The Conscious Leadership Mindset And Empowering Genius Teams With Jeffrey Deckman

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.

Well, you're in for a treat today on the Change Proof Podcast. I've got a gentleman by the name of Jeffrey Deckman. I'm just gonna read a little bit of his bio here, and we're gonna get right into the conversation. You're gonna love this conversation. Jeffrey Deckman is a national and international award-winning author and innovator on next evolution conscious leadership mindsets, models, and methods. He is a leadership and organizational development consultant specializing in helping small and medium-sized businesses to maximize their profits by maximizing their human capital. He is a serial entrepreneur who's built 2 multimillion-dollar businesses, so he understands the complexities and the challenges of building a business from firsthand experience. You're gonna love this conversation. Sit back and enjoy. You've probably heard yourself get introduced as, as I have multiple times and all that, and it's always kind of funny. To hear it. I always find it a little interesting and a little uncomfortable. I don't know exactly why that is. I still have stuff to work out around my own self-worth or whatever, but it's a fun thing to hear it. I want to know what's not written in that introduction. What's not a part of the introduction that you would love for people to know about you? Just pick one thing.

That's a really cool question because like you, I'm— I sit and I listen to this stuff and I kind of cringe a little bit. That's better than just wallowing in it. What's not in that is how challenging all of that was and how I never thought when I was a younger person that any of that stuff could happen. A self-doubter. My self-doubt is a fuel for me. It's a painful fuel, and I'm learning how to rid myself of it because it's not needed. Self-belief is a much better propellant. You listen to that stuff and you go, wow, that guy must really have his act together. When you don't realize a lot of the stuff that I was doing, I didn't know how it was going to turn out or if it was a complete waste of time. But you keep at it and you keep working hard, good things happen.

I didn't intend at all to ask this question, but it's just coming up now as I'm listening to you say about how self-doubt has been a propellant at times, but yet at the same time, self-belief can be a stronger self-propellant. I want to come back to that, but for the moment, do you think that there's something that doesn't make sense in the fact that people, when they get older, take fewer and fewer risks? When part of what we know as we've gotten older is that the reason we've been successful to the degree that we have was the result A lot of mistakes, a lot of fuckups, having to pivot and be resilient. You and I are going to talk about that today. Of course, it was in the making those mistakes and moving from that position, having taken a risk that didn't work out in the moment, that we evolved into the successes that we've had along the way. And as we get older, we go, do I really want to? Should I really? Would that make sense? What if that goes wrong? Do you think that makes sense, Jeffrey?

It really does. It opens up a whole line of thinking with that. In 2016, I had stage 4 cancer. It was an amazing gift for me. We could do a whole other show on that, but one of the things that I really got was I have a runway. This party's going to end at some point. I know as I've looked to diversify and what's my next thing, et cetera, I just started a big leadership certification training program, et cetera. And one of the reasons that I have hesitated to take some risks, I've ended up taking them. There were 2 things that were impacting my thinking, what I'll call the fatigue factor. I just don't have the same energy, the same drive. I don't want to be doing 70-hour weeks, et cetera. I want to dial that back. The other thing is the fact that I have a shorter runway. I'll be 66 next month. If I go in a direction and I make a big mistake, I don't have the same amount of recovery time. That shortened runway on one hand is like, gee, if I mess this up, I don't have another 10, 15 years to recover. But then on the other hand, what I do with that is I go, well, I better get cracking on this stuff because I only have a certain amount of time. All this stuff either works for you or against you. It's either a foot on the brake or an accelerant depending upon your mindset. And so much of my work that I do is all based around mindset.

I was thinking that a lot of people who listen to this show and a lot of the people that I frankly speak to these days are leading other people. Sometimes it's small organizations, startup-type groups, and often it's very experienced larger organizations with scores of managers and senior-level leaders. I guess I'm asking the question because in regard to an organization, anything in the universe that stops evolving Ultimately stops existing. It's sometimes called entropy, and it's a part of the natural process. Things die and things are born, and that's the way it goes. As you said, we all have a runway, even an oak tree, the longest living trees or mammals. Everything has its runway. But when it comes to an organization that has a window of time, like we all do, to succeed and deliver value, shareholder value, or value to customers and clients and things. If they stop evolving, they will soon start to deteriorate, soon begin to disintegrate. How important is it that the mindset of those managers, especially as they become more seasoned, more experienced, they've been around the block, that they begin to stop taking risks themselves, potentially have a mindset where it's that same thing. If I messed up at this level, I may not have the time to recover if I screw up and have to leave this company. Like, it just doesn't— goes horribly wrong. My seniors don't believe in my abilities any longer, and I've gotta move. I've gotta pivot and find a new home. I'm at a place where I don't go through all that, that level of sort of playing it safe, playing the status quo card that exists in the organizations that you've worked with. Do you see that?

