Leadership Resilience Strategies With Tom Freeley

Life happens, and not always the way we expect it to. Every single day we face change, stress, and uncertainty. What if you could learn to thrive no matter what life throws your way? Resilience expert Adam Markel and his inspiring guests explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change-proof.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Welcome to the Change Proof Podcast. I am your host, Adam Markel, and I'm so excited for the gentleman that I have on the show today. His name is Tom Freely. He is a seasoned professional with more than 34 years of experience in commercial, condominium, and homeowner association management. Tom is also an experienced veteran in customer service, managing and leading teams in high-end luxury associations. His industry experience also includes CEO and positions of management For luxury high-rise condominiums, industry boards, and legislative committees. Further, Tom's experience includes disaster planning, emergency response, warranty reconstruction, and major loss restoration. Personally, Tom and his wife Lynn have been involved in a number of charitable organizations and philanthropic endeavors. He believes in giving back to his industry and their community. I know Tom quite well. I've worked with him, and he is just a special person. You're gonna learn a great deal. You're gonna enjoy this conversation. So sit back. Thank you. And get ready for my conversation with Tom Freely. Hey there, Tom. So it's fun to hear somebody read your bio. I think I get a kick out of it, like hearing somebody sort of give the short or the long— well, the short version of the CV. I appreciate when somebody's reading a long bio for me, it's truly like agonizing. I like feel so uncomfortable. Hard. So I didn't see any signs of discomfort just now from you, but what I want to ask you out of the gate is what is one thing that is not part of bio, your history and career, et cetera, that you would love for people to know about you? Something that's not included in your standard bio.

Oh, that's an intriguing question. That could go in a lot of different directions. I mean, a bio is a bio. You try to take 35 or 40 years of work experience and cram it into one paragraph, and you just kind of go, I can't do that. I mean, back in the day, I was doing resumes, even just for a resume for this position 5 and a half years ago, 6 years ago, I guess, by now. I was trying to redo my resume and I had like 5 or 6 pages. Like, I know just as a professional, you can't create 5 or 6 pages of, of this craziness. So it's, it's very difficult to take a lot of professional career experience, cram it into a paragraph. That said, one thing that's not on my bio, yeah, I don't put a lot of personal stuff in, in my bio. That's just, you know, a lot of, I did in this one just because, you know, I'm married to just an amazing person. And, um, I always add in at the bottom who my family really is. A lot of people think that I'm an extrovert. When I met you, I get on stage in front of 1,200 people and do my thing, and you get on stage in front of 1,200 people and do your thing. And then I spend 2 and a half days doing nothing but shaking hands and kissing babies as a host and an emcee of a large event. But in actuality, I'm an introvert. When I walk away from that, my wife and I just take some quiet time. We sit there and just chitchat just between the two of us. I'm comfortable walking into— I've trained myself, I should say, to be comfortable in pretty much any atmosphere where I can walk into and at least have a semi-coherent conversation with pretty much anybody in a room. I'm uncomfortable a lot of the time. I'm actually an introvert. Most people disagree with strongly, but in actuality, that's probably the one thing about me that nobody really knows except for my wife and my children.

Yeah. You know, it's so funny. I wouldn't have guessed that about you. I don't know whether you would have guessed that about me either, because I will refer to myself in term— in a— using a term that a friend of mine shared with me some years ago. And she said, you're a situational extrovert. I thought, oh, that makes— right, borrow it, pass it, you know, like bring it, right? I like that term. So I think it is in fact that situation that draws, draws it out, sort of call to service or call to being in support of other people. I've learned how to get over my tendency to be more comfortable Alone or in a small group of folks. And maybe when I was younger, that might've even been shyness. Could have used that term when I was 12 years old, but—

