Building Resilience In Times Of Uncertainty With Larry Hitchcock

So I've ridden motorcycles since I was a kid. I married my high school sweetheart. who owned a motorcycle dealership that was not the right company, let's just say. And so for 16 or 20 years of being loyal to another brand, when our daughter went off to college, my wife decided then I wasn't sending any bad signals about what acceptable behavior was and that riding a motorcycle is safe or good. And at that point, I bought the Harley.

Ah, I love it.

So no ink, but a big bike.

Yeah. It's so interesting. And you— and I don't think we covered this ground when we last spoke either, but I also married my high school sweetheart, Which is, I think that story, there's lots of people who've done that, but not a lot of people who are still married to that same person. So you and I are in a different space there and very fortunate for sure. Our roads diverged there just a little bit. I don't know how many kids do you guys have?

One daughter. Yes.

Just one. One amazing daughter. That's amazing. We didn't stop after the first amazing kid and we're not, we weren't the greatest planners. We weren't thinking too far ahead. So in the end, we ended up with more kids. They ended up outnumbering us for sure. And so the idea that all the things that we did were the things they actually paid attention to didn't even dawn on us until they were like 14, 15, or thereabouts, and weren't necessarily listening as much as we could just tell they were observing. So yeah, probably we were all thinking, are we modeling good and bad? And, and what would that mean to them? But at some point in your relationship, you were allowed— To get on a motorcycle again. And I am absolutely forbidden. Just saying it because it's the truth. I am forbidden, but I get on surfboards.

Okay.

And in fact, I did that yesterday. I got really beaten up in the surf. When we're— you and I are recording this right now, you're in LA on a client engagement. I'm back in San Diego. I'm often on the road. I think you've spent a bit of time there too. And so I got in the water. With my son-in-law yesterday, and the waves were overhead, and I got worked is the term that is sometimes used. I got worked pretty good yesterday, so I'm just happy to be sitting in the seat with all my body parts.

Glad to see you.

Working well. Yeah. I want to talk today about resilience because you actually, in your answer to that question, you brought that up. And I'm wearing the classic shirt today that says resilience on it. I want to get a sense of what resilience means to you personally, and then I want to also get a sense of how you feel it means or know it means within the context of the organizations that you and your firm, Deloitte, are engaged with, that you serve? Because I think there's something in that word that is both understood and some misunderstandings about it. I'd love to explore it further.

I think about it in 3 ways. 2, which you mentioned, which is me personally. A second would be professionally as a leader of practices within the firm. And then third, as an advisor to executives. And so I guess my definition in simplest form would be resilience is readiness and the outlook to thrive when you're faced with something that's unexpected. And I think, as I said, whether that's me personally being prepared, or if you have uncertainty in a client project or uncertainty in the economy that impacts our firm or our clients, you have to be prepared in those circumstances.

Indeed. And do you see it as a soft skill or as a hard skill or as something that isn't defined by either of those terms?

I'm not sure how you're defining hard or soft. It's certainly A soft skill in a sense that it's hard to like measure resilience. 1 through 5, you're a 5 resilient or a 3 resilient empirically. So in that way, I would say it's soft, but it's hard in a sense that it's important. Some of the difficulties that we've lived through over the last few years, the pandemic, rising interest rates, uncertainty about the economy, I think there's a hardness to that. You have to be resilient in the face of things that are going on as a leader and in our case, as advisors to clients.

Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience, but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com. And find out just how resilient you are. And again, I think it's— this is a perfect opportunity for us. We can agree about things, but we can also see that our worldview can be a little different. Having been a researcher in this area for some time, I probably would have opted for the— just based on my own life experience— to say some people are more resilient than others. And sometimes people are resilient because they've dealt with a lot more, oddly and interestingly enough, that the more sort of early life adversity or even trauma, often the case is that those folks are more resilient later in life. There's also lots of studies like the ACEs study, which is Adverse Childhood Experiences, which comes up with sort of 10 things that ultimately determine whether or not you've got predisposition to certain physical issues in your life, whether it's high blood pressure or diabetes or heart or issues involving cardiovascular health or anything like that can be sometimes related back to those early experiences. I would've opted to say it's more of a soft skill. And I, and you defined it perfectly because it, if it, if you can't define it, if you can't measure it, then it's sort of in, falls in that soft category. Not that it's not important, but you just can't empirically measure it. But we've now been able to research about 5,000 leaders across the globe, and we find more than just a raw score is that some people are very adept at what you said earlier, which is to be able to be ready. more ready in the face of change or in the face of disruption, and that they have an outlook to thrive, which the word outlook is a great languaging. I just feel like that's mindset. So it's mental, it's emotional, it's physical. On, on a certain level, it has to do with our alignment, which we would call spirit, but not like, you know, in terms of any spirituality concept, but just more alignment. With the organizations right now that you are with, are you seeing that they're But they're preparing for the headwinds that appear to be already here and maybe greater headwinds that are facing us in the way of recession or other things. Are those organizations focused on how they can build their workforce up, build them up in terms of their resiliency? Or is that— do you see— is that on the radar as focused on wellbeing or other things, or is it not really there as far as you can tell?

