Training Your Managers To Be Resilient To Change With Janet Polach

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.

You are in for such a treat today on the Change Proof podcast. We've got Janet Pollock. She is a global leader in leadership development. As a retired Marine Corps officer, she knows a thing or two about what it takes to be an effective leader. Realizing that managers are often too busy running their businesses to take the time to connect with employees and witnessing the wave of high staff turnover, she felt compelled to teach organizations to get clear about what effective leadership really looks like and implement the right practices to increase purpose and profit. You're going to love this episode, so stay tuned. So, Janet, it's always fun to hear ourselves get introduced. I think it's weird as well. At least it is for me. I don't know if you—

It is weird. It is weird. You know, you read those background pieces and I'm like, are they really talking about me? Huh? It must be somebody else.

Right? It's like, who wrote that? Yeah,

exactly. Thank you for including me, Adam. I really appreciate it.

No, this is, as I had said right before we started, I don't know that there's anything that's more appropriate than to start any conversation with gratitude. I just think it's one of those things that it's not so much about politeness. I know there's an element of maybe we've been raised that way and that was drummed into us, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's totally cool. My nieces and nephews are incredibly polite kids, and that's great, but there's definitely a difference between just politeness and feeling gratitude and appreciation for whatever it might be like this conversation that you and I are about to have. And I am grateful.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much.

Beautiful. So with respect to that introduction, your bio, your history, all that, what's not a part of that introduction that you would love? And I'll say one thing that's not part of that introduction that you would love for people to know about you.

Well, I love what I do. I feel like I'm very, very fortunate. My husband is now retired. I'm not sure I ever will. I get to work with leaders and help them evolve. I get to work with brand new young managers. And I talked to one of them yesterday. And we went through his 360, this assessment from multiple perspectives, and really wasn't great. He's struggling. And I said to him, you've been a manager for about 4 years, but who taught you how to be a manager? Well, no one. You know, have you gotten feedback about how you are as a manager? Well, not really. And he's just kind of struggling. And I said, the good news is we can develop those skills. And I see it all the time. And it's my background from the Marine Corps. You know, we take plain old people off the street and turn them into Marines. And it takes a number of weeks, doesn't happen overnight, but it's marvelously effective. And so that's what we know about leadership development is we can take average performing people who really want the opportunity to work through other people and help other people thrive. And we can help them be very, very effective at it.

I got chills listening to you talk about that, Janet. And, you know, I want to dive into your history a little more because it—

yep,

let's just call it out. It's not an everyday occurrence that you meet, that you run into some— into a woman who has been in the Marine Corps to begin with, but then has was able to succeed at the levels that you, that you were able to. So I think that's not quite typical, and maybe I'm wrong about that, but I want to get your perspective there. And I want to go back to just before we do that, the thing you just said about taking an average person and, you know, after a number of weeks and some training and all that good stuff, that you can— they can become Marines. So here's my question to you, Janet. Do you think that anybody could become a Marine?

I think you have to want to become a Marine, first of all. You know, thank goodness we haven't done conscription for, I don't know, over 50 years because we saw in spades how poorly that worked. So first of all, I think you have to want to do it and you have to fundamentally want to, you know, serve and defend the Constitution of the United States. A lot of us don't get a chance to do that. And I think back at the times that I got to raise my hand and promise that I would support and defend. It really is a mind-chilling experience. experience to make that commitment. So I think that's fundamentally, you know, it's not just a regular job interview to become a military member in the United States, but you have to really want to do it. And then when you want to do it, there's a lot of opportunity. You get to learn a lot of things. And, you know, leadership is one of the key things that I think our American military teaches young people, whether they're men or women. And it's a combination of hard work and commitment to doing what's right. And you can be successful.

Yes. That makes sense. I don't know it from a Marine standpoint, only from the perspective of a lawyer. I was a practicing attorney for 18 years. I'm retired now.

I

like to say I'm recovered now. Oh, fully, I think. But to raise your hand, your right hand on the Bible or however it's done, and to say, I am committing myself to defending our Constitution. It's a big deal. I mean, it—

It is a big deal. Yeah.

People that go into that line of work or into that calling, really, they take it quite seriously as you would want to be the case because it's quite difficult, isn't it?

Well, it is difficult.

It's literally— You're saying the most

obvious

thing. Yeah.