Oh, absolutely. For me, the same way. I mean, candidly, till I'd met my wife, Lynn, I've had— was a very shy person and struggled in a lot of social settings and things like that. And then one day she told me, which really till this day just kind of makes me kind of go, what? She told me, wow, I never thought I'd met somebody, ever meet somebody who has a bigger personality than I do. I just kind of went, I'm sorry, what? Who are you talking about? That's certainly not me. But I'm also a believer in self-evaluation. So when I hear things, I try not to react to anything. I always try to respond to things. And response usually takes a little bit of reflection to try to understand what was just told to me or what experience I just had, and then turn around and then I can properly respond, opposed to just reacting to whatever a comment was. So I took some time and did some reflection after the first time she told me that. I had to actually argue with myself on my introvert/extrovert process or thought process because she's right. I mean, I do have a very big personality. When I speak at introvert, I'm— I speak more conversationally, more situationally. I could walk into a dance club, go to Belly Up in Solana Beach quite often, love the place, and I'll be the one out in the middle of the floor just dancing crazy. And she's like, Tom, just— But we'll walk out of there and meet a bunch of people and I'll be the quietest one in the crowd. It's just the way— there's no logic to it, but it's who I am and it seems to work for me. And my wife hasn't killed me yet, so it's pretty— not obviously not too bad for her either.

Well, I know where to find you now. I mean, so does everybody else. This, the club that Tom is referring to is in Solana Beach, California. It's this great, great little club called the Belly Up. We know, actually know the owners of the club only because our Youngest daughter and their youngest, they went to school together. They were in cheerleading together. They did all a bunch of stuff together. It was neat. And that's a great place on the right evening to dance. They have other music there. So depending on the night, dancing would not be appropriate for some of the music that's in there. But they have a great diverse lineup. And that club has been around since the '70s. That's—

Long time. They've been around a long time. We don't—

I always wondered whether in that Bruce Springsteen song— and I'm not— I mean, I love Bruce Springsteen. I'm not like a mega fan or anything, but I started listening to his music when I was just a kid. because my best friend's older brother was into him. That's the only reason we knew about him. And I forget what album it's on. It might be actually in Greetings from Asbury Park, where there's— I think it's in the song Rosalita, something like that. There's a crazy— there's a little place in Southern California where they play guitars all night and all day. I've always wondered whether that's— he's referring to the Belly Up, you know.

That'd be interesting. That would be a very good trivia question to find out.

That's a shout out to the community here. Like, if anybody knows the answer to that, Like, please just like throw your answer at adamarkel.com/podcast and then just let Tom and I know if you know the answer to that question.

And a shameless plug, go to Belly Up and go see Atomic Groove. Shameless plug for what I think is a great high-energy band.

They are Atomic Groove. I think they're Friday nights typically or something like that. So yeah. I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof Podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices And rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. So anyway, back on track here.

Sorry about that.

No, no, this is you and me together. This is perfect. So, Tom, you said when you were answering that question at the beginning, you said, you know, about your bio that some years ago, maybe 6 years ago or so, you were working on your bio, you were reworking your bio. So I'm gonna follow the breadcrumbs to the point where you were working on your bio. What was it that led, or what was the pivot, sort of, if there's a pivot story behind why you were working on your bio 6 years ago that led you into this CEO role at CACM? I would love to know that better.

Well, while I was editing my bio/resume, To actually apply for this role, roughly say, I think the application process started about almost to date, 6 years ago. I was in a place— our industry is very challenging. You have to be extremely resilient to be in this industry, which is homeowner association management, to clarify for your audience. After being in this industry for 35, 40-ish years, I was getting to a burnout ratio. You have the industry in and of itself has a high level of burnout ratios. So I was getting to that point. I knew I needed to make a change in my career in some capacity or another. I did not know what that was. This opportunity came to me, and what a lot of people don't know is I did not actually initially want to put my name in the hat. I actually went home and spoke to my wife about it, and she asked me, well, why aren't you putting your name in for this role? She kind of went, well, what do I know about running a nonprofit association? She said, well, every homeowner association is a nonprofit association, and you know anything about Actually, the homeowner association or a trade association operations, but you didn't know everything about the industry. I just kind of went, "Well, that's actually a very valid point." That kind of started down the road of seven or eight months of six, seven, eight months of interviews and going through the process. And I was I happened to be at a good friend's beach house in Newport Beach when I got the call that that I was awarded this position. And I remember. hanging up the phone and just— and I won't repeat on the podcast my language, but I walked out of the bedroom that I was in and my good friend's daughter was standing in the hallway and I just kind of went, ah, so sorry. Luckily, she's an adult. She was like, okay, really, Tom? Don't worry about it. But it was an exciting time. But going back to your question, it was going through the bio, going through a resume, and then obviously whenever you start a new role, You have to modify your previous bios and it just takes a lot of time to cram all this experience into a paragraph or 2 in a bio. I've read 100 bios in my life introducing people and so on. And you're right, taking a long bio just to read the long bio makes me feel uncomfortable, but having somebody else read a long bio about me makes me seriously uncomfortable. And so I just kind of was like, I got to find a way of shortening this up and cramming it in. So hopefully it's not too bad.