Yes. And at that point, they cease being leaders and they become managers. What they're managing is their eventual decline because the world is changing so rapidly that trying to plateau is not possible because you are not plateauing. You may not be evolving yourself, but you're certainly not standing still. You are devolving in today's world. If you're not constantly evolving, you're devolving. Organizations, we have a mechanized viewpoint of organizations. It's a Newtonian view. We see them as machines. We see them as linear. We see them as siloed. We see them as hierarchical. We see them as standard structures. It's the worst possible model we could come up with because organizations are not machines. Organizations are organisms. They're living, breathing, adaptive, learning, Entities because they're made up of living, breathing entities called human beings. And all of my work, the, my whole body of work for the last 15 years has been to help develop mindsets, models, and methods that allow people to go from the Newtonian industrial age mechanized model that worked wonderfully well in the industrial age in the 20th century. You can't argue with that level of success. But we're not in the industrial age anymore. We're in a network information age. You've got at least 2 different massive societal cultural changes that are colliding with one another that's changing everything. One is we've got 5 most independent-minded generations in the history of humanity in the workforce. They're smart, they're mobile, they're impatient. They want to have a say in what happens. Boomers my age, we want that because we've been around a long time. We've got something to offer. The younger generations want that because they've been raised with that. They can't even imagine not having input. That's a shift in the level of consciousness of the worker. It's not a put my head down and obedient energy field that I'm now dealing with. I'm dealing with a much more vibrant energy field as a leader. The other thing is the advent of technology, specifically the internet, high-speed communications, et cetera, has just eliminated time and space and geography. From our daily reality. It's changed so drastically. If you are not adapting yourself, your mindsets, models, and methods in your own head and in your organization, you're just managing your decline. It's like any other thing on, on the downside of a sigmoid curve. It kind of starts to go slowly downward. That's your clue to do something different, and then it just drops like a rock. Organizations that are not embracing this mindset, that are not developing the new models and methods to help them exist in this new world, are really going to suffer. Well, the people in them, when the dinosaurs died out, the mammals came in and they did terrifically because they were smarter, they were faster, and they were more adaptive. And that's where we are now. What are the dinosaur organizations and individuals? What are the next evolution? It's gonna be sorted out.

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. You may also believe this or feel this way as well. I get to be on the front line. I ran organizations for many years, law firms and, and other startup firms actually that I was associated with. And in that role of being either a, a high-level leader or a CEO, in the weeds of it, nose pressed up against the glass kind of thing. I really had a hard time getting a lot of perspective. I thought I did get up to 30,000 feet and look at things, but not so much, in all honesty. But now, being a consultant in some organizational development work similar to you in that regard, but I also do a lot of keynote speaking. I'm a resilience keynote speaker and a mental health keynote speaker and a work-life balance keynote speaker and all these things, I get to be called into organizations to not just deliver a keynote, which is usually where things start, spend an hour, spend 90 minutes with our folks. Because of our work is fundamentally about resilience, and we have a proprietary assessment tool that people, you know, tend to really get a lot out of, we get invited for this sort of continuity training, the follow-up, where we get to actually see what their progress is after they start to make small changes. We're right on the front lines, and I get to hear about things. I feel honored. I honestly feel it's an honor that people are as transparent as they are. Like we were talking to a major accounting firm, he's saying to me, I've tried so much. You know, he didn't use the word frustrated. He was just sort of in disbelief that through the pandemic, after the pandemic, he's done everything he could think of and so much more to just get people back into the office, to have them wanna come back. He's got this brand new office building. He spent tons of money and it's gorgeous. And He's got 30% of his people in the office. He called himself a dinosaur. I said to him, I said, with all due respect, dinosaurs aren't dinosaurs if they know they're dinosaurs. For you to call yourself a dinosaur means you have a level of self-awareness that a dinosaur does not have. I'll push him back just for a second, buddy, because you're not a dinosaur. But I could really feel— my heart went out to this guy because I know what it's like to be in that position where you just think you're trying everything. If it's not the resignation, the great resignation, it's now this thing they call quietly quitting.

Presenteeism, they call it. I'm present, but I'm not there.

So I'm putting you on the spot right here. I'm literally throwing you right on the spot because you consult in this way. Guy who is coming from this place where he feels like he's incentivized his people to be there and he's feeling disbelief, not frustration, but disbelieving that more people haven't decided to return to the office. Jeffrey, I know this is not an easy question in the, in this context, but what do you think? What would you say to him?

