GA 500 | Celebrating 500 Episodes

Hey, everyone, this is Ron Pereira, and I'd like to welcome you to episode 500 of the Gemba Academy podcast. So, boy, oh, boy, 500 episodes. That's been quite a ride. I know I've shared a little bit of history on the podcast before, but I'll touch on it. You know, when we. Before Gemba Academy was even a thing, I had my own personal blog called LSS Academy. Actually looked it up on that Wayback Machine website the other day just to. To remember some of the. The roots of where this thing all started. And anyhow, on that blog, you know, I just wrote articles about Lean and Six Sigma and that sort of thing. And I also started to experiment with. With podcasting. Now, podcasting wasn't really what it is today back then, but there was a few people doing it, and so I started recording a few episodes and, and got them posted. And, you know, there was, you know, we started building a little bit of a following and that sort of thing, and then the whole Gamba Academy. And we eventually realized that, well, it doesn't make any sense to have an LSS Academy podcast when we had Gemba Academy going on. And so we moved everything over to the Gemba Academy podcast. And, well, yeah, we've. We started, and, boy, we didn't stop. In fact, I'm pretty proud of, of. Of our team and the effort that it's taken to say this, but we have never missed a week in 500 episodes. Now, there's been a few times where Craig would come to me and like, hey, we need to get something, but most of the time, we're many weeks ahead, but, boy, it's been a journey and we're not stopping by any means. So this is just one of those nice milestones that we wanted to celebrate. Now, obviously, a lot of times on these episodes, we're having Lean experts or continuous improvement experts or leadership gurus, and we can get pretty technical talking about things, but also, as we all know, Lean is about people. In the end, yes, there's a lot of tools, a lot of methods, a lot of things that we're doing, but it's about people, people helping people and making the world a better place. And so what we thought we would do for episode 500 is we polled several Gemba Academy employees who many, many of our team members listen to the podcast on a regular basis and just wanted to find out if there was any particular episode that touched them and, and if so, which one was it and why? And so that's what we're going to do today, we've had some Gamba Academy folks stand up and, and pick out a few of their favorite episodes. And so we're going to play just a snippet, if you will, of each of these episodes. And then obviously, like always, we're going to link to these episodes below in the show notes. So if one of them stands out to you or a couple of them stand out to you, go back and listen to the whole thing. And yeah, that's what we're going to do. So the first episode that we're going to focus on is episode 4 11. And this the guest was Dave Tuttle. Now, Britta Quella, our director of customer success, is the one who suggested this one. She was really moved by Dave and his story and the way that he's impacting students. So Dave runs or helps teach a Platte Tech Institute there in Connecticut. In fact, we did a Gemba Academy live episode featuring them. But he's teaching these kids how to work in a machine shop. But he's also really pouring into them lean principles and they work Gemba Academy in and all the rest of it. So let's have a listen to what, what Dave had to say in episode 4 11.

When we get them jobs and they begin a career, we get feedback from the employers immediately. And one of the best ones we hear is when, you know your young guy that just came in here, has been here a couple months, is teaching my staff about 5s.

Yeah.

And I go, well, I hope they don't get mad at him. But I said, that's the way they were trained for four years. I was a very fortunate young guy to have a lot of great mentors in my life, beginning with my father, to my shop teacher, to people I worked for. And to be able to do for these young kids what was done for me and keep paying it forward, to me, that's a blessing. It's not a job. And I told someone this story, actually I posted on LinkedIn last year. But I went into the local Lowe's, grab some hardware. One day, young guy comes up to me with a baseball hat on and a really thick beard and he goes, Mr. Tuttle. And he throws his arms around me and he goes, how you been? I had no idea who he was.

Okay.

And he takes his phone out and starts showing me pictures of his new wife. They just got married. The house they just bought. This is my brand new car. This is my dog. We're planning on having children. And he went into this for five minutes and I'm still looking at him and not knowing who he was.