I think with the clients that I serve, it's a mix, but certainly within our firm, I don't think it is as mixed. In other words, I think We've learned from the pandemic, and we're much more flexible about the way that we go about work, working hours, the location of the work. I think we've done a lot to invest in people, like redoubling our efforts to train folks, making sure that there's the capacity, even when you're working remotely, to meet with people that you're connected to or want to be connected with in informal gatherings, whether it's dinners or gatherings in the office, a way to surround people, make that connectivity happen. At the same time that you're providing the flexibility to not be on the road 5 days a week. There's a bit of challenging convention that's happened over the last few years. Many of us grew up in a consulting environment where you went to the— some of us went to the airport on Sunday night, came home on Friday, and that morphed to leave on Monday morning, come home on Thursday. And now I think we're a little more flexible in defining what makes sense. Is the work getting done? Are the needs that the clients face being addressed? And then secondarily, we're at the client location. It almost doesn't matter. As long as the work's getting done and the client's getting the outcome they want. That's a very big mind shift that I think makes people more resilient, not having to go through that Monday through Friday or Monday through Thursday drill of traveling every week. And that's just accepted as the norm.

Yeah, it really is fascinating, right? Because I came out of not so much a similar profession, but one that certainly integrates in the consulting arena as well. And that was the legal industry. I was a lawyer for 18 years and worked on in a variety of different ways within organizations. The hours that lawyers put in similar to the hours that partners or others within consulting firms put in, are pretty extreme. We're not necessarily a model. We talked earlier about modeling for our kids, right? We're not necessarily a model for good work-life harmony or even boundaries, let's say, not balance, but more boundaries and things of that sort. And the fruits of that would be seen in the law, in the legal profession, for me, in my experience, with just High degree of misery, substance abuse, physical problems, people that weren't physically healthy, and then some mental health challenges that we didn't often hear about, but you just knew about. And then there were always the cautionary tales of lawyers that ran astray, that would dip into their trust account or committing malpractice and that kind of thing. And the pandemic certainly, I think, has changed the attitude, that mindset greatly in the legal profession. But yet I think people are starting to also also fall back on some of those other worn-in grooves in the record. I'm curious what you think in terms of what you're seeing within your firm. Does it feel like there's a longer-term commitment, not just a bridge commitment at the moment, to changing sort of the way business is done? Because it sounds like that's what you were saying earlier.

I think there is. We're in a unique circumstance in the services industry, just like you were as a lawyer. We're highly dependent on attracting people who are highly committed, resilient people who want to work sometimes in very difficult circumstances. So, so in order to attract and retain those sorts of people, I think we've got to do things that make the environment suitable and attractive. Something that we talk about a lot, and I think we have done a great job over the last couple of years, is asking leaders to show leadership in this area, talk about how they personally deal with adversity, how they're keeping themselves physically fit, mentally fit, making it okay to Recognize, look, you don't have to just set it aside and ignore the challenges that you face or feel just because you're a new consultant. Here's a partner who's been doing this for 20 years that has faced these challenges and can point to ways that they've thrived in the face of adversity. Other things that we do is, as with a law firm, there's certain forums where you get people together directly or virtually, and they tend to be formulaic. The great new client that we landed, here's some great work that we're doing, here's some investment that we're making that's going to make us all better in the future. And that's all well and good, but we've also made it a point to find time to profile, here's a fabulous outing that a team, just to get away from the client work Monday through Friday, that they took an afternoon off and went and did something together as a team. Or featuring people with photographs of their family and things that they've done on vacation that are enjoyable, that make them balanced and re-energized, ready to come back and contribute the way we need and expect them to. Those are like changes that are small, but, and they're subtle, but they send a signal like we're looking at this in a way that we're trying to be accommodating and understand That consulting is a demanding profession, but there's ways to make it more accommodating. It's not always routine that I described to you, fly out on Monday, fly back on Friday, and work 20 hours a day every day and go to dinner with the client one night. It doesn't have to be that way. There's ways you can work around it, especially if you talk about it as a team and have leaders that set the right tone.