What I would say to him is, first of all, thank you for caring. And the fact, just to your point, the fact that you are acknowledging that you think you have dinosaur tendencies means that you don't have as many as you think you do. I would suggest that the reason people haven't responded is because he didn't go to them and ask them what they wanted with the best intention. certainly in my generation, everybody's been taught the top-down command and control leadership method that management has to come up with the creative ideas, have to solve the big problems. It's not so much from an ego standpoint, it's from a sense of obligation and responsibility. And I tell senior leaders that I deal with, that's unfair to put yourself in that spot when there's so much more help around you. And another way to do it, there's a collective genius around Everybody. I call it the bigger know. I know what I know, they know what they know, and together we have a bigger know. All the work that I do is looking to tap into that collective genius, because if you get their collective genius, you get their collective energy. What I preach is if you're going to change someone's job, their location, their responsibilities, bring them into the design process before you do it. Get their input because You're going to find out what'll work, what won't work. And if you really have good intentions and you're just not a dictator, and most people aren't, you're not going to have a problem opening that up to them. And they will tell you what will attract them to come back in. And it saves time, it saves aggravation on both sides of the equation. I help potential dinosaurs. Here's how you protect yourself from dinosaurism, a new word thanks to you, is that You meet with those younger people. I'm in my 60s. I'm talking to the 40-year-olds, the 30-year-olds, et cetera, because what they need from me is my elder wisdom. I've been around the block. I'm steady. You can't shake me. You can't scare me. I've seen it all and I'm tough enough. However, what I need from you is your mastery of technology, your fresh legs, and your innovative ideas outside of the model that I was raised in. That's no longer working. I talk about organizations aren't departments. Every organization is a tribe of tribes. Engage them as tribes. Engage them in conversation, bidirectional conversation. Don't always lead from the front. The 3 things that the modern leader absolutely has to master is not to be a command and control, like we're going to take that hill, rah, rah, rah. Some of that's good, but your role is to be a master communicator, collaborator, and a facilitator. You need to be in service of that collective genius, that bigger know. You need to resource it. You need to activate it and help steer it and guide it. The last company I had, I sold it a week before its 21st birthday, 17, 18 years ago. It was a data networking firm. We were going to build large networks. I designed computer networks for 20 years. One of the things that when you look at the network manager of a computer network, that management software is not in there driving all the actions. It's monitoring the conditions. Do we have a breakdown? Is it going right? Do people have the software that they need, et cetera? It's a facilitator, and that's what you do in a network. That's how you empower And get a network to be this thing that takes energy and exponentially increases its effectiveness and its power by being that. What we have to do is we have to start shifting from the Newtonian mechanized method to a more organic organizations or organisms. And then we also at the same time have to stop thinking silos and think network. There's a reason why you take one computer and put it into a network, Once again, the word exponentially faster, more powerful and effective because the way that network is designed to operate, there's 4 basic principles to it. And when you take those same 4 basic principles and you apply them to building a team, which is a knowledge network, it's a human network, you plug one individual into that team and they become exponentially more effective as well. It's the exact same 4 pieces. When I stumbled on that about 7 years ago, I about fell off my chair because I just went, oh my gosh, a network is the network, whether the processors are computers or whether they're human beings. Computer network needs processors. We need people. It needs software applications. They need training. They need education experience that's applicable to the tasks they're going to do. They need high-speed communication networks. They need strong relationships and trust. A computer network needs the bandwidth to handle the amount of work that's going through it. These people need time, resources, and support. Those 4 things, when you assemble a team looking at, do I have enough processors, people? Do I have the right software and applications in it? Do they have the training, et cetera? Do I have the right type of high-speed communication networks? Do these people get along? Do they like one another? And if If not, maybe I go in and do a little bit of management of that, but at least I know I have to manage that. Most importantly, and this is one of the things that a lot of executives don't think about, is the people that are working for me probably are already doing 45, 50 hours worth of work a week anyway. When I add something to them, the biggest question I have to ask myself is what am I going to take off of them and how? If those people don't have the bandwidth to do their job, the job's not going to get done. If you don't get those 4 things right as a network designer, That network's going to become a not-work. And then when that not-work doesn't work, you're going to go in and lean on them and they're going to get upset because they're going to look at you and they're going to say, you didn't design us right. You didn't resource us right. That's one of the reasons why there's conflict between the frontline and the front office. If you look, Gallup has been doing studies on employee engagement for decades. Consistently, only 3 out of 10 employees are engaged. When Gallup asks people how many would like to be engaged, 70% of the workforce says they want to be engaged. I talk to management. I say, how many of you would like your people to be fully engaged? All the hands go up. Put your hands down. I ask the workforce, how many people want to be more engaged and participate? All the hands go up. Put your hands down. The question then becomes, what's the issue? If there is a baseball manager that could get 3 of his players out on the field, He'd lose every game, he'd get fired, and he'd never be hired again. But in our world, 30% is considered acceptable. If it's not a people problem, what is it? The problem is our model. We're not machines. Organizations are organisms. And when you shift from that mechanized, instead of managing by org chart, you manage by network, things are going to change. I'm in the process of writing a book about what's actually drives performance behind the org chart. My research has shown that there's 3 things behind the org chart that are 100% responsible for performance, therefore profits: tribal dynamics, knowledge networks, and culture. Culture is the level of consciousness of the organization. I do a ton of work around helping people see what those 3 pieces are, because if you go in and you manage the tribal dynamics, and you assemble your teams as knowledge networks and you pay attention to the level of consciousness of the people and how they interact, you get that right, your financial capital's going to go off the scale. You get the human capital right, financial capital's going to work itself out because financial capital is a lagging indicator of the human capital. And we can't keep treating our organizations like machines and we can't keep treating our people like they're cogs or tools to make the machine work, or we're going to keep getting the 30%. You shift that around and you treat them as a tribe of tribes and you treat them as human beings. People, they want to be engaged. Stephen Covey once famously said around trying to be understood, seek first to understand and then to be understood. I have a version of that when it comes to employee engagement. Seek first to engage, then to be engaged. Flip it. You gotta flip the paradigm because the old paradigms will get you killed in the new world. The people I work with is, they're like, we really want to change, but we don't know what the new model is. How could they? It's taken me 15 years of ridiculous amount of time of work, research, working it out with my clients. I know this stuff works. And the thing I tell people I work with is the more you learn about the stuff I'm talking about, the more intuitive it will become and the more you'll realize how much you already know about it. It's just a paradigm shift. It's really cool because it really worked.