It's literally life and death, you know, and we saw that in the last 20 years. I joined the Marine Corps because I couldn't find a teaching job. I graduated from college in the middle of the school year and I was like, oh gosh, now what am I going to do? Um, and so at that time, peace was breaking out all over the world. And so it seemed like the risk was fairly low, but I got really lucky, which is, I think we make our career the way we want to make it, but it's some, there is some luck that's involved as well. And everything changed for women in the 20 years that I was in the Marine Corps. We weren't in combat roles. We weren't, you know, doing the real work of the Marine Corps, which if you think from a career perspective, that limits you. You can't command an infantry unit if you can't be in combat, in a combat unit. And so what I believe happened is during Desert Storm, the first one, we deployed the women with us and they did an outstanding job. And then the glass ceiling was really broken. Have we totally shattered it? Absolutely not. Like in a lot of professions that were male-dominated, there's still women that aren't at the very top of the organization, but we now have infantry commanders who are women. We have women flying And tactical aircraft. And so it really, really did change. And I got a chance because of that to find out what leadership really is all about. It's not about title. It's not about how many direct reports you have. It's about how do you work through other people? And, you know, how do you work in a really male-dominated organization? You be yourself. At least that's what I found. You know, when people meet me, they're like, oh, Janet, you don't look like a Marine. And I say, thank you very much, because I talk about my kids like most professionals do. I am comfortable wearing makeup and making sure my hair looks great. And I think all of that is your professional persona. And it's just kind of one of those secret powers I have that, oh, I also understand how our government works and how the military works.

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of ways that you can language things like that. It's fun for me to do that as an author, as a speaker, as somebody that is playing with ideas quite a bit, it feels like relatability. It feels like, among other things, you have a capacity. If there was a superpower or one of them that you, that you have, it's this ability to— I want to use this term intentionally now— to disarm people by just being a regular, a regular person who also happens to be perhaps at a higher rank.

Yeah.

than they are, right? And that's not easy to do in a hierarchical structure like the military, right?

Yeah. You know, I think though, Adam, it was always easier to do that in the Marine Corps than it was on the civilian side. I spent many years in the reserves. So, you know, I would work for my civilian organization all during the week, and then on weekends I'd go be a Marine. And, you know, in the Marine Corps, we have rank, and you wear it literally on your sleeves, you know, at least on your collars. And so you can tell, oh, you know, am I talking to somebody who's more senior or more junior than me? And immediately there is a sense about, you know, who knows what and about whom. And then you get on the civilian side and it's much more requesting people to do things, creating a case for action, describing why something needs to be done. It may be slower, but in the end, I think you may have more buy-in when you encourage and engage than when you directly tell. And I think that's probably one of the biggest changes that someone coming off active duty struggles with when they go on to the civilian side is how do you get things done through other people without just plain giving them a direct order?

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Yeah.

And I've interviewed a number of former military folks on the show, Navy SEALs and Green Beret and others. And and I've heard that before that that's. Part of the transition challenge or even struggle sometimes is that those systems are very different. I want to talk about resilience today because I think in addition to it being a topic that we talk about quite a bit on this show, this show is about being change-proof, ultimately being able to navigate any form of change without it becoming a stressful event. It changes the nature of the universe. Yeah. So for every time things are changing that we're stressed, because there's uncertainty is really sort of, I think, gonna set us up to be more anxious, neurotic, more neurotic, depressed, more depressed, because change is happening all the time. I wanna just ask you, is there a difference between change, how it's handled in the military, in your experience? How many years were you actively in?

I did 20 years in active and the reserves.

Got it.

Yeah.

So in 20 years of experience in, in that arena and in the civilian arena, how do you think change Well,

I think the military has learned a lot from the civilian side about how to do change. I think that change needs to be planned, whether the organization is foisting a change upon you, like we're going to do a new procedure, or I'm a department leader and I've decided that Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, we're all going to be in the office and everybody's going to do that because it makes good sense. So, It has to be planned. It has to be thinking about what is the impact to people to this change? What are they going to like about it? What are they not going to like about it? Just because people don't like change doesn't mean you don't do it. It means that you have to think more carefully about how do you engage people? How do you give them some runway to accept the change and understand what's in it for them? The Marine Corps kind of has this— I think people have a sense that Marines just say, here's what we're going to do and we're going to go do that. But in the same token, any major change in the military is a long time in coming. Even things as simple as we were going to change uniforms, it's a different cut or a new piece of gear gets influenced in, we will often hear about that a year in advance. So there are people literally up the chain of command that are thinking about some change that's coming forward and communication starts. And I think that's really the key for managing change is thinking about it, describing the impact, and then sharing, communicating with it well before the due date is actually going to happen.

So there's an element of it's not a surprise that you're giving people an opportunity to get used to the idea.