Sure. For me, it begs the question, what are the ways that you measure things? Because I love that we began with this conversation about a little bit what's How do you, how do we distinguish soft from hard in terms of skill? Because it would seem there's a lot of transition in across industries and modeling, I think, is one element of it. I think when a consulting, when the actual firm is focused on those things, it's easier for them to share even those successes with their clients. And I would imagine there's some of that's happening too. So I'd love to get a sense of maybe even what does this look like? Is there a ripple effect that you see that's going out beyond Deloitte connection with how you work with organizations? In regard to that?

For sure. We field inquiries from clients all the time who remark, you deploy teams every week, every month that are energetic, solving some of my most difficult problems, show like high levels of commitment to the task at hand. And they ask us like, what is it that you guys are doing? Like in terms of this virtual work environment where we have people in the offices, sometimes at clients, sometimes working at home, sometimes working at our university down in Texas. Like, how do you make all of that work and how could we adapt it? If you're a more traditional company whose model is built on people showing up in an office, sitting in a cubicle, doing work, like, what are the elements of flexibility that we've tried to put in place that could be applied by clients? So, it's been curious to see those types of inquiries come in. Obviously, clients see something and observe something in our folks that they realize there's something that we should maybe consider and model and take what we can and apply it in our circumstances.

Love that. How do we measure it? Because you brought that up earlier too, and I think that is a really valid point. If these things are important, and I think it's unmistakable that this has gotten on the actual radar screen now, I'm hoping that it stays on the radar screen, that it's not just a blip till the world is different. I don't think it's ever going to be the way it was, so it's just going to continue to be different. But how do we measure, do you think, some of this?

I'm actually concerned about something which is the opposite of what you're asking about, which is that we get overly focused on measurement. I could go into our intranet site and look at my health and wellness dashboard, it'll tell you the number of days I've stayed in a hotel. It'll tell you the number of flights I've taken this year. There's no shortage of measurements.

Right.

But I think if you get too focused on the measurements and not the outcome, then you can get yourself like off in the wrong place. We have historically low turnover and people that are delivering really good results for clients that are satisfied with Deloitte. Those are outcomes. And you can look at the inputs that drive to those outcomes, but I think You're better off focusing on the outcomes. I don't think you can overlook the inputs, and I think my own opinion is that they only matter at the extremes. If somebody is utilized at a client location seven days a week, twenty hours a day, they're traveling seven days a week away from their families and friends. They're not doing anything healthy for themselves as a person. I mean, all of that data is available, and you can see like that's somebody who's probably not in a good place, and we need to like. Reach out to them and understand, is it just a client situation that it's like that for a matter of weeks, or is it something that's going to continue and we have to intervene in some way to help them? Once at the extreme, I think it matters, but I'm more concerned about making sure the outcomes are there. There's no shortage of ways to measure the inputs.

Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your The best way to take your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Yeah. And I'm so glad you put it that way because I, I feel like there's a good medium between the quantitative and the qualitative because the outcomes being engagement, less absenteeism, or fewer accidents on the job, other measures to look at the KPI or those things and saying, okay, our engagement survey, for example, this year is better. Our attrition rate has— and we've closed the gap on that. And I think that's super important. But you're right. If somebody is just— if we were analyzing a stock or a company by way of its chart as a publicly traded entity, we might say, what are these The bloops on the screen tell us, is the trend positive or negative? And it may well be that just some of that dashboard can be utilized in that way to say, hey, listen, it could just be this is the time of year, like classic accountant stuff. My accountant was always miserable between February and May. That's just, I knew I couldn't even ask him a question then. So we would set up all of our strategic planning and stuff like in October or November after the other time of the year when he was miserable, which was usually between September and the end of October, right? So you just go, okay. There are times a year when it's just certain things maybe are just seasonal or what have you. But I think if we can look for the signs, for the trends of their going down a path that wouldn't ultimately be good for them, good for their families, their kids, or their other loved ones, that those things would ultimately translate into how they showed up in their work, for sure. I think that's proactive.