Okay?

And it was the beard. The beard set me off.

And.

And he looked at me and said, everything you said was right. Everything you said came true. He says, he goes, I got. I got the best of everything, and my parents are proud of me and all this stuff. And then he finally, he goes, do you know who I am? And I said, the beard's killing me.

I don't.

You know, and it was this kid, George, and I mean, it was just. He was so proud of everything that he had done, and it was all off what he learned here. And, you know, I walked away that day and I went to my truck and I said, I got the best job in the world.

The thing I love about Dave is just his genuine passion for. For the work that he does and for the kids that he's impacting. And what a story. I mean, can you imagine young person coming up like that? So maybe you have. Maybe you've had this in a similar situation, but, boy, I sure appreciate Dave and. And all he does for. For those kids. All right, so the. The next episode that we want to feature is episode 347. And this is featuring my good friend Billy Taylor. Now, if you've never heard of Billy, Billy is all kinds of. All kinds of energy and all kinds of passion, and he's just a fantastic guy. So Laurel Martin is the Gemba Academy team member who chose Billy. So she met Billy at a conference, at the AME conference, and she was really moved by him. And so she went back and re. Listened to the show that we did with him, episode 347. And so, yeah, let's have a listen to what Billy had to say. How important is diversity to you and what value does it bring to an organization?

It's critical. Here's why it's critical. And I'm going to start with Lean Operational Excellence. Diversity is what drives excellence. It's different thoughts, different ideas, different types of innovation. It's not just race, gender, or demographic. Diversity is critical. Those things are important because when those people feel comfortable that they can come to work and be their authentic self, you get their very best. And see, that's what drives innovation. And if you look at stats, companies that are more diverse are more productive. And one study done by Deloitte said that they're 80% more effective than companies that are not okay. And Deloitte is a company in Australia. Now, when I talk about inclusion, inclusion is what drives excellence. It's those innovation, innovative ideas, embracing people Embracing thoughts of ideas, including people.

Yeah.

And so it's critical. Diversity and inclusion is critical. But remember, diversity and inclusion, diversity in itself is different. It's not a gender. There's mothers that are out there working in the manufacturing fields. There are women out there in the field. That's diversity. There are people that have disabilities that are out in the work. That's diversity.

Yeah.

So it's. It's. We all have. Where none of us are alike. So it's critical. Diversity. Inclusion is critical.

Yeah.

It's a key element.

Hey, I'm not. I'm not senior leader, you know. You know, maybe I'm lower to middle management, something like that. Right. You know, frontline supervisor or something like that. What advice do you have for them when they're. What we. Sometimes I use. I use the analogy that they're pushing on a rope.

Yes.

You know, they wish someone was pulling a rope, but they're pushing the rope, you know, so what. What advice? And how do. How do you. How do those folks, you know, survive or thrive, even?

Well, right there is the end game. Right. The goal. What's winning? Right. So then start deploying from your level.

Yeah.

Don't wait for that. You know what winning is for you. And you have a team. How do you deploy from your level? And then you start building that credibility with your leader.

Yeah.

That's how I broke through personally as a young manager coming up. At that point, I understood operational excellence. I invested in me learning and cascading to my team. I was one of the very first one in the company to do visual management. Here's what I didn't say in the keynote. Goodyear had no idea that the plant was pursuing the Shingle prize. No one from corporate America knew. No one in the organization was engaged with us. Now, I could have said I didn't get approval from my senior executives, but I knew what we didn't know. And so we didn't go after the Shingo prize for the prize. We went after the Shingo prize for the process.

Yeah.

And at that point, our CEO calls me and said, hey, Billy, tell me what's going on with the Shingle prize.

Yeah.

And then I said, oh, by the way, Rich, we'd like to have you as a keynote speaker. Right. So I built Evangelist. So start where you are. Right where you are. I don't care what level of the organization you're in. If you're an operator, you can do 5s.