You and I, before we hit the record and got going here, we were talking about the importance of resilience and how every one of these stories of success, or even things that don't feel like success, are still stories of resilience in so many respects. I want to get a sense of what you feel about that word. My bread and butter, having written a book called Change Proof, that's all about how you leverage uncertainty as a superpower for resilience. When I work with organizations, it's usually On that culture side because we have to operationalize resilience, but to do that, it has to be baked into the values. It has to be a part of the standard operating procedures. They have to model and reflect that. There has to be modeling and permission given for people to actually see this is not just the checkmark today, the idea du jour. It's real. And there has to be partnership. There has to be support. Mm-hmm. That's baked in so that people can actually work in a new arena, which the resilience arena is new for a lot of people because we're, at least according to our research, as you said earlier, the paradigm has changed, but a lot of people don't realize that that's the case. Even if they do realize that the paradigm has shifted, they don't know what the new one is. Mm-hmm. And until they know what the new one is, they still lean back on the old one, the outdated one, the one that doesn't work. And that outdated model is one where we see resilience as our capacity to just go forward no matter what. Tenaciously, persistently. Look, I'm a very tenacious and persistent person. It has a level of importance in my life. And I know that if all I ever do is tirelessly try to plod forward, the grit mentality, I will become exhausted. And the older I get, the more I realize that that's true. But it's now true for 30-year-olds that we are burning people out. It was the 55-year-old waiting on retirement in school. who was reading the paper in history class, the teacher that was no longer engaged or present. That's back to 28, 29-year-olds are at the point of burnout, not 55-year-olds or exclusively so. I wanna get a sense of how important resilience is to you, Geoffrey, in your experience in working with leaders and teams. And I also wanna get a sense of how important it is to you personally.

Resilience is absolutely essential. It's the lifeblood to everything that's we do if we're looking to move forward and not die on the vine? In the '80s, sustainability, '80s and '90s, sustainability was the ultimate goal. A friend of mine, I talked to you about Larry Quick a little bit earlier, the guy does genius-level stuff around resilience. He helped me to understand the difference between sustainability and resiliency and the superiority of resiliency. And he said, sustainability is about getting hit and getting back up. Resiliency is getting hit and getting back up stronger. Smarter, more agile. There's a difference between resiliency and stubbornness. Big difference. Both of them require a level of perseverance, but stubbornness is a one-trick pony. I've accomplished a lot of things because I'm bonehead and stubborn. As I've gotten a little bit older and a little lazier, a little smarter, there's other ways to do this. And it's about being agile. And you know, when a door is closed, you don't have to smash through it. Maybe you can go around it. Maybe it's the wrong door. Maybe you hit a trampoline and go over it, like whatever. Just being agile with your thinking, that is how you tap into the creative genius of yourself as an individual and the collective genius of all the other selves that are associated with you by being open, looking for best idea wins. Get the ego out of the picture. As a leader, if you're not leading From the standpoint of trying to get the organization, if you're not trying to lead the people to the best thinking, the best processes, and the best environment possible, you're not leading. My book is called Developing the Conscious Leadership Mindset for the 21st Century. And it's all about that. It's all about the first step on a path of leadership is an inward one. And so are all the rest. Because if I can't lead and manage myself, I've got no right coming out and telling you What you should be doing. Leadership's a state of consciousness. People will follow your directions if you have authority over them, but I want to function with a level of consciousness where people look and they see that I'm authentic, I have integrity, and I respect them and myself and the organization. They look, they will respect my consciousness enough to follow my direction. If I have people working for me who follow my directions, The minute I stop giving them directions, they're probably going to stop. If I can create a workforce that is following my direction, and what is that direction? Authenticity, integrity, respect, performance. Let's create a Navy SEAL team here. Let's not be the regular Navy. Regular Navy is awesome. Thank you for your service, but let's go out and kick some ass. Let's have some fun. Let's develop this team. And all we have to do is tap into that collective genius that we all have. And make it part of it. And it gets to the point where people love the idea so much and you have to flatten your network out a bit. I've been humbled by a dock worker one time. At first it didn't feel good, but after that I was really glad that I was, because smart is smart. Degrees don't make you smart. They don't make you wise. People are brilliant. I was raised poor. I've got a whole section of my family that they share the tooth at Thanksgiving. It's a rough crowd. But man, these people, they know how to fix things because they've never had resources. So they're incredibly resourceful and they're smart. And I've also been around people literally at genius level. Everybody has a genius level somewhere. It's my job as the leader to maximize where their capabilities are and to put them in a position where their talents can make them feel good and they can grow and can help the organization. If you're not leading with that level of consciousness,