We're doing both. But like I said, I, I'm not worried about our ability to measure like the details. I'm more worried, like you said, are they, is, is their engagement score up? Is our retention rate high? Like the results that we get for clients, the satisfaction data that we get, are, are they showing up and delivering the results that clients want? That's what I really, you know, wanna focus on personally.

Got it. Yeah, that makes a world of sense. I'd love to get a sense, just because you defined it really well, readiness and outlook to thrive. Is there a place in your life that you could pinpoint, a pivot point if you will, where you, Larry, said, or you look back now and you go, that was a pivotal time for me. I learned something about my readiness, or I developed greater readiness or greater outlook to thrive in that experience. Or has it just been like you're filling a bucket one drop at a time kind of thing?

If I had to pinpoint one, I think I would have to say it was going to graduate school. So look, I'd spent a lot of my life and a lot of my early career being told that I was a top performer. And then you go to graduate school, and in my particular case, you go many months without any feedback whatsoever. And so you live in this period of anxiety where you don't know what your performance is and you're surrounded by people that are smarter than anybody you've ever met. And then all of a sudden it raises a lot of questions about who you're competing against, who's in your class, who's in your section, and all those sort of things. And then I think you find out when you get out, everybody's by and large unbelievably successful. But it was a period of time, a 2-year period of time that was incredibly intense. And you're— I feel like I was put to a test and stronger because of it.

Yeah. You know what? I want to use that. Love to take that example and apply it, layer it on the time that we're living in right now. Because, and I want to get your take on this, it just feels like anxiety levels are at all-time highs for many people. And given the place we are in the economic cycle, it feels like there's more anxiety and more unknown now and will be goingly for some time in that space. What in your experience as a grad student Can you look at and go, this is applicable to how people might, if you were teaching a course in how to develop readiness and an outlook to thrive in the midst of uncertainty, unknowns, and anxiety, what would people be able to do that you did?

I would think about a couple of things. I see when there's uncertainty or even adversity, people tend to focus on the adversity as opposed to what options that situation creates professionally, mergers, acquisitions, and restructuring practice. And I've been through 6 bankruptcies. I think you could be in a position, and that's the worst, probably the worst possible position for a company to be in, both in terms of like the morale of the workforce, the leaders, that their position is in a bankruptcy. But at the same time, as you would know as an attorney, it gives you a chance to basically shred your contracts, reevaluate your assets, your people. So it really is a chance even in the most adverse professional circumstances to rethink what are the possibilities and to think about it that way, as opposed to being downtrodden and thinking that the only place we could go is down further in even a bad situation like that. I think another thing that I see is both people and sometimes our clients, they fail to recognize that you personally are better because of the adversity you face. Like I always tell our consultants who wring their hands about, oh my gosh, we're in this economic downturn and clients are even more discriminating about whether they're going to hire consultants or not because we're the ultimate discretionary expense. about it, like when you go through whatever it turns out to be, 16 or 18 months, you're going to be a stronger consultant because of that, because you had to face the scrutiny of clients and demonstrate the value that you're doing during a tough time when it was tough for them to scrape up the money to pay us. And I guess the third thing that I feel about those situations where you're either uncertain or in a tough spot is you need to have naysayers who are balanced by somebody who's a positive influence, not a Pollyanna where you're just ignoring the facts and the circumstances, but somebody who's got to, in the midst of that uncertainty, kind of point out like, wait a minute, let's look at this Another way or suggest like alternatives.