So you mentioned resilience. It's a great lead-in. I don't know that you did that on purpose, but it's definitely like a softball for me, which is good since I'm interviewing you. I'm going to put it back to you though. Where have you had to be the most resilient in your career to this point? And has it been in the life before you're taking on this role, being given, awarded this role? I love the way you said that, awarded the role, and then you immediately spontaneously celebrated. So I get this sense. I think everybody listening to this gets a sense you were quite joyful about it. Maybe give us a resilience, an answer to the question of where you've had to be most resilient, both before and after that event.

All right. Well, before, it's easier to address. Well, it's easier to address the after because I have a very specific challenge that we had to be very resilient through. But the resiliency before is, like I said, this is a very, very challenging industry. I was working for a management company in New Rochelle, New York. I got headhunted to take my career into Manhattan for a very large company. I was thrilled. This was the coolest thing. And after the first board meeting, felt very confident that, okay, now I've taken my rental hat off, put my condo co-op commercial hat on, and started a whole new career. It takes a lot of resilience just to start a new chapter or a new career. But then after my like 10th board meeting, one of the board members just ate me alive verbally. Just destroyed me. And I just went right back at him because I was a New Yorker, just destroyed him. Got back to the office, found out that I could have lost my job on that spot and just kind of went, ah, so I can't actually react to those things. I have to learn how to just keep my mouth shut and take it. And you go, well, you know, there's ways of working through those challenging conversations. So I spent many, many years throughout my career learning how to be resilient, learning how to not react to things and be more responsive than reaction. If you don't mind, I'll tap on my mentor at this point because it fits into this category. Very well.

Please

shout out to my— well, they give names.

Yeah, of course.

He may not realize that he was a mentor. It wasn't like we sat down and said, can you be my mentor or whatever? But his name is Richard Deutsch. He's an author out of Armagh, New York. He was my senior at the time. He's now a successful author. I strongly encourage people to read his books. And they're all based, oddly enough, they're all— shameless plug— they're all based in where he lives in that general area. But he was probably the smartest guy I knew in the industry, let alone just in general. And he took tremendous time to carry me literally through a lot of the processes of career that at the time I didn't understand. I was still going through the process of learning the ins and outs of community management, high-rise management. And he was calm, cool, and collected through the whole thing just for years, just walked me through every little step. Just a great guy. So, but then next resilience was we relocated. Wife at the time was an equestrian.

I want to pause you there for just a second. And the reason is because the situation that you described where you almost, or could have, let's say theoretically could have lost your job. I think that's a thing that a lot of people deal with and maybe don't deal with effectively. Maybe they've also gotten away with it the way you did in that moment, or maybe they didn't. Maybe it cost them their job or something. Or maybe it's a situation that's literally ongoing for them right this second. So I really want to unpack that just with you a little bit when it comes to how you define what resilience meant or looked like going forward, meaning with the assistance of your mentor, what you might have learned. Tell us, share a little bit about what that looks like or is like for you mentally, emotionally, physically.

