step to that is to be honest that how we're not good. I think that's kind of proven and kind of going through there.

Speaker 1: 52:55

I saw in the top 200 workplaces you were within that, I think from was it Star Tribune?

Speaker 1: 53:03

Yeah, and then looking within you broke it down even further, which I just truly love, because I've never seen a company a for profit company do that of showing publicly who likes working within the organization in real time who's me and who's like no, I need to go find a company and who's like no, I need to go find another place. You, you have a 73% at the time that I looked at it Favorability rating from individuals on your team, which is truly outstanding. I won't share with what mine was when I was company commander and I had to do a command climate survey. It wasn't that high, I'll tell you that.

Speaker 2: 53:41

So the national average is like 30%.

Speaker 1: 53:44

That is insane.

Speaker 2: 53:45

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 53:46

I know how you did it because you just shared all the secret sauce throughout all of that. But I think that just sums it up is that if you have your company, and it's not hard on paper to do all of these things, but it is hard to do all of these things because there's going to be things that pop up. You know, for you being the CEO of this company, there's going to be things that pop up. But you have to prioritize where the company is going, based on the values that you're trying to be replicated, the mission, the culture, and are your deeds aligning with the words that you're speaking to your team? And that's tough because life's going to get a vote.

Speaker 1: 54:27

But how you choose to act in those times defines the legacy. And you said something before and I think it all comes about how we think there's I think John Maxwell said this and I call it tball, so it's easy to remember acronym I'm an acronym wizard is that our thoughts shape our beliefs, our beliefs drive our actions and our actions forge our legacy. And that could be the same with your company. So if you want to go play tball, that's, that's what you got to remember and I think that 73% favorable rating sums up all of this.

Speaker 2: 55:04

And that's. There's so much deep wisdom, what you just said. Your thoughts shape your beliefs, your beliefs shape your actions and the actions shape your adding. I think if people really understood that in a very deep way, it would change, change a lot for the better.

Speaker 1: 55:22

Yeah, I was hoping that tball would be an easy acronym, so tell me about some of the content that you also produce. So I was looking at your podcast series, I think fearless unicorn when did that name come from?

Speaker 2: 55:41

Yeah. So we've got a few different shows that we're now producing. What I've learned is that a lot of business leaders think about how the dollars and cents are really important to a business, and certainly they are. What some business leaders miss is that attention, I would say, is almost equally as important. To give you an example of this, when you go visit Gordomamsey world famous chef Hell's Kitchen. If you go to Las Vegas you can see he has a bunch of restaurants there and all of his restaurants. There's always a line. One of my favorite there is Burger. There's a 30 minute wait. Almost always when I'm there. Hell's Kitchen is like a several month notice to get on the wait list for going to that restaurant. But in the same casino you look across the aisle and there are other beautiful restaurants done by incredible chefs with incredible food at a very similar price point, and they don't have nearly the number of people at their restaurant. Well, what's the difference? The difference is that no like and trust that Gordon Ramsay has built.

Speaker 2: 56:47

In fact, I was talking to someone at the Wall Street Journal a couple days ago and he said, mike, I knew Steve Jobs before the world knew Steve Jobs, and he said my experience. He was one of the major financial reporters there for many, many years and he said, looking at all these companies, there was a huge discrepancy between the ones that got that right that attention, that awareness and the ones that didn't. The ones that got that right, they just the path to success was much, much better, and so in the last year I started to understand that. So we are now experimenting, we're creating our own shows. The first main one is Zero to Unicorn. It's about the story of small business growing to billion dollar enterprise.

Speaker 2: 57:28

And yeah, that's first covering our business, but we're also bringing in guests of like a really incredible caliber to share their story. I just got off the phone this morning with the executive producer of Batman and he literally owns he owns the movie rights to Batman. He was the one to make Batman a reality in the way that we see it today and he's literally on like the set of Joker's, like working 18 hours a day. But we're getting him scheduled in the. But the other show that we're working on is Fearlessly Unicorn, and this one I wasn't expecting to make.

Speaker 2: 58:06

But what happened was my daughter kept every day for quite a while saying, hey, I want to do a, I want to do YouTube, I want to do YouTube, I want to YouTube channel. Eventually I kind of gave in and said, okay, we'll give this a try and you can go watch our earlier videos. They're quite bad, but we're just experimenting, we're learning right, and that's. That's been a really kind of fun journey and the surprising benefit of that has been this incredible like opportunity for my daughter and I to work on a project together. That is kind of our thing and it's been just a ton of fun. I think it shows a little bit in the video. It's just the the fun we have, and so it's a way to share off my personal life and gain attention that way as well. It's been fun.

Speaker 1: 58:49

I think I was watching one, as we're two Nerf guns like you start off with a smaller Nerf gun and it just keeps escalating.

Speaker 2: 58:57

And to me it's just. It's just a, it's just a it's just a.

Speaker 1: 58:59

It's just a. I can just see the true, authentic Mike and those of like what he cares about what? What are the areas of the pillars in your life that you're unreasonable in? Family is one of them.

