216 - Leading with Love: How Servant Leadership Can Transform Your Team with Culture Force's Tom Kereszti

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Tom Foresti, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the co-founder of a company called CultureForce, which can be found at cultureforce.com. Team, T-E-A-M. Welcome to the show, Doug.

Thanks for having me.

Two Californians. I'm in Central California. You're down living life in San Diego, which is great. So tell us a little bit about your background. I know that you were in corporate for a long time and now you're doing some pretty interesting stuff. So let's just start with a quick synopsis of who you are and where you came from.

All right. From, I guess from 20 to about 40, mostly in the US, and then actually 35, I went out overseas. I was an expat. I worked for Fortune 100, Fortune 500s, and as those companies, they have a headquarters somewhere, whatever country they may be, and then they have subsidiaries all over the world. I bounced from subsidiary to subsidiary as general manager, CEO, depending on the size of the subsidiary in Europe and also spent a lot of time in Brazil, Argentina. Middle East, Africa, Far East. So basically I lived in 6 countries, worked in every continent, and had a lot of fun for about 25 years overseas. And then came back to the US, started my first business back in 2006 and got out of there in 2016. I diversified from 2016 and then started my co-founder with Kyle and Chris CultureForce and CultureForce is all about just working for large organizations on their culture.

So we were talking before we started recording about the fact that how you and your co-founders have aligned leadership principles with very different backgrounds. Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, so I live in San Diego and in San Diego, it's really the heart of the Navy SEALs in the country. That's where they have their BUD/S. That's where It's funny in fact, cuz their, their basic training is just maybe a mile and a half down the beach from where I live. So at certain parts of the, of the year when the guys are training, they actually shoot fake bullets at 'em. So you hear machine guns going off and everything else, and then social media blows up. Did you hear all that shooting that's going on out there? What's going on? So those are all the newbies in the neighborhood cuz they have no idea.

Right.

So that, that's just, uh, part of it. So. I met Kyle, who's a retired Navy SEAL, a number of years ago. And he's in leadership and he loves leadership. He loves culture. He believes that elite teams make elite companies, and I believe the same. And we came at our conclusion very differently because I came to my conclusion about servant leadership and how to effectively lead teams and what it takes to have inside a company, not just at the top of the part, top, top of the company, also inside the company. How does that work where you have great teams functioning? So I, my philosophy aligned with Kyle's who came from a Navy SEALs background, which I had no idea that's how they viewed the world. I thought they were shoot 'em up, bang 'em up, in your face. I tell you what to do, you do it. And that's furthest could be from the truth. Navy SEALs have a, a very unique leadership model, and that was very much aligned with what I exercised in servant leadership over 20 years. So, you know, It was a great partnership marriage between Kyle and I and another partner, Chris, who pretty much put Dave Ramsey on a map. Chris came from marketing and is a very good marketing guy, and he really established Dave Ramsey to what he is today.

So tell us about this leadership model, both the SEAL model and the servant leadership model.

I like to— yeah, the way I describe it is, look, having been in San Diego, I met a number of Navy SEALs. And not one time did any one Navy SEAL jump off the page to me and said, my goodness, this guy's absolutely brilliant. On the contrary, I look at them and I speak to them. They're like regular guys. And, but what makes them really unique is although they're regular guys, they are driven beyond what you and I can fathom. The stuff they go through BUD/S and to become a Navy SEAL, the drive is just inspirational. They're all united by a common cause. They're not brilliant, but they're very smart, right? And they absolutely trust each other. One of the saying is, I trust you with my life and I trust you with my wife. So very high trust model. And that's what we do at CultureForce. We go into an organization where we take just ordinary regular people. That's really what is, you look at middle, any middle organization, you may find a brilliant person here or there, but for But a majority, they're just regular folks working inside of an organization. So we make sure that they have a united common vision and cause that they can rally out. We make sure that they have a trust model where they can trust each other and they could rely on each other. They make, we make sure that they're motivated and we just turn regular people into really high, highly functioning teams.

How do you, what's the process you use in terms of helping build trust within an organization?