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. I just so appreciate so many of the things you shared with us, Geoffrey, that it's a knowledge network. You're creating a knowledge network, a genius network, if you will. That's really one of the most important things leaders can do, this communication, collaboration, facilitation. Did I get those 3 correct?

Yep.

So often it is, right? Things are thought of in silos. That's not the way nature works. Everything is integrated. It's always the case that what's under the ground reveals what's above the ground at some point. The things that we can't see are often very powerful in nature. You're using the word consciousness in that respect, that consciousness is this process. It's the context, not necessarily the content. And we can be almost agnostic as to the content. Right. Because a great leader The way you're describing a conscious leader, and I very much lean into that very same viewpoint, worldview, you could take any conscious leader and drop them in any organization. It doesn't matter what the widget is. It doesn't matter what the service you're providing is. But ultimately, understanding how you develop people through context as opposed to through content, pretty magical.

I am proof that what you just said is true. My first company was a cable television construction and engineering firm. Made it for 7 years and it crashed. My next company I started as cable television, but it was in '87. I jumped in and I saw the birth of the telecommunications industry, voice, data, video. I mean, I was right in the front lines of that. That was kind of what my professional experience is today. I can take these processes and this level of consciousness And I've worked with top-level defense contractors. I've worked in accounting firms, I've worked in nonprofits, I've worked in logistics, I've worked in healthcare, I've worked everywhere. And people say, what business do you work in? I say, any business has people in it because you need to know what your discipline is. You need to know what you're doing for a living. Like, I depend upon you to, to be good at that. And I'm assuming you are because you're in business. You bring that piece. What I'm going to bring in is how to help you maximize That human capital you've got around you. Every organization is a living, breathing, talking library, and you can go in and that library will tell you every problem you have, the source of it, probably how to fix it. It's brilliant. Not anyone in there has all those answers, but collectively, you bet they do. The ones that they don't, who cares? You're going to have enough to work on with the things that they have that's going to increase your bottom line, increase your morale, Increase the functionality of your organization, and it becomes fun. You get to this point of, we're activated here. We're energized. You literally change. When you change your level of consciousness, you change the energy field in which you operate, higher or lower. When you feel joy, you're energized. Yeah.

I'm just going to put you in the fryer again. It's so topical at the moment and more than topical. It's a real thing, this concept of quietly quitting. People are Maybe not resigning as quickly as they were when inflation wasn't quite as noticeable. Some other situations I suppose were different. There was a backstop from the government if they decided to leave their job. Now maybe not so much. What is this quietly quitting thing, do you think? What's this all about? Your wisdom on that subject would be wonderful.