Well, there, there, you know, resilience to me is trying to cope with tough situations and Standing up on the other side, getting knocked down, getting back up. A lot of people take that very hard in their— especially in their careers. But like I said, I do believe in self-reflection. At the time, I was reacting to a situation that was, you know, somebody was confronting me aggressively. At the time, I was young, I was aggressive, living in Manhattan, working in Manhattan. So I gave the pushback. After meeting with Richard and going through The conversations and training, if you will, or mentoring, if you will, from his perspective, I then had to go back and reevaluate, really think through, okay, so I could in the future, this is not going to be the last time somebody's going to confront me because that kind of goes with this industry. So I had the need to learn how to adjust and pivot and be responsive and not be reactive. And that was kind of one of the first training, if you will, for me to learn that being responsive is far more appropriate. And it helps both me, it helps both the other person who I'm responding to. It helps reduce temper, helps reduce the temperature in the room if you just respond. So if I've learned nothing in my career, if I've learned anything in my career, it would be to be responsive as opposed to be reactive. And I help preach that as often as I can.

I came upon some research recently that I found fascinating, which said that when emotions are high, when people are very highly charged and feeling stress, their intelligence goes down by 13 IQ points. 13 points is a lot of IQ points. So you think about even just where, where we are in our world today and why there are certain things that you just kind of think, I can't believe that's happening, or I can't believe people are reacting in the way they're reacting. It's because they literally are dumber. We don't realize And perhaps even as a society, we are a little dumber, or maybe not so little. And that's just a result of how our bodies respond to stress, but extreme stress or feeling threat, because there's a biochemical change which we don't need to get into, but it—

Oh no, I agree.

Yeah,

I agree. I've tried to tell people at the same time, and I only do it because I experience it. When I get very upset or very angry, people start to talk really fast. And when you talk really fast, your brain's not getting a proper amount of oxygen. And when your brain's not getting a proper amount of oxygen, your brain's not working in conjunction with your mouth, and you're saying things before your brain's saying, don't say that.

This is perfect because it's what I wanted to ask you about. So in the moment today, if let's say you were in the situation that you found yourself in back then, what would be different physically speaking? Like, what would you— or mentally? What would be different for you in that situation today?

After many, many years in this industry and having many, many, many countless situations that are exactly the same, some worse, I've learned and taught myself to be responsive and not to take whatever that aggression is coming at me, at least in the professional world, and try to narrow it down and try to say, look, I understand what's going on. Help me understand what exactly is causing you This aggression and let's see if we can't figure it out. And if we can't, let's take a pause and meet back tomorrow and kind of rehash some of this so we can both have calmer heads. To me, it's a simple fact of being responsive instead of reactionary. If you respond to people and no matter what the situation is, if you're responsive and not reactionary, probably you're gonna have a brighter future, a brighter ending to that one con— uh, confrontation than you would if you just the opposite and start reacting to everything.

Absolutely. Yeah, I think the power of the pause— this is something you've had a shameless plug or two, so I'll do the same— to say, you know, like in the book Change Proof, we talk about this pause, ask, choose process. The power of the pause is really undervalued, I think, by a lot of people. They don't understand how powerful it is to pause. In fact, in radio, the pause, the dead air time, is such a taboo thing. And I think a lot of people think somehow or another when it comes to their response time to people, uh, that a pause is also some sign of something that they're not comfortable with. But that pause, especially as you say, when the purpose of the pause is to actually evaluate, to not just pause with no intended, you know, with no outcome or no agenda. My agenda when I pause is to take a breath. It's to allow my brain to catch up. To what might be happening in my body on a biochemical level, like the cortisol, the adrenaline is flowing. I feel threatened. I feel somebody's somebody's going after me. I also grew up in New York. It's like there's some DNA thing that's reacting ready ready to fight back, etc. But when you allow yourself and your body, your brain to catch up with your body, you might find that there are some other options available, including more evaluative questions to ask to understand as the word is. Used a lot today to express empathy, or at least to try to have some empathy and compassion, what it's like to be in that other person's shoes, etc. Or to sit quietly to listen. Or as you said, to even take the— you know, if you're being abused, or if there's a situation where you feel like you don't know what to do, but it doesn't feel good, whatever you're experiencing feels like crap, you could just say, hey, listen, is it possible for us to take a pause here and come back to this conversation an hour, A day, a week, you know, something. Next year. Yeah. Let's table this for calendar 2030.