Yep.

You can identify defects. So start where you are, and then you'll build that evangelist.

Yeah. Man, I love Billy. His passion is contagious. Every time I talk to Billy or just even just see him, he's got this big old smile on his face and he's so excited about life. And gosh, I'm just so, so grateful that our, our paths have crossed and he's been able to come on and, and talk several times. So again, that was Billy Taylor, episode 347. Okay, the next episode is episode 100 that we're going to feature. This featured Matt May. Now Matt actually has been on the show several times and, but boy, episode 100 is. Well, it's one that I'll never forget. So I don't know how else to set this up other than to say Matt shares a story about how he died. Like he was dead and, and, and basically obviously he came back to life, but he, he talks about that, the impact that that had on him and, and also just really ties it into, you know, things like Lean and, and the dangers of vanity metrics. And so it's just a super powerful episode. So two people from Gemba Academy actually chose this one. Kevin Meyer, my business partner, one of my business partners, and Jessica Bush. And Jessica works in our content team. So they Both picked episode 100 and neither one of them knew the other one picked it. So that's how that' this one is. So yeah, let's have a listen.

The scene is a week before Christmas, you know, a couple months ago, December 19, 2015 to be exact. And that at that time of the year, a lot of people are sort of winding down for the holidays, sort of trying to avoid the shopping malls and be outside here in Southern California. And that's exactly what I had planned for Saturday morning. A mountain bike ride with three other friends, two of which had not really seen or ridden with regularly for a couple of years. Saturday morning, fairly warm. They said the rain was gonna move in around 11am so we wanted to get on the trail around 9. It's about a two hour ride. And we all grouped together and set about on our ride. And gosh, everything was going swimmingly well. The trail was nice, it was a little moist, the air was fresh. My lungs were clear.

How hard do you ride? Are you like really getting after it or no?