I love that. And I'd say just as you did before, even go the flip the script on that and balance the positive people. I know this is gonna sound strange, but balance the folks that are always seeing the glass as half full with some people that see the glass differently. Because, and you must have known this intuitively, I started my practice in law was in bankruptcy. So I handled a lot of Chapter 11 work, reorganization work at the outset of my career, which was really interesting because I really got to see where things went sideways. My teeth in business, learning how businesses went bust, which was fascinating and devastating in so many respects. And yet coming out of that, seeing those organizations and leaders emerge from those really tough times was actually, in fact, maybe high-water marks in my career, in my law career, because I would come out of meetings, meeting of creditors or something like that, or sometimes adversary proceedings with people Senior levels in, in corporate leadership and organization. And sometimes they come outta that room and they just gimme a hug because they're real. And I, I just, sounds strange, right? Hug your lawyer. Just the whole concept of hugging a lawyer is weird, right? But there was such relief, the sense that the relief from what new start was created, what new opportunity. In fact, you know, there's 3 numerous chapters of the Bankruptcy Code. The Chapter 7 is the liquidation. It's the complete fresh start in the Yeah. The '11 is the reorg, and that's a different kind of a fresh start. But there is, I think, this wonderful interplay within where you have people that if they see the world as too one way or the other, there's an issue there because you have blind spots. Because right now we know there are layoffs, there's layoffs that have already been announced, there's more layoffs that are coming. And maybe we're gonna wind this up in just a second here, but I'm gonna put you in a scenario. You are mentoring some young folks that are coming into the consultancy. And they're saying to you, hey Larry, all we're hearing is we're just getting all this pushback when we talk about the services that, and the need that we see for the services. But we're just, people are tightening their belt. We're like you say, that first level of discretionary, cut that out kind of thing. How do you coach or mentor those individuals? You know, even from the standpoint of how you market or sell that service, because a lot of people other than your people are hearing those very same things or have that Sure. I

guess my counseling would be, number one, don't extrapolate from your circumstances to the entire realm of consulting or even our firm. So

don't project.

Don't project. Like even in a downturn, there are plenty of like services that clients do buy. And some things that we've had to do because of the circumstance over the past few years is to really substantially invest in innovation. So there's a conventional model where you bill a certain number of hours for a certain amount of services. And we've looked beyond that to build build solutions that clients will buy over time. And we've looked at new and innovative services as well. So from your perspective, it might look that way, but if you look more broadly across our firm or others that are doing the same sorts of things, I think that then you start to get a different vantage point and a different perspective on the downturn. Another thing that I think is a curious thing that I would counsel folks is, it is odd that in the face of all the uncertainty we've had, the pandemic, these consulting firms continue to grow and be unbelievably resilient. So in a way, there's stability in the situation that you're in. And it also teaches you important lessons. As I said earlier, if you're dealing with clients that are going through difficult times, if you're at the client and you're one of the client executives, you're going to go through that 3 or 4 times during your career. But if you're a consultant and you're going 3, 4 projects per year into difficult circumstances at a client, you're developing a bit of acumen and perspective on what does challenging look like? And you have that ability to show your ability to be positive and to see the possibilities even in tough situations. So they're actually putting themselves in a firm like ours where they're getting good experiences to build that resilience that clients really value.

Yeah. It may have been the author of Good to Great. Was that Jim Collins? Is that who that was? I'm trying to—

It was.

Yeah. I think in an interview I read about him, he said, the funny thing is that chaos is the rule and Whatever the opposite of chaos is, calm, peace, the quiet, calm seas. That's the exception to the rule. And I think that's a thing that people don't often really get. If you look at any point in time in history, just go back in 5-year increments or 10-year increments, and we could do it very easily. We were thinking that the world was falling apart in 2008 when Lehman Brothers goes bust. And at the 2005, there was a NASDAQ bust that was the end of the world. Right. In 2000, there was the dot-com bust, and that was the end of the world. You just go back. And so chaos is the norm, and it's similar And this is a funny little thing here. I'm going to just, I'm amusing myself, but there's a JL Collins who wrote a book, I believe called A Simple Path to Wealth. And everybody should get this book. I think it's a brilliant book for your kids to have, for anybody at any age, honestly. But the whole concept here is that if you simply invest in an asset class like stocks, for example, over a period of time, 30 to 40 years, this is what it looks like up and to the right. That's what it looks like. But if you look at it in 5 or 10-year increments, it's going to be one world-ending event after another. The sky will be falling 4 or 5 or 6 times in your work life. And so in your investment life, if every time you're trying to avoid getting crushed by the world falling on you, what you will end up doing is not having very much of an investment nest egg at the end. But if you simply were to recognize that's the norm, as Jim Collins said, and not get wigged out by it every time or try to move ahead or react, you know, in the face of, then you get that long-term ROI from that sort of steady So I think what you're saying makes a world of sense. There's opportunities in every scenario. If you can learn or be led to see those things, to innovate, as you said, then not only does the firm that's providing those services have a very change-proof way of dealing with that disruption, but the people and the organizations that, that, that organization serves also gets to benefit from that, that change-proof approach. I was able to throw in the title of my book there, buddy. I'm sorry about that.