Speaker 1: 59:12

And being able to spend that kind of quality time cause. It's hard when you're so ambitious, but you have to find ways to be able to balance your life, and one of the ways making content still helping achieve your mission, but you're able to do it with your family and your daughter and make it special, which that that that is. That is awesome.

Speaker 2: 59:34

That is so much fun. I love those moments, especially if you can find things in life or like you're accomplishing multiple things at once. It's just incredible, but it's I don't know. My, my daughters are amazing. It's just so much fun getting to come home and see them every night. It's amazing.

Speaker 1: 59:51

So one of the last questions that I want to ask them, cause I always think it's interesting for like for profit companies and how you have such an amazing mission that's trying to lower the cost, but how do you balance the need of renters needs for the company's need to make a profit?

Speaker 2: 1:00:09

So one nice thing is that, um, really I'm the. It's my wife and myself for the primary. My mom has some stake in the older properties and brother is a little bit of a stake, but because of that I don't have investors that I have to maximize profits for.

Speaker 2: 1:00:25

Hmm uh, and we are actually allowing investors to get involved now, but we, we tell people what their interest rate, the rate of return, is going to be as part of their investment. So they're not. Uh, we can give really stable returns as a result of that, but I also don't necessarily want the investors who want unicorn billions of dollars, right? I think that just gets us off of our mission. Yep, um. So that has been really valuable, but the way I really think about it is like this if you go on our website right now, our rents they're at market rate. They're no different than where everyone else's rent is. You may look at me and say Mike, you know you've been talking all this time about housing affordability. Like what the bleep? Seriously, right? Um, good question. Thanks for asking.

Speaker 2: 1:01:15

The way I look at it is like this Elon Musk talks about how it's hard to produce a car, but it is 10 to 100 to a thousand times harder to produce the system that builds that car, and so what we're doing is we're taking those profits and pouring it into building the system that builds the, the housing that we see today, and that's where I see a lot of real estate. People get it wrong. They're in it to line their own pockets. They're in it to sit on that private beach where they're not doing work for the rest of the lives.

Speaker 2: 1:01:47

I think that's just a mistake. You want to take the profits and build the system, and as we scale that up for the next 10 years, our goal is to basically build so many units that we're destroying our own profits right and that those profit margins come down to a more natural level. But you're lowering housing pricing for everyone as a result, and I think it's important to know that, if we were to, did not take those profits today, we solve housing affordability for a few thousand people. It's great, but that's not the end goal. Our goals are solve it nationwide, and so it just takes a different strategy.

Speaker 1: 1:02:22

So I think I also heard something from Elon Musk's and I love that dude how just disruptive he is and innovative he is. And it's so simple, like reusable rockets. Well, why hasn't anyone thought about that before? But the concept of why our matchbox cars are so cheap it's because they can do single press casting. Well, why don't we make cars with single press casting? Well, we don't have a casting big enough. Well, why don't we find someone who can do that? And I can't remember the name of the company, but they're from Italy right now that.

Speaker 1: 1:02:56

Tesla is working with to create this whole car casting. Because what is a car? It's a system of systems. The systems is what costs so long, takes so much time that we need all these machines to produce and replicate. What about if we have one system that makes all of it in a blink of an eye? Well then the cost of manufacturing goes significantly down and then that cost savings gets to the consumer. But then it kind of goes back to inside out thinking mission, process, outcome. Most companies are focused on outcome processes in the mission. You need to be focused on the mission, having that laser focused, and then the process to achieve that mission, and don't even be focused on the outcome. You need to have KPIs along the way. But if you're focused on the outcome, your heart's in the wrong place.

Speaker 1: 1:03:45

Like how you just talked about. You know chasing being on the beach, so I love that, mike. That's inspiring.

Speaker 2: 1:03:54

I love it.

Speaker 1: 1:03:56

It's time for our final show segment that I like to call the Killer Bees. These are the same four questions that I ask every guest on the Tales of Leadership podcast Be brief, be brilliant, be present and be gone Gone. Question one what do you believe separates a good leader from an extraordinary leader?

Speaker 2: 1:04:18

I think it's where their heart is at. Is their heart really in it to solve a meaningful problem that's greater than themselves, or they in it just for themselves? And I think if you get that heart state right, that's the first and foremost thing for me.

Speaker 1: 1:04:35

So what is one resource that you can recommend for our listeners?

Speaker 2: 1:04:40

Yeah, one book that changed my life is no Rules Rules by Reed Hastings. It is incredible. Yeah, it talks about the importance of hiring the best and talks a lot about culture. It's really valuable to me.

Speaker 1: 1:04:51

All right, so the third question if you could go back in time and give your younger self a piece of advice, what would it be?

Speaker 2: 1:05:00

Be okay with not being perfect, all right. Understand that you're going to be terrible at what you do initially. That is okay. That's part of the journey. That's part of the process. I think my journey would have been a lot less painful had I understood that. That's just part of the game.