I think so. I think so. And you and I were talking for a few minutes before we got started about COVID And I think the thing that made COVID so difficult is it really did come out of nowhere. You know, we had known a global pandemic may hit us, but of course, like all people, we're like, ah, it'll happen someplace else. You know, it won't impact me. And then suddenly we were in the midst of this and it was such a dramatic change. We really didn't have a choice because it was so contagious and so deadly. And so we were following rules, but we didn't know how to follow the rules. What were the rules? I had a client organization that had been a fully onsite company. They were a financial services firm. They were located in, in St. Paul, and their history was just to work onsite. And in 4 days, they sent everybody home. Well, one of the reasons they were able to do that is because they had just an outstanding IT organization that had been planning for what happens when we deploy our workforce and What are going to be the rules and how do you just pick up your whole computer and your monitor and all of that and carry it out in your car? And so we figured things out really quickly, but none of us liked it. It was difficult and we didn't plan for it. And so it made it even worse.

Yeah, it's interesting because it's in looking at unexpected events or sort of black swan events as they're sometimes called, right? In the financial industry. I think they often talk about it that way. Is it, you know, I push back and say that anything that's ever happened was predictable. So, I mean, it's— if it happened, it was predictable. It might have been highly unlikely. Yeah. I use the Coast Guard actually as an example of this because throughout the '90s, they were doing future casting, what might be called strategic foresight planning now, to eventualities, many eventualities, or prospective future outcomes that were unlikely, highly unlikely. And they had planned in many ways for what occurred on 9/11. And they were one of the better prepared groups—

Yeah.

—on that day to deal with something that was truly devastating, tragic, unexpected, and yet was predictable. And so it is, when we think about a pandemic, you think about how we We did get really sideswiped, you know, like just blindsided by that thing. And I, I don't really know of too many organizations or people that had planned specifically for that. But we do see that there were those that were agile enough in the moment to make moves, to pivot. Yeah. Some years ago with that title. So that concept, is that also embedded in the military? This idea that, you know, it's like, I, I don't know whether it was Churchill or somebody says, you go into You go into battle and the bullets start flying, and whatever plan you had, all that great planning, took a year to create this plan, but as soon as the first bullet starts flying, you know, the plan is sort of, uh, maybe you're keeping it and maybe you're pivoting in that moment. Is that

your

experience as well?

Yeah. So it was Eisenhower who said, um, planning is everything, the plan is nothing. And, um, I, you know, you can think through the inevitabilities that may or may not happen, What the Marine Corps does with particularly their young troops is when they issue an order, there's a piece in there that's, that, you know, I refer to in order to, and I talk about this in my book, of in order to what? So take the hill, but really secure the city. So if you can't take the hill because it's just too, um, too prepared and the enemy is too entrenched, You know, can you go around the hill? Can you communicate to other units that could maybe go into the city from the side rather than from the front on? And so knowing that bigger perspective in order to do what, I think is really, really critical to help you plan for contingencies, which of course are going to happen. Exactly. And I think in American business, we don't spend that time. What might go wrong? If things don't go as we planned, then what are we going to do? I was working with a very large manufacturer recently, and we actually did create a recession playbook. You know, recession looked like it's, you know, it still is probably on the horizon. And we actually defined what were the variables that would say we're in a recession. And then what are our steps of actions that we're going to take? And I think it's a process that this organization has never done before. And whether they have to execute it or not, they collectively said, wow, these are all the things that we have to think about. And then of course they had, you know, different, like a narrow recession, a deep recession. Oh my God, are we ever going to get out of this recession? And it helped them really think about what are all the levers that they have available to them that they can pull.

Yeah. I mean, we, it's so funny again with language, right? We just call it something different in our organization. We call that resilience planning. Resiliency training. And the thing about resilience is you have to develop it before you need it. That's at least, you know, what we found to be the case. So I'd love to get a sense of how the— in that environment in the military where it's over, under, around, or through, in order to— and then fill in the blank— how much is, would you say, is about the preparation for kind of any, any eventuality? Are you planning for certain ways of being, certain mindset, certain capacity to sort of engage in any variable that might change on the spot. Is that a big part of the training?

Oh, I think absolutely. I would say the US military, the average military member probably spends 200 or 250 days a year training, you know, and no organization on the planet does that except our US military. And why do they do that? Because it's life and death. And so, in that training, you're constantly running drills, scenarios, what-ifs. Some of them are done on a tabletop. Some of them are done actually out in the field, but you're constantly dealing with unplanned circumstances. And I think what our military also does is take real-time situations that we learned in Afghanistan and Iraq and say, Oh, we hadn't planned for IUDs, for example. We hadn't planned for suicide bombers. How do you add that into the curriculum, into the training so that we have updated all of the contingency kinds of things? And you're really, which is the core of resilience, you're teaching people how to think about the situation when the chaos is happening. That if I look back at all the things I practiced, all the training that I had, this situation isn't exactly like I've practiced, but it's pretty darn close. And it wasn't just me who practiced, but it was all these other individuals that I'm working with that practiced as well. And now we know what to do.