Beautiful. I do I think what you said is something that I would offer as advice as well, which is you do need to have perspective. There's plenty of consultants and plenty of clients that we work with. They didn't live through the Great Depression. Many of them would not have lived through the dot-com bust in the 2000s. There's even a few that wouldn't remember 2007, 2008, all that. And you have to remember when you're in rooms with these people, whether they're like consultants or clients, all of that history that we remember, the oil shocks of the 1970s, that, that's not in their frame of reference. So of course the world looks like it's going to fall apart today. Because you don't have that perspective. That would be the last piece of advice I would give them. Take a breath. It's actually been worse than you can imagine in this case.

Take a beat because we're going to get through this, but it's how you get through it makes a big difference. And I don't think you need to get through it white-knuckling the whole experience. Maybe that's because you and I have gray hair when I let it run. So that could be it. Yeah,

that could

be it. Larry, I, I so loved getting together with you again, man. It was, we enjoyed each other's company that, that time we, we were together on that gig. So it's just terrific to be able to reconvene the meeting, so to speak.

Yeah, thank you. It's so good to reconnect as well in this format other than over dinner.

So my last question is usually just about your own personal rituals, your personal resilience. Is there one thing that you do on a ritual basis that is go-to reset for I

would say some form of physical activity. So in the summer, like long-distance bicycling, it's a chance to really reflect, to get some quiet time to think about what's important. And back to this theme of resilience and being change-proof, you're physically preparing yourself for whatever you face and whatever circumstances you're in. So it's probably that for me.

Beautiful. For me, it's getting in the ocean or in the pool even, but not as

attractive to do that in Chicago, no matter the season.

No, I don't think we

can match your waves and we certainly can't match your weather.

Yeah, that's why we made our big move. But we have other things which we won't get into. I'll just say, for those of you out there that have enjoyed this conversation and someone that could benefit from it, maybe there is somebody right now that's, that is white-knuckling the world, the environment we're living in. They have just health concern about what the road ahead looks like, where it might be that there's opportunity and they want to be thinking opportunistically. This might be a great conversation to share with them. We'd love to get your feedback as well, and you can drop Drop any comment in for us at adamarkel.com/podcast. I tend to answer all those myself, so there's no bot there. It's gonna be me. And if it's not me, then it'll be an announced member of the team, that kind of thing as well. And of course, when we think about resilience, it's a snapshot for us. That's just what our experience tells us, that in a moment, if you're measuring it mentally, emotionally, physically, and even spiritually, there'll be a sort of a raw score. And it's really a curious thing to check out, just what your current state of resilience looks like, you can go to rankmyresilience.com and get an assessment of that in the moment. And you can take that as often as you want just to see and track exactly how resilient you are. That's rankmyresilience.com, and you can get your own scores there. Larry, again, thanks so much for being a guest on the show today. Of course, there'll be show notes. So if you wanna find out more about Larry's practice and the consultancy that, that he is involved At Deloitte. You can click on the links that are in the show notes to get more information right there. I can tell you that in the organizations that I've run, we've always made great use of consultants because, and I think you used the word I would choose to use in this instance, Larry, is perspective. We are so often inside of an organization, we don't even realize to what degree we're operating within these 4 walls. Sometimes they're pretty narrow and sometimes they're expansive, but often we just can't see what we can't see. Bringing in others that have been around the block, have seen, you know, a cycle or two and have the perspective on what the opportunities might be in the current environment, I think is absolutely vital. And I know that's the work that you're committed to doing. So thank you for that, Larry.

Sure. Thank you.