Yeah. No, I'm a firm believer in taking the pause. I think it's a very smart avenue and it's easier than anything else. It's easier to just kind of go, look, this isn't— we're obviously miscommunicating in some way. I'm not saying it's you, I'm not saying it's me, but obviously there's some miscommunication going on. Let's Call it a day and let's kind of revisit this conversation after we both have just a little bit of time to go through what we just talked about and see if the next conversation could be a little more professional or calmer.

So the resiliency theme, as you said, there's that event. What of more recent vintage would you say has caused you to lean on your resiliency?

So as a CEO, leaders always has to have resiliency. There's always challenges. I'd say when I took this role and COVID hit was probably the absolute hardest challenge in trying to be resilient that I could hit throughout my whole career. Specifically, I mean, everybody says, well, it was COVID, we all had to pivot, we all had to, you know, and I get that. My situation's no different, just my circumstance was a little different. The last seminars that we were happy to have you at, at the Disneyland Convention Center, was on March 20th of, or I'm sorry, March 12th of 2020. And March 11th at like 11:30 at night, the governor came out and stated that conventions or groups of 500 or more people was now prohibited. Okay, well, we— it was about 3 weeks too late for me, but I kept trying to negotiate getting out of this law seminar because I knew that this was, from a health perspective, that this was going to be a challenge. But the contract negotiations were very difficult. to get out of. The people on the other side of the table were basically taking the position, we understand that there's a pandemic, we understand, but we have all the resources to protect your people. We have all, all the resources to be able to provide the services that we are contracted to provide. We want to move forward. I just kind of went, okay, so we're going to move forward. We played a little bit of chicken, if you will. I didn't want to take a hardline position to cancel the contract, which I had the right to do. But I would have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process. And that was just not prudent in any business sense, let alone for a nonprofit organization. So we moved forward. Well, we found out at like 5:30 in the morning when I got up to start preparing for this event that the governor made this mandate. So I immediately started making phone calls at 5:30 in the morning to go, so now if we move forward, we're completely in violation of state mandates and so on and so on. And the audiences— the audience that you saw at Disney was that audience plus a little bit. So it's about 1,200 people that spend a lot of money to book hotel rooms, travel, get to Disney. The industry partners spend— some of them spend a fortune putting together their booths and hiring contractors and designers to come in and create this fantastic atmosphere in a 10 by 10, 10 by 20 space. And I had to get on stage And basically tell everybody, how was breakfast? Well, everything's great. Good. I'm glad you enjoyed it. You all need to go home now. And you could have heard a pin drop in a room of 1,200 people. I looked around the room and I kind of went, no, I'm really not kidding. I'm serious. The governor came out last night and did this, this, this. And I was like, please go to the front desk, check out of your rooms, work it out with Disney on your rooms, and we'll see you again. But, and at that time, I didn't know if this organization was going to succeed or make it through the tail end of the pandemic, but I had to be resilient to be able to carry the organization forward. I could have stuck my head in the sand and just kind of went, well, this kind of sucks. But yeah, it's just not who I am. So I just, I attacked it. And thankfully, all of my career training and learning and self-reflection gave me the wherewithal to be able to be resilient beyond anything I thought I was capable of doing and solving problem after problem after problem for a couple of weeks post that one event. And then obviously for the rest of that year and the following years, that was probably the hardest challenge I've professionally had in my career.

You must have witnessed a lot of great leadership and probably some not so great leadership during that period of time. And maybe, maybe without sort of naming names there, can you think of an example of what great leadership looked like for you through that period and maybe Even if it comes to mind something that was not great leadership as well.

On my end or what I experienced?

Well, what you experienced. I mean, it could be on your end, but might also just, as you say, been an observation of others or other situations.

So obviously, we, in a grouping of 1,200 people that spent a lot of money to go there and now have to just get up and leave, literally with no idea how this is going to pan out, whether they're going to get refunds, not get refund. I mean, there was just There were so many unanswered questions. So naturally we fielded, for a couple of days sitting on site, we fielded a whole lot of different perspectives, very aggressive to, Tom, we get it. Good luck. Let us know if we can help. And certainly without naming names, there was a lot of aggression and understandably, but understandably meaning, you know, I get their perspective. I don't understand the aggression side of it because it's not like I had a whole lot of choices here. Putting that aside, I understood the perspective, so I did the best that I could to just look. I walk it through calmly. Stayed. I had to stay calm through the whole process. We worked it out with with all the different stakeholders over the course of that year, and financially we ended the year on a positive note, which was a shock to me that we were able to do that. And positive revenue during that period of time for a nonprofit is just unheard of. It was success. It was very successful, but it was a very very. Very, very challenging year.