It's a combination of several factors that are all coming together that are real, legitimate, and incredibly important as leaders. We start getting our, our heads around. The first thing is We need to accept the fact that this new generation that's coming in is wired differently when it comes to how they see their work-life balance. I'm 66. I was climbing telephone poles and towers when I was 17 and 18 years old. I'm a hardworking guy. No snowflakes on me except if I'm in a blizzard. The stuff that I do, there's no kumbaya in it. It's all designed to really work. You've got this younger group that's in here. They're not pushed out of the nest as quickly. And these people that are sitting there, some people call it presenteeism where they're just really disengaged. They're sad. They wish they weren't. They're bored. They don't know what to do. What I look at is I look at management and I say, okay, you have an upset going on because you need more performance. Take a look and seek first to understand, then to be understood. Take a look and find out what it is that's upsetting these people. It can really be frustrating to be sitting there listening to this stuff because you don't relate to it and you want to just yell at 'em to suck it up. But really true leaders, I need you to understand, at least respecting you enough where I want to hear what you have to say. And then in that, I'm going to ask for you to hear what it is that I have to say. And then in that, I'm going to say, can we align upon the fact that neither of us are happy? I'm not, you are not. Now we've just aligned on something where we're both in the same unhappy bucket. How do we get out of there? You tell me some things, I'll tell you some things, and let's see how far we can move the needle. You're not going to move the needle all the way over to Happyville. The most important thing that's going to happen with that is you're going to improve the level of trust and the human relatedness to one another. I'm constantly telling people, see the human in the human. Everybody is challenged. There's nobody that has a free ride. I mean, everybody's got stuff going on in their lives, either professionally, if it's not financially, it could be health, it could be family, it could be Who knows? Let's take this opportunity to create a work environment, maybe a little bit of a sanctuary. We're going to have our ups and downs, but I call it leading with air. This is a place where you come in here. It's a place of authenticity, integrity, and respect. And the respect has 3 parts to it. Authenticity is me being me and accepting who I am. There's a great quote from Rumi that says, I am what I am because this one is like that. That's self-acceptance. And you be that with as much grace as you can muster. Don't be a jerk and just go, hey, this is how I roll. Be authentic. And then integrity is about being authentic in the world and having good character and being honest and that type of stuff. But respect is about me respecting me and my boundaries, you and your boundaries, and respecting whomever it is who's paying us. We work within that realm. We're going to move the needle further than what it is now. And when that happens, All of a sudden we feel that things are different. That energizes us and we want more of that because up to that point, the person that's sitting there who has resigned without quitting, they're in a form of resignation and they're not happy. That's what it is you have to do.

I don't know who said this. It sounds like a Rumi thing to say. The quote is that problems are good because they show you where your problems are. It's an interesting thing. You know, what do you mean problems are good? Because then you don't have blind spots as to what those things are. Difficult as this is to be on the front line as you and I are and speaking with organizations about these challenges that they are having, they are also great opportunities to address things that otherwise could be cancerous, that things that are happening that you're unaware of that are more devolving than evolving. There's an opportunity for evolving out of it. That's what's good about it. The fact that it's showing up, it's another sort of a wave. We've got hit with wave after wave. Organizations, leaders have been hit with too many waves to count. Teachers, people on the front lines, people in the medical profession, nurses and doctors. And there's just so many groups that are just flat out exhausted from the wave after wave of change, of uncertainty, of all of that. Yet one more wave that we're now giving a label to is this quiet resignation thing happening, necessarily want it. But I think it is a very good sign that we can see it. Another expression that I heard some years ago that I love was that what's coming is going. And you can think about all the problems in your life, all the things that are maybe not to your liking in this moment about whatever. And at the same time, you can acknowledge that whatever's coming is also going. It's a good sign on some level that, that you can see it. We said earlier, the guy who thinks he's a dinosaur isn't a dinosaur because he thinks he's a dinosaur. And that level of self-awareness, it changes it. It's transmuting the situation. It's something different because he's questioning and he is sensitive. And I think when you think about this younger group of folks, millennials and Gen Z, they're questioning more. They're sensitized and sensitive to these things in part because they have a different consciousness. than the one that you grew up in and had early and that I did. And I think that, that again, while it's challenging for someone of a different generation to actually be able to understand that, to seek first to understand, it's difficult to understand that there's something really quite magical, miraculous, mysterious, certainly in all of that. I so appreciate hearing your perspective on that, Jeffrey.

If I really sit down and ask and seek to understand you, I get to ask you to seek to understand me as well. This is about fairness. It's about equity. It's like you want to be heard. I want to be heard too. If you can't listen to me, then how can you expect someone else to listen to you? Young people question everything, but at the same time, there's this paradox. They already think they know everything from whatever news source they're getting. That's what they're parroting out. And there's a lot of them who don't go in like young people don't. It's not just their generation, it's generational. Young people are quicker to believe than they are to research. That's the big challenge we have now. And there's so many social media platforms out there and so many places where we're just breathing our own exhaust in our echo chambers.