And we can trust one another because we've witnessed that everybody's put in virtually the same amount of time and effort.

Yeah, exactly.

Playing from the same sheet music, etc.

You know, and it's not just, it's not just the military that does that, you know.

Well,

hospitals have done—

go ahead. We've established what could be a best practice. And what I want to get a sense of, because with all the years you had in that space, you also spend, have spent many, many years now in, in the organizational development space. So I want to see, obviously, as you said, The best companies out there are not going to spend that kind of time and effort. They're not going to put 250 days of the year into training for unplanned circumstances. They're not going to do that at Apple or at Tesla or anyplace. But what's the next best thing that you've seen? And also, what recommendations do you have?

Yeah. You know, first of all, I do think some of our civilian organizations do it— firefighters, police officers, some healthcare situations will run, you know, large-scale event drills and so forth. So that's one example. I think the next best is to do lessons learned, you know, to literally stop and take 2 or 3 hours to say what worked well. If we had known more information, what would we have done differently? And then somehow archive that information so that it's available to others. What we don't do in organizations is we have a brand new project starting up. We have a team of 20 people. They've never worked together. Oh, let's brush off the lessons learned documents. It is something that the military does after every major exercise. We do a lessons learned experience, and those documents are readily available. And so I think a great practice is to make sure when a new team starts, you know, what did the last team say about implementing software or building a new building or dramatically expanding our customer base? And so we get so oriented on what's the next thing rather than looking back on what we can learn.

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 instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. I couldn't agree any more about that. We call it a feedback loop. What worked for me? What didn't work for me? What could be done differently? When you are constantly providing feedback, you know, sometimes called 360 feedback, whatever it might be, that people just get used to this idea that we debrief things, that we're constantly debriefing things, which, again, probably is more of a military, you know, kind of co-opting that, that term a little bit from that space. But in the business world, I'm not butting. I shouldn't say and. Yeah. In the business, what I'm seeing and I've seen in my own working in our company is that that landscape is changing. Things are so disruptive. That there's not always a playbook to go back and go, so in that scenario that happened 3 years ago, we skinned our knees, we spilled our milk. What did we learn? There's an element of that, but there's also an element of this is brand new territory. So any thoughts there when you're advising organizations? What do you say about that?

Well, I'm not sure every situation is so new. You know, we've— this pace of change that we've kind of got our wraps self-wrapped up into, I'm not sure it's that different than it was 3 years ago, 5 years ago. Calling a brand new project team together and actually spending time to get to know each other, to understand what the project timeline is, what are the deliverables. Literally taking— so often organizations are so excited to get started. They've finally gotten the investment, and then let's just launch. Here's the 2-hour orientation meeting. And you still don't know each other. You still don't really know who's doing what. So I think taking time to actually create a team that's going to work together, regardless of what those people did in the past, they've all had experiences and they can say, you know, here's one thing we did. Rather than doing a standup meeting on Monday, we did it on Wednesday because, and here's why it works so well. Or we used this software to communicate with, and that worked really, really well. And maybe that software is no longer viable, but the point was that the communication portal was very, very valuable. So, I think taking time to say, how are we going to work together, really allows everybody to bring their best ideas forward and then tune them to the situation that's at hand.

So, I'm kind of hearing you say that there are some basic elements that are almost Call them change-proof.

Very good.

Is that true?

I think it really is. You know, and I think part of that is, is forming the team. Who is our team that we're working together? You know, the Marine Corps trains with a deployable team for 6 to 9 to 12 months before they actually get on a ship or deploy to a foreign country. And that's partly so that they can practice some of these contingencies, but it's also so that they can get to know each other. Is Joe a good shot or not? Can I depend on him? Is he cautious or is he aggressive? And I think in business situations, we can use that same sense about who am I working with? Who can I count on? What expertise do they have? And now let's go forward. And again, the change-proof, Adam, is not to do that just once. So you do a 2-hour offsite with this great big project team, and then poof, we're ready to go, right? No, come back 6 weeks later and say, okay, we decided on these guidelines. How are they working? Are we following any of them? Why not? What's changed? What do we need to— So I think what we've learned about change is that we have to talk about not just what the change is, but how are we going to get there? And that's the thing I think organizations really shortchange themselves on.