Typical, it could be masterminds, could be workshops. Trust is not something that happens in a day. No. Trust is something that's built over weeks, months. One of the things that we use is we actually have a, and everything now is AI, right? But we have a software that actually sits on back of things like Slack, things like Zoom meetings, et cetera. So we put the culture model into that., and then it, it just takes notes in the background as people speak, as people communicate with each other in meetings. It takes kind of notes and say, hey, Doug, the way you said that, you could have said it differently, right? The, the way you related to Tom, it could have been that a little bit differently. We're not spying on you, so that's not the idea, but the idea is just to, to raise the awareness level. And the other thing is I find a lot of times that teams really don't understand. So you have this animosity between people and teams and they don't trust each other for the simple reason that they view the world differently and they problem solve differently. Whether you use the DiSC model, Myers-Briggs, Strength Finders, I'm sure everybody's taken some of these assessment tests. They're not tests actually, they're just assessments, right? Just to see how do you view the world? And, and, you know, I view myself as an example when I was a young executive, there were some people in a room in meetings where I just like, I couldn't stand them. And I couldn't stand them because they just looked at the world differently. I'm very action-oriented. I gotta go get him. I can't procrastinate. And I used to have these people in a room that used to procrastinate. They drive the hell out of me. And then once I took some of these assessments, I figured out, no, they're just analytical mindsets, right? They're just analysts. They analyze the data. They're not gonna make a decision and I learned over the years that in fact what I have to do is that's my blind spot. So I have to surround myself with folks who think differently than me. And one of, one of the things that we do when we go into companies is make sure that people understand that the other party in the room or the other party on the team may think differently than them. And that's a good thing. And they should appreciate that.

Trust, trust in my, as a lawyer turned peacemaker where I'm dealing with conflict as a mediator. As a negotiator and trainer is all about how much risk am I willing to take that you're gonna betray me. High levels of trust, high levels of trust means that I think the risk of betrayal is very low. Low levels of trust means the risk of betrayal is very high. And so part of what we have to deal with is when we're building trust is build a relationship that understands that when I'm in a trusting relationship, I'm taking risk, but it's not a lot of, it's not a lot of risk because I trust you that you're not gonna screw me over. And that's what it's all about. And then in my work, we build trust by how we listen. And there's a technique called affect labeling that I teach, which is the idea that we learn how to ignore the words In the right circumstances, we ignore the words and listen to the emotions and reflect back the other person's emotional experience with a you statement. And there are brain scanning studies show that when you do that, things happen in the brain. The emotional centers of the brain are inhibited. The right ventral lateral prefrontal cortex is activated. People calm down. And now you can have a calm conversation. But if you don't do that listening first, then to your point, you've got somebody with a different mindset, a different way of looking at the world, different values, different beliefs. You're going to have a hard time bridging that gap because what that person wants more than anything else is to be listened to and understood. And once you do that, once you listen to them to the degree that they feel understood from their frame of reference, that's when you start building trust.

So that's— well, unfortunately, in our day and age, society has strained everyone to listen for affirmation of their beliefs rather than listening for other people's points of view. And it, it has to translate in all parts of your life, including your workplace and everything else, cuz that's just what's all around you. We are, as a country, are so divided about so many issues and we stop listening to other people's opinions. We just only talk to those people who affirm what our opinions are. And it's just a sad state of affairs.

And right.

It needs to change.

It does. And that's why I'm on a mission to teach people how to listen. I actually have a— teach people how to have a calm conversation with the politically polarized. And it's an exercise in listening, not in talking.

Yeah.

So that's the kind of work that I do. So what is it that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to do the work that you do?

I define myself in with 3 different questions. If you've heard me on other podcasts, this is you probably heard it for the 100th time already. But every individual should be able to answer these 3 questions. Who are you? What are you passionate about? And what are you good at? So the answers for me, I'm a servant leader. I'm passionate about making people better, making things better, making companies better. And I'm pretty good at leading and mentoring. So why does that work for me? I've heard people say at workplace, you have to act a certain way or you have to behave a certain way, which is different than you behave in your house, which is different between somewhere else. And I just said, that's schizophrenic.

Man.

How do you keep track of your life? So with the, with the formula that I use, if I'm a good mentor and I'm a good leader, I can mentor my kids and I can mentor my employees. I can be a servant leader to, to my church. I can be a servant leader in my family. I can be a servant leader on my tennis team. And I can be passionate about making life better for my customers. I could be passionate about making life better for my friends. And I throw my Hungarian goulash party on the beach about every year in the summer. And I'm just passionate about throwing a great party for 35, 50 of my friends and making sure they have good time. I'm able to use that formula and I can be consistent regardless of what situation I'm going through.

And I think that there's a hidden message under there, and that is that you don't have to be at the top to be a leader. You can be at the bottom and you can still be a leader. Leadership does not, is not related to hierarchy. Leadership.

Oh, absolutely not.

Leader, leadership is related to mindset and how you are going to be around other people. And I talk about the 4 axes of the 4 dimensions of leadership. You can lead up, you can lead down, start with leading inside yourself, and you can lead your peers side to side. And it doesn't matter where you are or what kind of organization you're in, you can always be a leader.