Well, it begs the question, what is research anyway? Now we can't digress there, but the fact that a lot of people, what people call research is just what they read online. Now, I'm not saying it's not, I'm not pointing a finger to say something is or isn't, because I couldn't. I'll just say a great piece of advice that a first early mentor of mine, when I was sort of 17 and working as a summer camp counselor, said to me. He says, take it from the source. And that was in regard to a particular person at this camp who happened to be one of the owners who was annoying the shit out of me. I mean, he was just getting under my skin and this guy was watching it agitate me. And he's a 40-something-year-old guy and he says, look, this guy's Look at this guy. He's a very passionate, intense young man. I think he's going to do great things in his life. But if he keeps getting drawn into this emotional distress, he's going sideways. He says, take it from the source. It took me a lot of years to sort of really unpack what that wisdom was, what that advice was. I do get it. If you don't consider your source carefully, you can go down a lot of rabbit holes. You can end up in a lot of places that you don't know how you even got there to begin with. You and I could talk about that socially, politically, in every which way, in every context. I'm sharing that old wisdom and advice that I got a long time ago with anybody that that makes sense to and anybody that might need to hear that in this moment, actually take it from the source. But I just love the way the conversation flowed today, Jeffrey. So thank you so much for that. My own take on this, the standpoint of what we spend our time researching, thinking about, talking to people about, is that People are, are not feeling cared for. And the first wave was people leaving because they could find the grass they thought would be greener elsewhere. We know that the grass isn't greener. They don't know that, but we know that. And a lot of those people will even try to return if they didn't burn a bridge when they left. And now we got this other thing, this quiet resignation, quietly quitting thing. It's because people are genuinely just not having their needs met. I wanna go back to what you said at the beginning, which is that if we're willing to have conversations and ask people, what do you need? That's the managing partner to find out what they need instead of trying to be like, they pay me the big bucks so that I can figure out how to solve every problem. That's why I get the big pay. We know that that's a bit ego, but it's also a bit BS because you're not gonna solve this by yourself. So speaking to any leader out there who's felt that same frustration with How to get people back to work and how to keep them inspired or engaged. Bring somebody like Geoffrey in to help you talk about it. Talk to the people within your organization about it. Have really transparent conversation, relatable conversation that creates trust because that's where you're going to get the collective genius that Geoffrey was speaking about, the bigger understanding, the bigger know that comes from this humility, not thinking that because you're a senior-level person, And you make the big bucks and congrats on that, that somehow or another you have to figure it all out because that's what you're being paid to do. And I get that, but that's just a recipe for not understanding and then watching as things devolve around you.

Mm-hmm.

And just being in disbelief at, at the fact that it's happening.

If you're really getting paid to solve the problems, then how can you argue that multiple brains are not smarter You plus multiple brains are not smarter than just you. If you're really paid to solve the problem, your job is to solve the problem, and that means you need to pull as many brains in as possible. It's not a singular act, it's a collective act. One point that I want to make sure that I touch on here, because, you know, I mentioned earlier, this stuff is not about kumbaya. You know, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to look to try to understand you, want you to understand me, but all along we need to perform here. There has to be consequences in this, and they've got to be clear and they've got to be defined because if a culture without consequences is chaos, and I can't lead a chaotic organization, I'm not getting paid to lead a chaotic organization. We've worked with a lot of people and say, I hear what you're saying. My obligation to make this thing happen and to do the best I can with you, but we either need to move you up or I need to move you out because if you're a bad seed here, You're negatively affecting the other people who want to do good work. We can't have that because that's a low level of consciousness. How can I help you get up to where you're performing the way you should be and not a distraction? And if not, all due respect, you need to go somewhere else and we're going to make sure that happens. And those consequences, oftentimes I've worked with a lot of people, very challenged. I had construction companies where sometimes the workplace was the only safe place these people have been in based on how they were raised. I had to set up consequences so that it would hit them in the head a couple times to go, maybe I should change my behavior because I don't want to go home and tell my spouse that we don't have a job. And I didn't want them that either. I told one guy, I said, I've been working with for weeks and I said, I can't want you to have your job more than you want the job. You either got to start coming up or I got to get you out. No harm, no foul. Love you either way, but this is real world. You really have to have that in there, especially with these younger people. Sometimes they need to hear that there's a lot of wisdom in discipline, and discipline is a learned skill, and sometimes it's learned in a hard class.

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. 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 instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. It's a great depth that we can go into a lot of these things. I just want to say thank you again for the time and the insight today. I know our folks have enjoyed it, getting a lot out of it. I'll speak to our audience right now in saying goodbye. I want to just say, first of all, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or somebody that you know that might just need to hear some of this or all of this. We always love those 5-star reviews, so please feel free to leave that. We love that too on Apple, on iTunes, et cetera, wherever it might be that you're listening and consuming your podcasts. Also, feedback is like air. It's oxygen for us. You can go to adamarkel.com/podcast and leave a comment or a question for myself or for Jeffrey. And of course, we can connect on LinkedIn and elsewhere, and I'll look forward to doing that. I'll close by saying there's an old TV show, it's called Hill Street Blues. Some of you may have seen it, but we spend half the year up on the Cape and half the year in Southern California. We're on the East Coast at this moment in time. And that was a show based in Boston. At the end of the show, the sergeant was a tough guy. And I think this is actually pretty appropriate to what you just shared, Jeffrey, about discipline. You know, he was a really tough character, this sergeant. You know, this precinct was in South Boston, tough area. And he would say to his guys, finish up the meeting and their morning gathering. And just as they were getting ready to leave, he would say to everybody, hold on, he says, listen, be careful out there. He would stop and he'd pause and he'd make eye contact. It was a great, wonderful way To me, that show showed that even this tough guy— Billy was a tough sergeant— had that level of discipline. That discipline came from a place of heart. It was born out of his love, actually, for his people, the men and women that were in blue. He wanted them to be safe, and he wanted them to do their jobs well and feel good about the work they were doing. That's what I'm going to leave you all with right now. Be careful out there. Thank you. Thank you, Jeffrey. Appreciate your time today.