Yeah, this is, yeah, I'm a, I'm an avid mountain biker. I'm probably on my bike when I can swing it 10 to 12 hours a week. I've got a fairly high, what's called VO2 max, which is the volume of oxygen your Lungs can pump, if you will. I've got a fairly high hematocrit level, which is the oxygen level in your blood. And while I'm not a professional, I'm way too old for that. I can keep up with guys 15, 20 years younger than me and in super fit shape. So, yeah, we ride pretty hard. And Doug was ahead of me, and he was enough ahead of me that he was around a turn and really couldn't see me. So I was lagging a bit because he's faster down the hill. So he beat me down and started up quicker. And gosh, as I started climbing, lo and behold, I couldn't catch my breath on a section that I clear all the time and have virtually no trouble on. So I knew that something was amiss. And because I have in my past an instance like I was experiencing, which is shortness of breath when you shouldn't, I started to get nervous. And I'll take you back to three years ago when I was on a tennis court on a Sunday morning just warming up. And same thing, I couldn't catch my breath. Just warming up, just, you know, just an easy warm up. Oh, my gosh, why can't I breathe? And my partner said. My tennis partner said, you know, you actually don't look all that great, to be honest with you. And he and I had actually ridden mountain bikes the day before and played tennis the day before. But he said, maybe we went too hard yesterday, but here's the thing, we were at the country club where I play tennis. And he said, you know, I know this is going to sound kind of crazy and maybe it's over the top, but, you know, the head of cardiology for our local hospital is working out in the gym. I'm going to go run and get him. And the only reason he knew that he was working out in the gym was because he had actually come through the locker room and seen him, peeked in to see that he was. His name is Vishwa Dev. Dr. Dave. Dev was working out. And he said, you know, let me go run and get him. So it was lucky A, that he had come through the locker room, B, that he had spied Dr. Dave and that we were close enough that he could just run and get him. And so we did. And he came back, Dr. Dave did, and he said, he took my pulse and asked me what I was feeling. And I said, well, I can't catch my breath and it feels like there's an elephant stomping on my chest. And he said, you know, I'd like you to come to the emergency room. And I go, no, really, I'm fine. I'll go home, I'll lay down. I don't think anything's happened. He goes, no, I want you to come to the emergency room. I'm going to call ahead. This was a Sunday morning. I'm going to call ahead and I'm going to open up the catheter lab just in case. They admitted me right away. They wheeled me in and they took a look at me and they said, you're having a heart attack. Because that's what had been listed. Myocardial infarction, which is a fancy word for heart attack. I go, I guess so. That's what they're telling me. And the nurse said, you don't look like you should be having a heart attack. You look pretty fit. I go, I am pretty fit. But be that as it may, they hooked me up to an ekg, and sure enough, my heart was not happy. And the doctor came in and my wife was there. And he said, you know, it's not good, but I can fix it. They wheeled me into the cath lab, and 20, 30 minutes later, they had snaked a catheter up through my femoral artery into my heart and implanted two titanium stents. And all was better. Spent a couple of days in intensive care, but all was sort of well and good after that. So by the time that 2014 roll around, I was drug free, I was feeling good. And then this happened on the mountain bike ride. So I'm out of breath, I'm climbing up. I go, you know, this feels just eerily familiar. So I began walking, hoping that it was just another instance of being out of breath or something would reverse itself. And it didn't. I had to sit down. And as I sat down, it got progressively worse. And a biker came by that I didn't know. And he goes, are you okay? And I said, I'm not sure. If you get to the top, tell my friend I'm not going to make it. Not meaning I was going to die or anything, but I just wasn't going to make it to the top anytime. Yeah, anytime soon. I pulled out my phone because I was getting worse. I was getting chilled. I could feel that I was sort of going into shock, visibly shaking. And gosh darn it, it just kept getting worse. The pressure in my chest kept getting worse. And finally I pulled out my phone and I texted my friend Doug saying, you know, not coming. And he texted me back right away, are you okay? And I Said no. And he beat a. Beat a path down to me. I think back in 2012, the doctor actually did say, it's a good thing I went into the ER because had I gone home to lay down, I might not have woken up. But. So he beat a path down to me, and that's when the real fun began. So lucky point number one was that a. I had decided to ride with a friend or friends. I wasn't alone. Lucky point number two for me was that we had enough cell phone coverage that we could text each other. So he came back down to me and he said, well, you don't look good. I've never seen you. I've never seen anyone. So. And I gave him my phone and I said, Call Dr. Dave. And luckily I had his cell phone number. Keep in mind, again, this is Saturday morning. Most doctors are doing something they love to do. And he called that cell phone number. Luckily, Dr. Dave picked up. And luckily he had cell phone coverage because he was out on a hike with friends. So he was out in the mountains here in Southern Cat, California. The coverage is spotty. And he answered the phone, he says, hello, Matt. I could actually hear him say that. And Doug said, this isn't Matt. This is his friend Doug. And Matt doesn't look good, and we need to know what to do. And through Dr. Dave, Doug asked me what's going on. And I said, I'm having a heart attack. I knew I was having a heart attack. At that point, Doug sort of sprung into action. I guess he got on 911. He dialed 911 again, lucky we had coverage and said, you know, explained who he was, explained the situation, said, we need help. We need a rescue team as soon as possible. We need to get him to the hospital. He's having a heart attack. Are you sending a helicopter? Yes, we're sending a helicopter. They're en route. And we couldn't hear them at that point. And I was getting worse by the second. So the helicopter lands on that fire road. I saw the helicopter. I didn't see it land, but I did hear it. I did see it. And it was one of the big ones. It wasn't your typical, like, lifeguard kind of helicopter. This was a big Blackhawk.

Oh, wow.