Are we listening enough, do you think? I mean, again, love this corollary between military structure and civilian structure. In the military, I'm pretty sure, though I've not served, That upper command, when they make a decision, they don't necessarily consult with or hear out the younger enlisted, you know, folks, etc., or whoever it might be. And in an organization, a civilian organization, I think there's some thought today that more conversation, more consensus is required. Any thoughts on those 2?

Well, I do think in the military, as much as we'd love to think it's command and control, I think big decisions It is a collaborative process. Commanding officer will have their staff officers that they talk about, what do we know on intel? How ready are the troops? What equipment do we have? And then there's almost always a senior enlisted person who really represents the thinking of the enlisted troops. Oh. They're the ones who say, boy, people are really tired because we've been training for the last 15 days nonstop. Or, We have a lot of Marines that are leaving the units just because their contracts are up. And so, I do think that decisions on the military side are much more collaborative than we think they are. I think when I say this to, on the civilian side, to a senior leader, a vice president, or even a CEO, she will say, what do you mean? They pay me to make decisions. I've got it. I've got a lot of experience. And Why wouldn't you ask everybody? Why wouldn't you get perspectives? And that asking everyone doesn't mean you're going to change your decision. It means you're going to make a better decision because everybody has weighed in and you've gotten multiple perspectives of how this is going to, how you can make it work.

You mentioned young leaders earlier on, and I would love to get a sense from you. Of— and this is not a well-formed question, I admit it. It's a broad area, and I don't exactly even know where to sort of dive into that. But let's— I'd love it if you'd share some thoughts on young leaders, the ones that you've experienced, and whether you see them as doing things quite a bit better than maybe some of their senior, you know, folks around, or whether you think there's still a bit of a learning curve. And if so, what that looks like. Yeah. Love to get your thoughts there.

Well, here's a couple of things for us to ponder. The average manager in the United States is reported— is promoted to manager somewhere around 29, 30, 31 years old. They don't get any kind of leadership development until their mid-40s. Second, we often promote our really spectacular individual contributors. They get things done, they're communicative, they make out project plans, and we say, poof, You must be a great leader. And so we don't give them again any training or coaching. We just say, here's what you will do. If you did a Venn diagram and said, here are the skills of an exceptional manager and here's the skills of an exceptional leadership, you'd only have about 20% overlap. Finally, the Conference Board has told us that when they asked brand new managers, 60% of them said that they had failed in their first 2 years. So I think new managers can be very, very effective, except we've never taught them how. We spend a lot of our leadership development dollars at the top half of the organization. And, you know, for a lot of reasons that makes sense. But those frontline leadership leaders are the ones who are interacting with our customers, who are making immediate decisions about whether the equipment is up or down, They are really driving retention in the organization. And even some simple basics about how to give feedback, how to have good one-on-ones, how to engage them in meeting and work is what's really, really critical. And I think brand new managers just don't think about that stuff.

So is there anything again that you draw from your experience in the military that's a good example of training young leaders differently?

Yeah. Well, I draw from both. You know, the military does it really, really well, I think, because they send people through boot camp and then they send people through staff NCO school or officer school or whatever. So there's a lot of talk about how to be a good leader. You know, it's fundamentally the reason that I—

Life and death context again, right? So it's different in the sense that you would never think of putting a 31-year-old leader with a bunch of stars on their shoulder and say, here you go, you know, lead troops.

Go figure it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's also the case because we draw our service members from so many different walks of life across the United States and, and Canada, you know, any, any country has the same thing. And so how do you bring all those different perspectives, the wealthy, the poor, various upbringings, different racial groups. How do we bring them together and get them to do all the same things? Well, you do it fundamentally through training. Right. But it's the reason that I wrote my book, The 7 Mistakes New Managers Make, is because we don't deliberately talk to our managers about, here's what good managers do. I was doing a workshop the other day, and I said to the group, let's talk about one-on-ones. What do you do during your one-on-ones? And this one young woman, I think she was probably 28 or 29, said, you know, I don't hold them. I don't know what I'd talk about and I don't want to look foolish. And, you know, thank you for being so genuine. And then the second thing I get about one-on-ones is, oh, I talk to my people all the time. We interact almost every day. We talk about what they're working on, what's getting in the way. Are they going to get done on time? And I say, well, when was the last time you talked about them? How are they feeling? What have they accomplished? What are they learning how to do differently? That's really the essence of a great one-on-one. And it doesn't take that long. You know, it's a 30-minute meeting.