Well, I agree 100% with that assessment. It's very true. I, I had one story where we're doing a very large mergers and acquisition exploratory meeting, and we walked into the conference room and I thought it was in Vegas for a second because everybody like took their business cards out as, okay, this guy's the VP of sales. This guy is the VP of marketing. He's the CEO. He's the chief operator. So like everybody had this business card to trump. And, and there's this guy Mike in a room and he doesn't have a business card. He's not handing anything out. And then as we get into the discussion and we, we're starting to get to know the other sides and probably about 20, 25 minutes into it, I'm like, Mike's the guy. I don't know who this guy is. He doesn't have a business card. He didn't try to outtrump anybody, but if anything's gonna happen from their side, it's gonna go through Mike. And it's just the way he commanded himself. He didn't, announce his title. I still don't know who he was. He didn't announce his title. He didn't talk about, he just, the way he carried himself, the statements he made, the knowledge that he had, he didn't have to say I'm the CEO or the COO or whoever he was. He, he was just, he was, he was a guy that was influencing everybody in that room. Right. And very successfully. So to your point, to this day, I don't know what Mike's title was, but kudos to him, respect to him. I actually voted against the, the merger and acquisition cuz I didn't think it was the best thing for our side. But it was just a, a great lesson for me that title means nothing.

Wow. Absolutely not. So what is it you think, Tom, that's unique about you that you bring to the table that make, has made you successful in the work that you do?

You said a couple of things, right? That you believe in. One is very active listening. Although my wife will argue with you that I'm not a good listener, I've gotten compliments. If you look on my LinkedIn page, one of, one of my former employees that lives in Brazil, he said, We love Tom because he actually takes the time to listen to, to our, to what's going on in our market, what our concern is. I was, as an executive for many years, I spent a lot of time in the field. I didn't have to travel Monday through Friday going to the different countries that I was responsible for, but I just felt I had to be there. And not only did I have to be there to sit in a conference room, because in a conference room they can blow smoke up a lot, get in the field, talk to the customers. Feel the market. So I was always one of those individuals that tried to absorb information and absorb facts before making any decisions and listen to people, listen to their ideas, listen to their concerns. One of the things that we did in Brazil, and this really came to me when I was, when I was a young guy, I was, one of my first jobs outta college was a shift supervisor in a Colque Palmada factory plant, right? That was at a, undergrad in engineering, and that's what we did. And word came down that Ruben Mark, who was the CEO at the time, is coming through for a plant visit the next day. So we literally shut down production for an entire shift, didn't do anything but just cleaned the sort of places spotless. And the, the 2 seconds that Ruben Mark is walking through, make sure all the machines are running and there's no, no hiccups. And I said, okay, let me stick around when Ruben comes in. Obviously Ruben comes in. It was like when your kids play soccer and nobody goes to where the open field is. Everybody just runs around the soccer ball. It's like a beehive. Here comes Ruben Mark with a beehive of suits all around him.

He's on tour.

And they just got— and they don't stop to talk to anybody. They just kind of have their own little discussions and probably spent maybe, I don't know, maybe 2 minutes on a production floor. Didn't talk to anybody, just walked through. And I just said, man. It was just such a waste of time, everybody's time just to, you know, appease because Rubin's walking through. So when I used to go out to countries as CEO, I, I would actually take time and I would talk to the production people. I would go down to the factory floor, obviously with an interpreter, and ask people, what could we do better? How, how could we make your life easier? How could we make you more productive? And then what we'd do is we would take those suggestions back to the management meeting. And it was the local management's responsibility, the local leadership's responsibility to get back to that individual that made the suggestion to say, hey, it was a great suggestion. We're gonna follow up and we're actually gonna implement it. Or thanks for the suggestion. I don't think it's for us right now, and this is why. So just listening to people, you know what, they're not stupid. You got people who are working production floors, they have great ideas. If we just bother to listen to them, We could be 2 steps ahead.

What do you think gets in the way of management people listening to people that are doing the work?

Oh, I would say without doubt, ego. If people just get in the, get in the, for the, what I call the, the food chain and the higher they go up, the bigger their ego gets, cuz they think it's all about them. And that's one of the great things about the Navy SEALs model is that every Navy SEAL tells you, hey, get over yourself. You're not important. What's important is for the team to accomplish their mission. It doesn't hinge on one individual. And unfortunately, that message hasn't gone through to a lot of corporate leadership because these folks in the top of the food chain, they really think they're it. And that's not it. It was funny. I had, I had an assignment one time many years ago where we went out to, I was sent out to Eastern Europe to turn around a fledgling subsidiary. And they were losing about $4 million when I got there. And then 3, 3 years later, you were making about $2.5 million. And it was a very marketing-driven company. So they always had a habit of appointing really high-flying marketing executives. It was a consumer goods company and I knew marketing, but I was not one of the marketing geniuses in the company. But a lot of the other companies didn't turn around. My company was always doing well. We always beat or exceeded our plans.. And they always said, we don't know what's going on with that company. We don't understand it, but something's happening there. So we should take a look. And, and he, and it wasn't really that I came in as the marketing genius and set the vision and set the strategy. It was more just enabling the people. And I'll never forget when I was leaving, 3 years, they threw a, a going away party for me and I was leaving and a new guy was coming in. So it was a welcome him and goodbye to me and my CFO. Did a little thank you speech. And I'll never forget, she said, thank you for believing in us and thank you for making us believe in ourselves. It wasn't thank you for bringing a strategy. Thank you for being a great boss. It was just, was thank you for enabling and empowering.