And they had three guys, a pilot and a paramedic and another guy that was navigator slash paramedic. Now, the paramedic had strapped me up to some sort of EKG machine, something electronic. And I said, I'm having a heart attack, man. You got an aspirin and you got a nitro equestrian. He said, yeah, I got all that. Let me hook you up first. So he hooked me up several electrodes to my arms, under my shirt. And I had started to feel a little bit better for whatever reason. And I looked around and I said to everyone as he started monitoring me, I think I need to pass out. Even though I had started feeling better, in other words, the pain had gone away a little bit. I felt woozy. And so I said, you know, I think I'm just going to lay back here. I think I need to pass out or what I remember is feeling really good after I said I had to pass out.

What do you mean? What do you mean good?

It just felt like all the pain physically good. Yeah, just like, oh, wow. Just. That feels good. I'm really glad I laid back down. I'm going to take a nap. This feels great. It felt just. Everything was peaceful and calm and pain free. And that's probably the last thing I remember before I started hearing voices. And it's kind of like when you come out of a REM sleep. You're sort of foggy and you're not really quite sure if you're having a dream or you're still asleep or you're actually awake. You've probably had that happen in some way where you're not fully conscious. But I started hearing people scream at me and I'm like, I was kind of pissed that people were screaming at me. I was trying to take a nap. You know, it's like, matt, can you hear us? Matt? Matt, Matt, can you hear us? And I came to and, you know, I looked around, I go, what happened? I passed out and goes. And my friend Doug just looked at me, no, dude, you died.

Okay, so sorry for the little bit of a cliffhanger there, but we're not going to play the whole episode on this one. But that might be one that you want to kind of go back and listen to if you haven't heard the whole thing. So again, that was episode 100 with Matt May. Very, very powerful stuff. And again, he, later on in the episode, he does tie it everything back to lean and continuous improvement things like Vanity Metrics. So a pretty special episode. Okay, next up we have my good friend Richard Sheridan. Even if he is a University of Michigan fan, you know, not everybody's perfect, you know. Oh, gosh, I love Richard though. He's. He's. He's something else. So. So Richard, he's. He's with a company called Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It's literally on the campus of University of Michigan. And he's a. He's. He. Well, he's, I think, the single best storyteller that I've ever, ever met. And so Jennifer Scott, Gemba, Academy's director of sales, is a huge Richard Sheridan fan. In fact, she'll probably get mad at me for sharing this on the podcast. But there's been times where, you know, Jennifer will come into the office. Here she comes into the office a few days a week, and. And one day she came in and it looked like she'd been crying. I was like, oh, my gosh, what's going on with Jennifer? You know? And so I kind of walk up there, say, hey, everything okay? And she's like, yeah, I was just listening to the podcast. I was like, what? The podcast? You know, why is the podcast making you cry? She goes, I just listening to Richard Sheridan. And, oh, gosh. And so, yeah, Jennifer, bless her heart, she was. She's really moved by Richard. And so this episode, Richard's been on a number of times, but episode 213 was the one that really moved Jennifer. So let's have a listen.

There was a day on a special project that was kind of my personal pet projects. It was an interest. It was an internal project that we were working on that I had really espoused because I really enjoy it. It's a. It's a small app for my iPhone that allows me as the CEO of the company, to check on receivables. And that's kind of lifeblood of a company that's driven by people, is cash flow. And receivables are the leading. The canary in the coal mine. And the app does a simple thing. It just highlights troubled receivables, and that's kind of an AI type of trouble. Which receivables are behaving differently than they normally do, rather than which ones are past net 15 or net 30.

And.