I want to just point out to our listeners, people that might be even watching this on YouTube, that we'll have show notes, of course, with links to Janet's work, including this book, 7 Mistakes That New Managers Make. But in the meantime, can you give us just a little sense of what some of those other mistakes are? Because I want people to go out and get this book for sure. So let's not— I'm going to say it bold. Don't give them everything. Can we just, for the value of this show, which I think has been hugely valuable already, I'd love to get a sense of what some of those other mistakes are.

Yeah. So failure to give and receive feedback, you know, not creating an environment where everybody gives feedback to everybody. We talked a few minutes ago, Adam, about giving recognition and gratitude. One of the things that I always, always encourage teams to do is start with recognition. Who did something well the last couple of weeks? And making sure that everybody shares the responsibility. We have a chapter in there about change and how to manage change very deliberately. I think the first mistake is really, really important, which is doing instead of leading. Again, we take that great individual contributor and we say, ta-da, you're a leader. And so it's hard to let go of what you do really, really well. And fundamentally, being a manager is working through other people. So talking about, you know, what do you have to let go of to be a really good manager?

I'm going to press you on that for a second. What's one thing that you do have to let go of to be a really good manager?

You have to let go of delivering the results all by yourself. And that you provide guidance, you provide feedback, but you let other people do things. And in doing so, they will do it a different way than, you know, you or I would do, Adam. And you have to let go of, well, here's the steps you do, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. No, here's the task. Here's when it's due. Now let me know when you get stuck. Or should we meet every couple of weeks and see how you're progressing? And I can give you some coaching and guidance. But I'm not going to tell you how to do it. Yeah. Oh, but that takes us so much longer. You know, it just, it's so much easier for me to just tell you how to do it.

There's a bit of ego in there too. I always think some of those things because our human development, our personal development is never outside of our business development. We kind of, we can't compartmentalize those things. And when When we have, for whatever the reasons are, when our egos are in the way of some of that letting go, I think we have to call that out as well. Do you agree?

Oh, I think absolutely. And hopefully we have created an environment where people will give us that feedback. But if we don't, we need to ask others and genuinely ask. So as a leader, I'm kind of new to this. What am I doing well? What would you like to see me do more of? And is there anything I need to stop doing? You know, what's getting in the way of you being effective?

Janet, you've been a, you're a mom. You're an author. You're organizational development expert, consultant, speaker, all these. Had a 20-year history career, successful career. What was your highest rank when you retired?

A lieutenant colonel.

Lieutenant colonel. Not again, not many women in the Marines. get to. So I want to understand how you've been resilient because you are, I look at you and I just think, ah, this is a remarkable human being. And I'm sure—

Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. You know, one funny quick story, when I would wear my uniform into the commissary or the exchange, people would watch me. It was really, 'cause there were so few of us, they were like, oh, look at, she's buying toothpaste. Hi, toothpaste. Lettuce. Her family eats lettuce. And you could just feel people looking at you. It was really an odd thing. Oh dear, Adam, I forgot the question. Oh,

I want to know how you've been resilient. I want to understand in such a varied life that you've had.

You know, I think you have to keep being yourself. I am Janet. Like you said, I'm a mother. You know, I lead with my motherhood there at my soul. I think I work really hard. I work hard to have fun at what I do and enjoy myself. When people ask me about what it's like to be coached by you, I say, I think we have fun. I think we try not to take ourselves too seriously. And then I think you just move on. Like everybody, I had some really dark patches over the years. I launched a business a number of years ago and I did my whole business plan and I thought I was all set. And then we launched it and the recession happened in 2008 and it was a train And yet, you know, my family and I moved forward and we recovered from it. And so, you know, I think you just reflect on what you learned and then you move on.

Yeah. Oh my goodness. I want to understand your rituals for resilience. I'm a resilience keynote speaker, but I also speak— I speak on mental health. I speak on work-life balance and stress management in that same sort of context. And I know you speak as well. Well, let me ask you this before we get to rituals, because that'll be the last thing I want to ask you about. When you are out there speaking, when you are building your business through your own speaking, what's your favorite?

How do we just become better people leaders? How do we do these basic things like giving feedback and one-on-ones? And, you know, even when it was the very first time I gave a talk about the book, The 7 Mistakes New Managers Make, and I had a bunch of directors in the room and they all kind of scratched their head and said, you know what, Janet, I make these mistakes every single day. This isn't new manager stuff. This is every manager stuff. But of course, that's not a very kitschy title. The mistakes that you always make every single day.

Right.