Yeah.

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 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.

You mentioned a mentor in the past. I'd love to— do you mentor others in your current role? Is that a thing that you take on in an intentional way?

I take it on intentionally, whether they know that that's being taken on intentionally or not. I mean, I hope they do, but it's not a conversation that I've sat down with people and said, I will be your mentor, or they have asked, will you be my mentor? But because to me, for some reason, that's just an awkward thing. It puts undue responsibilities when it should be a natural process. And there's a few people on this team that I've opened up doors and windows to their career when they kind of sat back and went, what? I don't know anything about that. Why are you asking me to do this? I said, well, because I see it in you, and good leaders are supposed to. Build good leaders. Good leaders aren't supposed to lead by, hey, follow me, do what I do. It's— good leaders are supposed to say, hey, I'll follow you. You go, you walk out in front. I'm right here. I'll hold you up. No problems being your support system, but you're a professional in your specific role. Go do that. I will be right here to make sure that when you take a misstep, and you have to understand you will, we all do. So learn, take a misstep. Don't let it crumble your world. Learn from it. Change is a very constant thing. It's the only constant thing. And if people learn how to respond to change instead of reacting to change, then I think they'll do better on the other end. So I try to mentor as many people on my team as I can. Obviously, as a father, you mentor your children the best you can too, but sometimes that sets in, sometimes not.

Sure. Yeah, exactly. I hear you saying it's like you're giving people space to also experience Well,

I'm giving them autonomy. So yes, I'm giving them space. So as a CEO, you— I tend to get a lot of people coming to me and asking me questions. Well, will you approve this? Will you approve that? And I'd say 90% of the time I kick it back and just basically go, would you? Do you approve this? Are you bringing this to me for approval? Or are you bringing this to me because this is something that you think is successful and you believe in it? Or are you just looking for me to make a decision for you? Because I'm not going to do that. You're the one who, whatever the situation is, if you're asking me to make a decision that's going to impact your job or what you do, wouldn't it be more appropriate that you accept that and then tell me that's what you want to do as opposed to saying, is it okay? So I try to change things a little bit to let people realize that they do have autonomy. I think everybody in any company should have autonomy. I think everybody in any company should have a voice to be able to be involved in decision-making. And a lot of corporate comments you've— I'm sure you've seen over the years is, well, we can't lead by committee. Well, no, I agree, you can't lead by committee, but that doesn't mean you don't take the advice of the committee. You have to at least ask— you have to ask the people around you what exactly is going to be successful. What do you think is going to be successful? I firmly believe that any team, no matter what company you're in, big or small, you know, you're having the ability to tell your seniors, I have this idea, Or better, in my case, better. You're thinking the wrong way, Tom. You're going down a path that we probably shouldn't go down. Here's an alternate path. I try to tell all my new, my new team members when we have new team members, I sit them down and say, look, just because I say something doesn't mean it's the rule. Doesn't mean I can't be convinced otherwise. It's obviously I have the responsibility and final decision-making. However, that decision-making is usually based off of everybody else's input. And if you have— If you see me going down the wrong path, I not only hope, but I expect you to tell me I'm going down the wrong path. And because I don't know it all, I'm not the smartest person in the room. I don't want to be the smartest person. None of us are the smartest person in the room. So I try to open it up and provide as much autonomy as I possibly can.