And the system wasn't working perfectly, but that's okay. It was an internal project, so it's a learning project as much as anything. And Tracy and Matt, two of our QA people, were taking a look at one of the problems, and they came up to me and asked me what my expectations were around this problem the system was experiencing. And it was that the data wasn't always right up to date for me, and that was what we were discussing. And I asked Matt, who was fairly new here at the time, maybe only been here about six months at that point, said, man, how often does the system Update itself. And he looked at me and he said, I don't know, Rich. And I can tell you, in that moment, I was not my best self as a leader. And I said something like, I wasn't mean. I didn't yell. I didn't swear, But I used my best adult voice and probably said something like, you know, matt, I'm the customer for this project. And that's the sort of thing I think a customer should expect you to know the answer to. And I'm probably either said it or made it clear how disappointed I was about that. And he looked at me, and Tracy was right there with him. Trace been here a long time and said, okay. And then they walked away. And I could tell right in the moment, I probably didn't handle that particularly well. Actually tossed and turned about it a little bit that night, thinking, yeah, I probably didn't do that well. The next morning, Tracy came in and applied a lesson that I've taught the team over many years. She walked up to me and she said, hey, can we talk? You know. You know, when the boss says that, yeah, this wasn't. You know, this was the boss being told this, too. And we sat down, and she looked at me, and she. She used a simple question that I have taught years and years and years for the team to use when they're having trouble with another team member. She looked me in the eye and said, are you okay? And I looked at her and I said, this is about yesterday, isn't it? She said, yeah. She said, I was surprised. It just didn't seem like you. So I want to make sure you're okay now in that moment. Right? That is. That is an act of love. That is an act of caring about the other person, Assuming that if they're misbehaving, it's not because they're a bad person. It's because maybe something's troubling them in their lives. And I went on to explain that, you know, I had some expectations, and I realized that I probably didn't handle them well, and I was fine. There was nothing wrong with me, you know, wrong with my life per se. And at that moment, Matt walked in the front door. This is real early in the morning. It was probably 8, 8:15 in the morning. And Matt walked in. There's Tracy, and I sit. And I waved Matt over. I said, hey, Matt, come here for a second. And he sat down, and I said, hey, Matt, that thing that happened yesterday, I didn't handle that very well. I'm sorry. And without missing a Beat. This guy had only been here for six months, looks me in the eye and says, I forgive you. Now, at that moment, my humble self just melts because I realized, here's a guy who's only been here six months, and he's demonstrating more loving, caring leadership than I did. Leader of the company, the Chief Storyteller, the CEO after 17 years. And. And I learned an important lesson that day about how to. How to be a better leader, and I learned it from one of our youngest team members.

You know, the thing I think I appreciate the most about Richard, just listening to that again and remembering that moment is just his sincerity. You know, Richard is very, very successful and runs a very successful company, and he keynotes at huge, lean conferences. And so, you know, he's. He's got a lot of accolades and a lot of people sort of swinging over him, but, gosh, he's just so sincere. He's so humble. And, yeah, you know, it was just a beautiful reminder listening to Richard. No matter where we are in a company, if we're a leader or not, you know, it is about how we treat one another. We don't always have to agree with each other, but the way that we treat each other, it does matter. In the way that we speak to each other, it does matter. The words have power, you know, and, gosh, Richard is such a blessing and so thankful for him. Okay, so next up, we have Peter Docker. So Peter Docker was on an episode 402, and, well, this is another one where we had two people select it. So. So Carlos Rivero and Greg Nichol, both of them work in our content development team. They both selected this one. I do want to give Greg Nickel, you know, when I want to back up to also Jessica Bush. I mentioned her earlier with episode 100. So Greg and Jessica and me, I guess the three of us, we're the ones that make this podcast happen. You know, we've got it, folks, whether you keep the website going and all that, but every week, you know, Greg, myself, and Jessica are working on this podcast. So Greg does all the editing. And so, you know, there's a lot of ums and Oz and, you know, maybe some things that we cut out of an episode. So Greg makes all these episodes sound great, and then Jessica, once they're done, Jessica listens to every single episode, and she types up these show notes that. That you see. So if you scroll down on the app and all the words and all the links, that's Jessica. So both of them are just instrumental. In fact, I say, I always say, and I really believe it. I have the easy job here. I just talk to people. But, man, Greg and Jessica make this, this podcast go so anyhow. So Peter Docker in episode 402. So he's a pilot by training, and while he's just got some really fascinating things that he shares in episode 402. So let's have a listen.