Nobody wants to read that book. So I think that people need to be reminded that our workforce needs to be cared for. And it doesn't mean baking cookies every day. It means asking people, how are they really doing? And then finding out what do they feel really good about in the work that they're doing? What do they love doing? And helping them find more of that. So it's caring for the time that they give us as employees in the workforce because they give us a lot of their time. Hopefully, we pay them equitably, but work is way more than that. It's about, am I contributing? Does my work matter? The time that I leave my kids at home, hopefully not unattended, but the time I'm away from them, that I'm creating something that's important. And I think that's the manager's job is to help them uncover that and name it.

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. And acknowledge it because where we started our conversation was this idea of what does real appreciation look like and feel like? It's not just words. It's not just a thing that we value that. It's in our mission statement. It's like, it's these everyday acts.

It is our everyday acts.

So the word rituals, when I'm speaking about resilience in particular, I'm talking about how do we recover? What is the method? Because that is what resilience is in our world and in the research we've done. It's about recovery more than it is about endurance. So—

Yeah.

When we have strong rituals for our recovery, we are able to just magically, miraculously, whatever you wanna say, handle almost anything. When your business had the challenge that it had that you called a train wreck, you were prepared for that even though you weren't predicting that eventuality and it wasn't one you were wanting to have happen. When it happened unexpectedly, you were prepared for it because you'd been developing your resilience long before you would've needed it. In that instance. That's what our research tells us about resilient individuals, leaders, and organizations. So I wanna understand a little bit about the rituals that you maintain that create recovery zones for yourself mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, any of those. And let's just pick one. And, you know, it could be your favorite or the most,

you know,

like, the most impactful even.

Yeah. Well, my most impactful is working out in the morning. I work out most mornings. When I do leadership workshops, you know, we usually stay at a nice hotel and I almost always work out in the morning. It just kind of gets me started. It allows me to eat a healthier breakfast than all those pastries and everything you end up having. You know, there's a downside to that because workshops start at 8 or 8:30 in the morning. So that means you have to get up at 5:30 or 6, but it's just Different. And, you know, we've taken 20 people offline for a day or two and they deserve absolutely the best.

Yes.

And that's the way that I have found it. I was co-facilitating with a gentleman one day and he said, Janet, I never eat dessert when I'm facilitating. He said, you know, again, you get these buffets and they keep bringing in snacks and all that. He said, I just, anything with sugar, I just stay away from. It gets me through the day and I use my time then as a reward to have a dessert. And I thought that was just really brilliant. And so we all have our strategies of how we manage that. And for me, I know if I haven't worked out for 2 or 3 days, now I don't run marathons, you know, I used to, but I don't anymore. So I'm not working out 2 hours a day. I'm working out 25, 35, 45 minutes, and that gives me enough. To keep me fit and to keep the energy where it needs to be.

Yes. Before we got together this morning for our discussion, I did yoga on our deck with my wife and we did it for 25 or 30 minutes because I didn't have a whole bunch of time, but it was the perfect class. It was the perfect length and the blood flow, the, the way my energy was, my thinking was before and after was dramatically different. And that is one of my rituals as well.

Yeah. Great.

Use that space in the morning, which we have so many choices.

We do.

Fundamentally, the thing that is within our control, because I know a lot of people just do feel like they don't have enough of their own time or they don't have freedom. But I call BS on that because there's no question that we do. It's just a question of what we do with it. So that's a conversation perhaps for another day. Janet, I have so So enjoyed, loved actually, speaking with you today. So thank you for, for taking the time to get with us. I know that I want to give you the last word here. I'll just say to our folks, show notes will be available, of course, links to Janet's work. You can get to her website, you can get to her book. I certainly hope everybody goes out and buys The 7 Mistakes That New Managers Make. I know I'm going to go get a copy. So I'm—

Great. Thank you.

That's just amazing. And I thank you again for being on the show. Any final words from you?

I think that if you are a leader, develop your team. If you have managers reporting to you, take some time, find a couple of articles, read the book and study it as a group, engage in leadership development. I don't think we have to have bad managers out there. This is a correctable thing.

It's a correctable thing. And in a world where resignation, or as they call it now, the Great Resignation— now I'm hearing terms like quietly quitting. I mean, in that world, I think we have to do a bit of a check-in, as we are, as many leaders, organizations are taking aware— having awareness around this and doing something about it, which is very positive. I'm glad that you and I are playing in that same sandbox. It's just wonderful. Folks, if you love this podcast, and I can't imagine that you haven't just listening to Janet, please share the episode with a friend. You can subscribe to our channel. We love it when you do that. If you want to leave a review, please make it a 5-star review. Now, just saying, uh, that's wonderful, but the feedback is vital to us. So if you want to go to adamarkel.com/podcast, you can leave a comment there for, for me and for our team, and we will respond to that. But Most importantly, we will take that feedback to heart. So thank you for that. And I will look forward to the next opportunity for us to all get together. Thanks again, Janet.