Speaker 1: 1:05:19

That is one theme that I continue to see throughout this, especially with very successful leaders, is that that perfectionism trap. So the final question how can our listeners find you? And then, more importantly, how can they add value to your mission so you can visit us?

Speaker 2: 1:05:33

by visiting norhartcom, that's N-O-R-H-A-R-Tcom. It really two ways right now. One is we have that new investment platform opened up by the time this podcast launches. It's going to be out there and then the. The second is the content Like. We're trying to work to build that know, like and trust. So if you have interest in zero to unicorn or maybe some of the fearless unicorn or the crazy new thing that we have in the future, the unicorn or the crazy new thing that we haven't even come up with, that, we'd love for you to be a listener and have you aware of some of that content.

Speaker 1: 1:06:07

Mike, it's been an honor and a privilege to have a conversation with you, talking about leadership and going through your journey of where you are right now, always. I say this as a pal purposeful accountable leaders. You, you are a purposeful, accountable leader and thank you for all that you do and continue to do.

Speaker 2: 1:06:24

Well, thank you so much for having me. This is a lot of fun.

Speaker 1: 1:06:27

Yeah, have a great day. All right, team. It's time for our after action review. What an amazing episode with Mike, but what are the top three takeaways you should have?

Speaker 1: 1:06:40

The first one that I wrote down and I'm not going to lie, I have several pages of notes is vulnerability. Vulnerability is one of the hardest things as a leader to achieve and then also have that replicated within the organization. But one of the reasons I believe Mike is so successful is that his authentic ability to be vulnerable and it was shared throughout his journey, especially starting off taking over his business after his father passed away unexpectedly. He had to move to people with influence, ask powerful questions and find ways, without that experience, to move the company forward. And it starts with being vulnerable. And I'll tell you that being vulnerable is freeing because you can be your true, authentic self. And if you're listening to this and you're a leader, regardless of you're just starting out or you're a senior level leader, listen to the words I'm about to say. If you do not know something, do not pretend that you know it, because people will see through that and that will only erode your position as a leader. If you don't know something, it's okay. Say you don't know it and ask the right question, because I guarantee you someone on your team has the answer.

Speaker 1: 1:08:02

The next key takeaway is really just kind of how he adds value to his team Modeling the way Leaders model, the way Leaders equip and leaders inspire. So remember those three things. How can you add value to your team? How can you add value to the individuals that work in your formation? It's really easy Model the way, be that barometer, that azimuth for your organization. This is what you do and this is the words that go behind the deeds and words, when they're aligned, you can have truly powerful momentum.

Speaker 1: 1:08:46

Second is equipping. You don't have to have necessarily an education program for your company and individuals. You just need to give them the latitude to go out and seek professional education and give them the time and the resources to do it. And how he shared some of his plumbers going through this professional certification program to make them better plumbers. That's the people you want on your team, the people that are hungry for that knowledge, and giving them the latitude, the time and the resources to go out and equip themselves. That is the most important thing, because they are going to be accountable if they're going to be doing it on their own and then finally inspiring. And that just comes down at the end of the day of what a leader does, and I think it's the quote by John Quincy Adams you know you're a leader when you can have your team do more, say more and become more. Don't quote me on that. It's probably not 100% accurate, but that's what a leader does. At the core of all of this, at the core of who I am, the core of what I'm trying to teach is to inspire. A leader inspires and you have to inspire. So modeling the way, equipping and inspiring.

Speaker 1: 1:09:54

The last thing that I wrote down is transparency. Transparency is probably one of the most overused words throughout leadership, but it's true, and I call it leading with windows. It's a two-way street. Your team's on the other side and you're on the other side. And leading with windows means that there's some information that you should not share with your team. It should be held at a strategic level, and that's okay, but most of all, that information does need to be shared with your team, and this is really where Mike summed it up beautifully If there's a problem within the organization and you cannot communicate it or you cannot hear it, then that's an issue, because that type of transparency is what moves an organization from being great to extraordinary.

Speaker 1: 1:10:45

It's what creates a problem making organization to a problem solving organization. That starts by being transparent and calling out problems. And if you're unable to call out a problem, it's not being a bad teammate. When you call someone out, you have to do it professionally. If you ever read the book Kim Scott, radical Candor, there's a way to do that. You need to do it professionally and make sure it's not a personal attack. But unless you can call out the issue and be transparent and it's a two-way street you calling someone else out or they calling you out you're never going to be able to improve.

Speaker 1: 1:11:23

Hey guys, if you like what you're hearing, do me a favor. Make sure you subscribe, make sure you share this podcast, make sure you write a review. You can go to McMillianleadershipcoachingcom. Find one of the blog articles that I've wrote. You can go on any of my social media platforms. Give me feedback, let me know how I'm doing. But also make sure that, if you like what you're hearing, support this podcast. I do all of this for free because I'm trying to add value to you guys and make sure you're equipped to take on any challenges that you have in life. As always, I'm your host, josh McMillian, saying every day is a gift. Don't waste yours. I'll see you next time.