I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation with Larry Hitchcock today. He brings a very different perspective in some respects, being a consultant, being somebody that's routinely being deployed in organizations to problem solve, to create and find creative solutions to situations, such as in times of great challenge and disruption, like the times that we are clearly living in, not just because we're in a time of change, but because the winds of change are blowing ever more strongly. I think we are feeling it more than perhaps I've ever noticed us feeling it. And I say us because it's not just me. It's the members of our team as well as the organizations that I have the great pleasure and blessing of serving on a routine basis. I mean, I'm frequently a keynote speaker at different industry organization association meetings as well as within the companies themselves that are looking to develop deeper levels of resilience within their teams. And so I, I have this great honor of, of being embedded in situations where I get access to how people are really feeling and how they're thinking. Often I have that pleasure because as part of being a resilience keynote speaker or a mental health keynote speaker or a work-life balance keynote speaker, any of those kind of topics that I routinely am brought in to address, we deploy a resilience assessment tool ahead of time. And that's pretty remarkable because a great percentage of the folks that I'm gonna have this meeting with will take this assessment a couple of weeks ahead of time, sometimes just a few days ahead of time, then are able to collect that data and aggregate information, present that information when I'm with them, which is something that calls for transparency, calls for a certain level of vulnerability on the part of the people who are doing that. The good news is the assessment is only 3 minutes. That's probably the best news. It's just a short assessment, 16 questions, but ultimately lead us to be able to see where people are strong and where there are gaps in their resiliency mentally, emotionally, physically, and even spiritually. Of course, I invite all of you to take your own resilience assessment, get your own baseline score in those 4 areas. It is a very much a snapshot of this moment in time. If you'd like to do that, you can go to rankmyresilience.com, rankmyresilience.com, get your own assessment. Larry and I got to talk about that today, starting with how he defines resilience from his perspective as a consultant. A partner with Deloitte, somebody that is just like me, dropped into organizations routinely to talk about what's challenging them, what opportunities exist for their own transformation, their own growth, how it is that things have been working and where they haven't been working. And I loved the definition that he started out with. He said that resilience for him is readiness, readiness and an outlook to thrive. And I hadn't heard it, the phrase that way before. And, and I was able to dig into that with him today to get his answers on things like, should we be measuring our resilience? What does it look like? And he pushed back to say that not all things should be quantitative, that we should be looking at it from a qualitative standpoint in that we should be focusing on the outcomes. And the, some of the outcomes that we're both interested in is higher levels of engagement, less absenteeism, less injury on the job, less attrition, less turnover, keeping your talent, attracting additional talent and engaging that talent to be productive. Those are the kind of outcomes that determine in many ways, or are a signpost, let's say, of whether an organization is resilient. And obviously, there's a lot more detail in that when we look at individually how people are actually faring, how they're doing in times of great anxiousness, like the times we're living in right now, where there are so many unknowns, there's so many things that are uncertain. And how that often shows up in the workplace. And so I think it was really key to me today to hear Larry talk about how he encourages and mentors others around him to be thinking about the opportunities and seeing the opportunities and to be innovative, especially when there are headwinds, especially when we're seeing more signs of recession or more signs that things might get tougher in the next little bit here before they might get less tough, I suppose. One of the things he said, which I thought was really interesting, was that he thought that we've got to balance out the naysayers inside organizations with people who are more positive, people who are able to see more clearly the things that— there's always tremendous opportunity when there's fear, when there's inefficiency, when there's inefficiency that's caused by our reaction to living with uncertainty or living in that fear space. And I countered what he said to talk about how we sometimes have to balance the positivity, the people in our organizations that just see things as always positive. They're always the half-full glass people. Sometimes that positivity can even be toxic in a workforce as well. And we've gotta balance that with people who are more pragmatic at times or more realistic at times, or are the people who are Are willing to be truth tellers. Sometimes even if that truth telling is, feels as though we're focused on, on what's not working and what the challenges are. That equation I think is, is really valuable. I love the fact that we were able to untangle that together. We were able to dig into that a bit. I love the conversation. I hope you do as well. If there's somebody that you think would really benefit from listening to this, hearing what we had to noodle on and dig into, chew on today, please feel free to share this episode with somebody that you know that could benefit. We love the reviews, and you can leave a comment, of course, at adamarkel.com/podcast. And if you would be kind enough to leave a review, those 5-star reviews are, are really helpful, and you'd be doing us a great favor in doing that as well. If you feel called to it, could make the time, we'd so appreciate it. I love this conversation. I hope you did as well. And again, I'll look forward to seeing you in the next episode of the Change Proof Podcast. Thank you. Thank you again.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience and become change-proof. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcast. For more resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change-proof teams, visit adammarkel.com.