Thank you so much.

Well, I couldn't have loved that conversation anymore. Janet, she is just amazing. I mean, in so many ways, she is inspiring, she is insightful, and she brings this tremendous wisdom born out of more than 20 years in military service. Starting out in the Marine Corps as an enlisted person, she rises to the level of lieutenant colonel, something very rare, something we don't see very often, and all the while maintains her true self as a method and a process for leading in an environment that, as we know, is in many ways life or death. The context in that environment doesn't leave great margin for error. And she had an illustrious career in the Marine Corps, and now, is leading in many ways organizations to develop their practices to model the things that worked quite well in that other environment, that environment that, as we know, just is formidable. So our conversation today, the conversation that I, I had to just in awe of really how varied it was and the directions that it, it took really blew me away. And I've got so many notes. I've got my pages of notes right here, but some of the things that I just wanna recall, I'm sharing with you a little bit of what about what I took from it was how it is that frontline leaders, the kind of people that are really on the front lines in most organizations, get such little training. They, they're, they're not really being, uh, thought of as the place where you, you invest dollars, you invest resources to see them trained. And in fact, many managers don't receive any formal leadership training until they're in their early 40s. They may make manager at age 31, but we don't see a lot of allocation of training dollars going toward their early training. And I think that's a mistake and something that Janet pointed out to us, somebody that worked, worked in, in the military space where 250 days a year were devoted to training for unplanned circumstances. And I think that's one of those things that today, given just what's happened with the pandemic and every other disruption that, that we've experienced, and still the rampant uncertainty, that we've got to be looking at training for unplanned circumstances more than we were before. And part of that is to develop a feedback loop that we are using on a continual basis, meaning that we're constantly evaluating and have a process for evaluation that people actually benefit from and look forward to and don't feel threatened by. So I think that's truly one of my great takeaways from our conversation today. We talked about how you create a recession-proof playbook, or as we are going to be speaking about, a resilience playbook. Again, for the future that we know is ahead of us that is so unknown and uncertain, that's something that Janet gave us great insight to. And I, I know that that was meaningful to me. I'm sure it's going to be meaningful to you as well. Again, talking about her leadership style and what it meant for her to just be herself, which included being a wife and a mom as she was leading troops and leading others and rising to the level of officer in an environment that typically doesn't reward women in those circumstances as readily as it does men, which of course we know is inequitable. And yet when you listen to Janet speak, just tremendous wisdom about how it was that she was able to navigate that. I also thought it was really wonderful when she shared about this concept of in order to do, in order to do. What does that mean? You'll have to listen, check out what she said about that, this concept of over, under, around, or through in order to do is something I think that all of us can bring forward in our personal lives and certainly in our leadership roles within organizations. It's just one of these things that is, for me, going to pay more and more dividends. I'm going to re-listen to this episode. I'm going to go back to it. I'm going to think about how it is that I can utilize some of the wisdom that we heard today, that we heard, or that I was was really lucky to be part of in conversation about young leadership and where it is that we can truly inspire young leaders and where it is that us as more seasoned leaders, let's call it, if that's your case, maybe you're not in a seasoned leadership role, but the importance, the vital importance of looking at younger leaders as an opportunity to bring new perspective and new insight. How it is we can utilize that young leader in a different way, in a more interesting, I think, and more impactful way than perhaps we've been doing. Again, Janet was kind enough to answer a lot of very pointed questions. I feel like I was able to push back in certain places or just ask for clarity with respect to how it is that we can look at her work in the military and the Marine Corps in particular and create a bridge To the work that she does in organizational development, the work that I do in that space as well, and how there's corollary. There are opportunities for us to see dots between those 2 different, very different arenas and connect those dots so that we can benefit so greatly from what she learned in that very important role. I so, as you can probably tell, enjoyed this conversation, learned a great deal from it. I know that you will as well. I know it's something that you're going to want share with leaders of all kinds in various, uh, seasons of their development. This is going to be one of those episodes that you relisten to, that you share with others. And of course, as always, we'd love to get your feedback on it. You can go to adamarkel.com/podcast to do so. If you've not yet subscribed to our podcast, The Change Proof Show, please go ahead and do that. Share it with a friend, leave a review. We all love those things. We So appreciate you being a part of our community as well. Enjoy this episode, as I certainly have.

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/becomechangeproof.