That is a critical lesson. And I think that's part of the whole concept of servant leadership too, is the idea that as a leader, we're serving. It's not about us. It's how do, how are we, how am I serving you? How am I helping you do what you can do best and allow you to excel? And I think the SEAL, this, I think the SEALs are, they're motivated obviously because of the team orientation. It's not about any individual, as you were saying before. It's about how do we all perform? How do we allow ourselves to perform at the highest possible level? And how do I support you in that? And, and how can you support me in that process? And I think that's the attitude.

One of the exercises that we do in Masterminds is one of the chapters that we talk about is Kill the Leader. And Kill the Leader is actually an exercise that the Navy SEALs do during training where, you know, during a training exercise, they'll walk up to the platoon captain or leader and, and say, you're dead. And so he's out of the equation and then he gets to stand back together with everybody else and say, okay, what is his team doing? How do they react when he's not there? Who's stepping up? Who's taking a lead? Because the mission must continue.

Right.

Right. If somebody doesn't take leadership, they're all dead instead of just being one guy being dead. So it's very important to make sure that not only are you empowering and listening to people, but you're also enabling people to step in and take leadership roles. And that, and there's many ways to do that in a company.

I think that points to a really interesting concept that I learned many years ago when I was working on my master's degree. And that is that leaders provide 3 essential psychological functions to a team: direction, focus, and safety. And if you're not providing direction, focus, and safety, then you're not leading. And so imagine that you have that situation where the leader is now missing, gone. How, who, how do you provide direction, focus, and safety to a team? And how do you do that and allow the team to continue to function? Because without those 3 psychological services, a team becomes a mob, you know, and nothing happens. And I think that those, and I think that's, a lot of people miss that idea that, that when you're leading, you're providing for people something they can't provide for themselves that allows them to cohere. And work together on a common goal or a common objective. Does that resonate with you?

Yeah, absolutely. I, not myself, but people define leadership in 3 levels. The first level is actually the most difficult, which is leading yourself. And then once you become proficient or successful in, in leading yourself, then the next stage is, okay, now you can develop followers. So now you can start leading people. And the highest level of leadership is really developing future leaders. And, right, a lot of people are just scared of that because of insecurity, right? Especially in corporate America— or not corporate America, but any corporation, large organization. People who are not secure in themselves will not feel comfortable elevating leaders in their organization because they feel that's a threat to them. They feel that, okay, you're going to take my job, and I think that's crazy.

I completely—

I agree.

I always tell leaders when I'm coaching, I'm saying, hey, you got to be teaching 2 levels down. You're not just teaching your direct reports, but you got to be working 2 levels down to find people that can replace you. And you got to be teaching them and never be worried that they are going to replace you because if you develop the team that way, they're going to be high performers. You're going to get elevated and you're just going to bring them along with you.

Not only that, but look, God bless them. If, if there's somebody in my organization that's much more equipped and better than I am.

They should be.

Or they should be leading me instead of me leading them. Exactly. I mean, just, that's, uh, survival of the fittest. That's evolution.

Well, and it's also, if you're thinking from a team perspective, what's the best thing for the team? What's the best thing for the organization? And the best people should be the best and best people should be leading. That doesn't happen though. The best people are not always leading. You, you get into leadership. Or positions of leadership in the hierarchy because of politics, because maybe you have technical skills that now people think somehow translates into leadership skills, which it never does. All kinds of reasons other than you're an effective leader do people get promoted into these positions.

And you hit on that one. That's a common mistake that a lot of companies make is promoting somebody on technical ability. And Mark Storey, who's also a, a guy that I know for many years, he, he said it best. He says, We hire people for what they know and then we fire people for who they are.

That's right.

And leadership is not about what you know. Leadership is about who you are.

It's exactly correct. One more question, Tom. What's one thing about yourself that we'd never know unless you revealed it to us?

Yeah. Never know that I would really be to you. I, I'm just, I, I don't think it's the first time I said it, but I, I love being a dad.

Oh, great.

I love being the dad to, to, to all girls. I've been surrounded by, by women all my life. I grew up without my, I grew up without my father. I grew up with my mother and my grandmother and my sister. Been married to, to Kathy for, I met her in '76. We've got 3 adult daughters, so I've been surrounded by women all my life and that's a great thing.

Good for you.

Good for you.

Thank you so much for your time today. Really enjoyed the conversation.

Thank you.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you Please share this episode on social media. Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.