I was in the captain's seat, and I had a fairly junior first officer with me. We're flying into Gander in Newfoundland over on the east coast there, and the weather was pretty turbulent. It wasn't pleasant. And the first officer, this guy John, he was flying it, and you've got to get experience, because otherwise, if pilots don't get experience when they become a captain, they haven't got that experience to fall back on. So he was flying it. Now, when you fly an approach to a big airport, you have four lights near the threshold. We touch down on either side of the Runway. These are called PAPPEs, Precision Approach Indicators, and they can shine either red or white. Now, when you see two red and two white lights, as the pilot, that means you're on the exact correct angle of approach. If you see three white lights and one red, you're going too high. If you see three red and one white, you're going too low. If you see four red lights, you're going way too low, and it's dangerous to continue. Okay, so John started this approach and he had two red lights, two white. Good job on the correct angle of approach. But then I saw three red lights and one white, so he's going low. So I called out, I said, below the glide slope, which is the call that you make. At that point, John should have put on a little bit of more power from the engines, and that would have corrected the situation. But he didn't. So he continued to go low, and I could see it starting to go into four red lights. So I called again below the glide slope. He didn't take any action, but instead of taking control, what I did was I nudged the throttles of the engines, nudged them forward a little bit, calling out as I did so, and that was enough to correct us onto the two red, two white lights. So correct blind slope, and we landed without further incident. Now, what do we learn from that, from a leadership perspective? We will be in a situation often in any business when we've handed over control to somebody else who should have had the appropriate training, but they're not performing as we would like. And if they start to make errors, then we need to let them know and give them a chance to correct it. But if they don't correct it and we have to intervene, we need to know when to intervene. And I call that the four red lights moment. And the four red lights moment is the point at which if you allow the situation to go beyond that, you, with your experience, you're not going to be able to recover that situation. But even then, you have a choice. You have a choice to turn that into a spiral up moment or a spiral down moment. What I mean by that is you could turn it into a spiral down moment. And with John, I could have grabbed control from him. I would have pricked his balloon of confidence and it would probably take him six months to recover. But I chose a spiral up moment and that was to intervene to the minimum required to address the situation, to still allow him to have control, and then to talk about it later after the event. And he continued to spiral. The really neat thing, Ron, is that here we are, 20 plus years later, my son is a pilot in the Royal Navy over here. And when he was going through his training, he came home one day and he said, hey, dad, he said, I met a guy today, one of the instructors who remembers you. I said, oh yeah, who's that? He said, it's John. And it turns out I didn't say this to my son, but it turns out it was four red lights John.

Oh, wow.

And four red lights John, as I call it, had gone on. He'd become a qualified flying instructor. He had progressed over the years and had helped others. And unbeknownst to me, it actually helped my son during his training as a pilot. So, you know, this is the thing, when we see people making a mistake, ask ourselves, what's the minimum intervention I need to make? Does it really matter? Do I let them make that mistake? But above all, think I want to turn this into a spiral up moment rather than spiral down, because that can create payback way into the future beyond what you might imagine. Just as it did when I suddenly realized that he'd gone on to become an instructor training my own son.

Oh, I love that advice. Create a spiral up moment. Super powerful. So again, that was Peter Docker, episode 4. 02. So go check that one out if you'd like to have a deeper dive. Okay. And so last but definitely not least, we have featuring episode 430. So this was with Bhavana Bartolf.

And.

And so this is a really powerful episode. And Mia Melton, who works in our sales organization. She's the one that selected this one. And Mia actually shared, you know, pretty vulnerable story that she was. She was going through some difficult moments in her life, and she listened to this episode and it really helped her and it really gave her encouragement to keep going and to keep growing, if you will. And so, yeah, so this was a pretty special episode for Mia, and I also really appreciated it. So let's have a listen.