That makes so much sense. I think you just gave a mini workshop on that. Whole concept of decision-making. And I mean, I think the distinctions are— I won't repeat them. So a person listening to this right now, if that made sense to you, go back and re-listen to that. Just hit that little rewind button and listen to the last minute and a half. That really good stuff there, Tom. Thank you for that. Sort of one last question for you here. I've heard anecdotally, and I've seen it too from personal experience, that culture was very important getting through the pandemic because we've talked a little bit about that today. what that was like. And the culture in many instances was what got people through the pandemic, got organizations through. I've heard that quite frequently. And then on the other side of that lengthy event, the world of business and what organizations look like, quite a bit different from a talent standpoint, from a number of different standpoints. There was plenty of pivoting going on, plenty of restructuring happening, et cetera, et cetera. I'm curious what you think today in a post- pandemic world. What is the importance of culture to you? Did you notice that the culture at your nonprofit changed in some ways? I've heard that has been the case for many groups, but just how important is culture today? And what, if anything, can you tell us about maybe how you saw culture evolve through that very difficult period?

I think culture is vital in corporations, and a lot of people hire people to fit a job. And I try to remind my staff when they're looking at candidates and more importantly interviewing candidates that we're looking to fill a role. Obviously, that kind of goes without saying. That's why we're interviewing. But I'd rather have a vacant role than hire somebody that's not going to fit into the culture of the organization. And my staff is starting to understand that concept. You know, there's like any leader who's honest will say that they took advantage of COVID did a little bit of restructuring and a little bit of changing. Um, the culture within our organization to, in their view, improve that culture. I had a few challenges that we, we dealt with. I'd say the, the majority of my staff, interestingly enough, I had to get all kinds of laptops and get people home and all the stuff that goes with working remote. And then I had a lot of pushback on people working remote. And I found that intriguing because most people, especially now, want to work remote. And then when we— I think it was a couple of months Later, we started thinking about bringing people back and I tried to create some kind of a hybrid schedule and so on. And we worked through the rest of that year in a skeleton crew. But I found that people wanted to be back. They didn't want to work remote, which was intriguing culture to me because usually people want their home. They're like, I can work in my pajamas or whatever, wherever I can do anything. I had a nephew who, uh, Moved to Aruba for 2 months and worked remote in some cabin on an ocean. Okay, that's a thing. I gotta set it up. And so it was really cool. But then when we did come back, it was the culture instantly was changed, having nothing to do with me or doing, but you could see people wanted to be together. They wanted to collaborate with each other. And now I have a, I'd say a handful of staff members that work remote one day a week. They've chosen, you know, the specific day, and that's their day to work remote. And it seems to satisfy the psychological concept of working remote. It was a challenge for me. I'm old school. I've been in a professional career for a very long time, and the concept that, you know, I believe in customer service is personal business. So I couldn't wrap my head around it. Obviously, I needed to be a little resilient and understand that challenge, and I I did. So we created a policy around it, and now we have a culture here that is very collaborative. We built a social committee in our team who comes up with random things. We're doing a Mother's Day luncheon on Friday. We have a whole wall or one section of our wall. We all chose a word for 2024 that would explain what our thought process is within one word, and we designed this really cool thing on our wall with everybody's different words. And new team members come in and we get that word from them and then we add to it. So to answer the question specifically, I think culture is vital to any organization, but that culture is independent and needs to be defined by the company, not by the leadership. The leadership can create the boundaries of culture, but I think a leader needs to allow the culture to develop and That collaboration needs to come natural. And when it does come natural, and I'm extremely fortunate that it comes natural here, people learn from each other. They talk to each other. They communicate with each other. You know, I find things out that a problem came up. It was addressed and resolved before I even had a knowledge that something came out, something that there was a problem. And that's all internal collaboration that you can't really, as a leader, you can't just say, this is what I want. You have to create that openness. You have to create the ability for people to communicate. You have to create the opportunity for people to have the independent autonomy to feel comfortable to tell me, the CEO, you're going down the wrong path. You need to go down this path, or you need to rethink going down this path. And when you create that ability within your team, I think at least it creates independence and a buy-in from the rest of my team that they have a say in how this organization moves forward. We make very big long-term decisions that we make collectively. I make the final decision, but I take all of the input from my entire team and say, well, this is going to work. Well, that's going to work. We talk it out, hammer it out, and then I say, okay, this is great advice. I can't really do that right now. This is why, but let's keep that open for the future. This is great advice. We're going to move forward with this, whatever the case may be. But it allows a culture of communication, allows culture of collaboration. I don't think any corporation will be successful without that level of culture within an organization. But who am I?