Thank you.

What a great next-level, I'd say, series of insights from Jeffrey Deckman today. That podcast, that conversation, really enjoyable. I mean, for me, I've been podcasting now for many years. We're up near 300 episodes or what have you, but I really just still get so excited, enthusiastic like a child, really, that childlike enthusiasm because of conversations. Like the one I just got to have with Jeffrey, because he's a little bit my senior, a couple years older than me, maybe 10 or so. I love the interplay. I love the fact that my knowledge of things and my experience takes me so far, and then I, I get to have a conversation with someone like that who's got a different set of experiences, a different knowledge base, and more years on the planet, more times around the sun and wisdom, the seasons of his life, his professional life and his personal life. That really just impacted me in that time we spent together. I know that there's a lot of very valuable organizational developmental insight and nuance in the conversation that we had today about things such as why it is and how it is that people are quietly quitting, this quiet resignation that's happening, and where leaders meet that moment, where it is that we as leaders are able to see the evident dissatisfaction and even pain of people in the workplace as not something that we ought to be upset about, or I should say, not upset with because it's upsetting to the business model or upsetting to our profit, our KPIs, but rather we're upset, concerned about the person personnel that are experiencing this, the human capital that are, by that very fact, sharing valuable insight and feedback about things not being satisfactory, not being optimal. This idea that people leave a job or quietly resign from things, that resignation, that is possibly the most important intel that we can get as leaders. I know it sounds funny because It's also a challenge at the same time, and we want to resolve the challenge, but we don't resolve the challenge but without understanding how the challenge came about and why the challenge is showing up. It's in many respects a welcome thing, a blessing of sorts, because the alternative is that people are unhappy and dissatisfied and disengaged. We don't see the signs of it except in the output. Or in other places, we're blind to it until it creates a devolution instead of an evolution. And when that happens, when entropy occurs, when disintegration begins to happen, it is often even more difficult to arrest that, to change that, to turn that around. It becomes a much more difficult job and maybe even an impossible task at a certain point to see the signs of it early. Even if there are difficult signs to see, especially when it's another wave of change, another wave of disruption after a pandemic brought wave after wave of disruption and uncertainty. And yet now there's still more. People are not eager to go back into the workplace or are only doing so half-heartedly or are somehow still not happy in their roles and in their jobs and are quietly quitting those roles and responsibilities. These are not easy things to see, and yet they're vitally important that we see because problems, while not necessarily what you want to experience, are good because they show us where our problems are. Therefore, we are not blind. We are not going forward blindly, but we are going forward with a greater capacity to understand, with greater awareness, greater consciousness. And nothing bad ever comes out of higher consciousness. In fact, I'll say that differently. All good things come from higher levels of consciousness. To the extent that this raises our awareness and raises our consciousness and wakes us up to these very important things, how people are doing and how people are feeling within the organizations that we lead, that we are a part of, that is absolutely life-giving. That is how we must evolve. I so enjoyed the conversation taking Look at some of those things, talking about the importance of communication and collaboration, facilitation, talking about knowledge, how you create knowledge networks, the collective genius that leads to this collective know, the bigger know that we all must have in order to see innovation occur in a future that is constantly and forever changing, in a world of constant, never-ending change. In fact, Geoffrey just lit me up with some Fantastic examples, really tangible insight, stories of his personal life, as well as his work in organizations of many different kinds. You're gonna find that the conversation was really organic. It felt to me like we kept following the threads, the little breadcrumbs that kept leading us to yet another important thing, another important thing, one after another. And that kept my interest. I was on my growth edge and my learning edge. It had me inspired as well. I hope you find that it was the same way for you. And if you do, feel free to, as always, share the episode with a friend, family member, somebody you think would really benefit from hearing some or all of what was shared. Leave a review. We love the reviews always, and you can leave a comment as well. We'd love to get your feedback. adamarkel.com/podcast. Leave a comment right there and I will be the one to answer it. I will just say ciao for now, everybody, and be well.

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/becomechange-proof.