So one of my favorite quotes, and I think this is based on maybe how I like to live my life, is I love the quote that's attributed to. I think it's Maya Angelou, which says, I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. And that, to me, matters on how I show up every day.

What do you do as a leader in a situation where trust has been broken or fractured or damaged? How do you go about building that back up?

I love that question, Ron, because. No, everyone asks, how do you build trust? But no one ever looks at a situation where trust has been broken because that is the toughest one to recover from, right? Because you have different types of people, people that start with a high amount of trust to people that you have to earn their trust. And in either one of those situations, that's a lot easier than once trust is broken. Both of those situations, you're having to rebuild from scratch. And when people lose trust in you, it's not even when you've done everything you can to demonstrate credibility, to demonstrate trust, people don't take it till it's consistent. And so that means it's a longer. It takes a lot longer to regain and rebuild trust. So what I usually like to do in situations when this has happened is one acknowledging what has happened. Because a lot of times when trust is broken, no one communicates it. The individual whose trust you broke just makes the decision, you know, personally, that I'm not going to trust this person anymore. But you never actually have the conversation with the individual, even with your kids. You know, you said spouse. And in that. In those scenarios, it's. There's something that's happened. You may talk about the situation, but you don't actually talk about the feeling and what exactly caused the distrust. Because we sit in this layer of assumptions where people come at it from different aspects, where in many scenarios, trust could be broken completely based on a baseline misunderstanding, but nobody ever communicates or talks about it, which is an issue for me. In those scenarios, the starting place is talking about it let's talk through the actual situation and take the time to listen to both sides. The individual who is impacted, whose trust you lost and then the individual that broke their trust. And we've got to get comfortable in having those uncomfortable conversations. And I know it's not for the person who's trust you broke. They're past it, they just want to move on. But the reality is if we don't take the time, it's going to be a pattern that continues to surface and then some, you know, and then it creates a lot of unconscious biases as well, because then you're going to expect that of people that haven't even done anything. So there's a benefit for both sides to lean in. The second thing for me is then building these small milestones of expectations, of progress in what you would need to regain trust. And at times I tell a lot of folks, sometimes it's, especially in a work situation, you may not 100% trust that person again. But we have to work together. So what would need to be true for us to move on to getting to the right level of partnership and alignment so that we can all work together and be successful and so working through those milestones. And I know nobody ever wants to have those conversations because they're always uncomfortable. No one wants to talk about feelings, which is fine. But I think the importance of that communication and the expectations is important as we have to rebuild it in any scenario, both personally and professionally.

Again, that was episode 4:30 with Bhavana Bartov. So as I mentioned, scroll down on your app and all these episodes are going to be linked. So if you want to go back and check any of them out, please do. And well, hey, thanks for listening to episode 500. Thank you for, for tuning in. However often you tune in. I know Skip stewards listening right now and Skip, I know you listen to every episode. So man, I appreciate you and I appreciate everyone. So hey, we're going to be back next week like normal with a, just a, I would say a regular episode. And let's just keep going, let's keep learning, let's keep improving. And if you have any feedback or any, any ideas for the podcast, please email me directly. My email is ronamba academy.com we're always looking for ideas or for feedback. We are practicing continuous improvement as well with this podcast. So anything, any ideas you have, I'd love to hear them. And, and as I've mentioned before, if you're listening here to the very end, thank you. And, and that means you probably like the episode and like the podcast. And if you don't mind scrolling down on that app that you're listening to and, and giving us a review, five stars, whatever you think we've earned, that would be, that would be fantastic because that, that is super important for the podcast. That does help these, these algorithms. And the podcast shows up more often for, for folks who don't even know what Lean's all about, and they might be interested. And who knows, we can, we can influence some people in a positive way with this, with the good news that is Lean. So, anyhow, thanks again, and we'll see you next week.