No, I— to me, who you are is a human being, fallible like everybody. As you said, nobody has all the answers. Nobody's the smartest in the room. But it is a very— I mean, I've been around a minute or two myself. So I just say, when I listened to you just express what you did, I thought that was comprehensive. And it felt like 6, sage advice, wisdom of somebody that's been around long enough to know these things, not know them because they're in a textbook or because you watched it on a YouTube video, but because it's actually a lived experience which informs the worldview. I couldn't be more grateful for your time and your presence and the wisdom that you shared with us today, Tom.

Greatly appreciate the opportunity. We've listened to your podcast and it's an honor to be a part of it. So I appreciate and thank you for the opportunity to join you.

Well, I thoroughly enjoyed that conversation with Tom. When you get to speak to somebody that actually has been around the block more than a minute, I think what you can get is either somebody that's really stuck in their ways and has a very set and maybe even sort of narrow view on how things are supposed to be done. And there's certainly plenty of people like that. There's plenty of people in leadership roles And managing other people that can sometimes come from that narrow headspace. But obviously what you can hear from listening to Tom is that even after 34 years plus industry that he's in, and now in sort of the role of sort of chief leader within his nonprofit, within the nonprofit that he is a CEO of, you get the sense that this is a guy who's still learning. This is a guy who has humility and values other people's opinions. Values, creating a space for people to actually grow and thrive. I love what he said about mentorship and the idea that it's less about a sort of a paint-by-numbers approach or one that is formulaic, but rather is something where you allow there to be this space for mentorship to occur. And that there has to be an intentionality. Of course, it can't— it doesn't happen sort of randomly, but also doesn't need to be put into sort of a restrictive container either, that it's more free-flowing than that. I love that. I love what he said and shared about the art of communication and how the role of a leader is often to empower others to make decisions, to be able to own those decisions, but to also see that it's vitally important that their instincts about whether to take an action, not take an action, make an investment, not make an investment, be strategic, or make a decision about a strategy, that those things have to be developed from within, that we have to formulate our own instincts and our own guidance and wisdom about them. And it's important that we keep other people in the loop, that we let people know how we feel, that we advocate for the things that we are most passionate about, of course. And at the same time, we're not necessarily seeking approval in the sense that we're asking somebody else to make that decision for us or to override even necessarily what those instincts that we have are. And I get that's a delicate balance, but I loved how in the structure of his organization that he really invites people to own those decisions. And to provide him with enough information that he can be a voice in the conversation as well and share his thoughts, but ultimately give people the opportunity to make those decisions and sometimes to make mistakes in the process. Because as he said, that's inevitable. We're all gonna make mistakes. And so I, I love that again from the standpoint of what it contributes to a culture of collaboration. And those were the words he used, the idea that in a culture that is by design You have to understand that so much of it we don't design, we can't design, but we have to actually allow to occur. That there has to be, again, space for those things to grow and be nurtured. But there are parameters. There are things that have to also support, almost like a container that holds something within it. The culture is more the container and what grows and what develops organically within it, like collaboration, like communication. That those things are the natural result of there being a structure that supports the growth of those things. And so again, there's some nuance, of course, to that and what it looks like in each individual business and based on any number of factors, too many to count in this moment, certainly. But I love Tom's thoughts on that and his insights. I thought they were quite sage and that there was a lot to be learned, a lot to be gained from really leaning in and even re-listening to some of what his thoughts were. Again, because the guy has been doing this successfully for a long time and has learned a lot and is not one of those individuals that you could just tell has an intractable mindset, but rather the opposite. He has a learning and growth mindset, and he applies that self-awareness and self-reflection to himself first and foremost. That's my experience of him, having met him personally, the honor to be asked to speak and keynote at 2 of their law conferences recently. Very, very large events, events like the one that he was referring to having had to cancel during the very outset of the pandemic and all of that. So if you've got questions for Tom or myself, always feel free to go to adamarkel.com/podcast to leave your comment, your question there for us. 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