Interview with Kevin Gazzara

Welcome to One Sharp Sword cutting through to what matters most with your host, Dr. P. Dr. Wayne Purnell, the breakthrough success coach and your powerful presence mentor. Welcome to one sharp sword cutting through to what matters most. I'm your host, Dr. P. Dr. Wayne Purnell and the exponential success coach and the president of Dynamic Leader Incorporated. We have on this episode Dr. Kevin Gazzera. He has a long history of management leadership and executive coaching and it's why I've invited him here because our paths seem really similar and yet very, very different. And so from machinery to intel to becoming an entrepreneur, Kevin's decades of experience give him the perspective needed to coach and to guide others. We're going to talk about creating engagement and high performance teams. We're going to look at management and leadership and we're going to look at keeping positive along the way. As always, there will be a bridge. I like to bridge the leadership stuff to the, to the personal life stuff because any of us can use what we learn from leadership lessons. We can use that in our personal lives and our families. So, so think about that. We're going to look at leadership and task balancing lessons. As we talk about all that, think about how this relates. So listen closely and welcome. Dr. Kevin Gazzara. Welcome. Thanks for being here.

Thanks. Dr. P or Wayne or Dr. Pennell, whatever. We'll mix them all up and it'll be very informal.

You can be very informal by calling me whatever you want. It's all good. Thanks for being here. So you do have a long of working in a management position. You've, you spent a decade and a half with intel, or was it longer than that? You, you've been an entrepreneur for 15 years and doing coaching for that long. So in terms of your management and leadership, you didn't wake up one day and go, I'm gonna be an executive coach. Like where do you, let's wind, wind the clock back. This is, I, I like to do that with my leaders especially because it basically shows you, you start somewhere, right? You start somewhere and then you, you go, wow. I could, I have things that actually could help other people. So what was your path? What was your journey?

Well, I mean, I think I had the kind of, the, the normal kind of leave it to beaver the type of life. Anybody that knows that, that reference of,

you know, that wasn't so, that wasn't so normal. They wanted to.

So I spent, you know, I was born and raised in Levittown, Pennsylvania. You know, my dad worked for the government. My mom was a stay Stay at home, mom. And we had, you know, the two kids in the station wagon and, and the dog and everybody lived in a kind of homogeneous suburb of, of, of the Philadelphia area. And that was kind of my, was kind of a, you know, the, I don't know if you can say normal or not, but that was my upbringing. It was, it was kind of what was expected, what was showing up on a lot of the, the TV shows at the, at the time. And you know, kind of, I think all of us find kind of our passion if we look back at what we did as kids, you know, that's where particularly since we didn't know anything differently, we gravitated towards what we love to do. And what I love to do as a kid, I love to take stuff apart. I love to fix things. I love to build things and solve problems. I really enjoyed working, you know, doing things with other kids. And I was an organizer when stuff wasn't happening in the neighborhood, you know, I put something together and we do a fair or, you know, we, you know, you know, put some kids together for bike rides and those kind of things. And that was always kind of natural for me. And it kept me busy, kept me out of trouble. And because of the kind of, the problem solving, the curiosity piece, you know, it drove me to. I went to Drexel for engineering and ultimately ended up doing a half engineering, half business degree called Commerce and Engineering. Five year program, great program. In fact, I still, I'm, I teach, I still teach at drexalt at the moment. Right. Even though I am in Phoenix, Arizona. I teach online for Drexel in Philadelphia.

What was the combo program called?

It's called Commerce and Engineering. So it's Business and Engineering, right? Yeah, yeah. And was, you know, and if people were to, to look at our new degrees, you know, is very similar to what many other organizations other universities were offering, which was industrial engineering. Right. It's really more about productivity, human factors, you know, building teams, you know, so it had the soft side, which I really liked and had the hard side, you know, on the, on the technical stuff. So good, good degree to have. And then I went off and did my MBA at Philadelphia University. And then ultimately about 20 years ago, I finished my doctorate in Management Organizational leadership. So, so it's, it's been a path. The, the path hasn't been a completely linear path, but one of the things I did recognize my first job out of, out of college was for a company called Delaval, who ultimately ended up being bought by Siemens. We Used to do heavy equipment, big custom steam, steam turbines and compressors and, you know, work with lots of utilities and petrochemical plants. So that was, that was my first 10 years. But what I found was I had this passion for computers. I had this passion for doing video. I got an opportunity at, at the level to, to produce some videos. They built a studio and, and I was intrigued by that. So I got to run the, run the studio in addition to my regular job, which is, you know, as a, as a product manager for them. And then when I found out that intel had bought the tech, the digital video interactive technology was known as DVI from RCA Labs in Princeton, New Jersey, which is 29 miles from my home, I said, man, I got to have that job. It has everything I want. It's got computers, it has, has video, it's, it's local. I knew of intel and I knew, you know, was a rising star at the time. I think I was employee number 25,000 something, you know, and I think right now it's a hundred thousand plus. So, so I got it. I got in early. I joined them in 1989 and it was a fantastic run. You know, I came in as a customer marketing engineer, became a product manager, operations manager, and then I was a general manager GM for them for, for a couple years. But I think my, my claim to fame and what was best about intel was intel is filled with amazing managers and leaders and it's truly a learning organization. So we got lots of time to do training and development. But in addition, as a manager, you were required to train for you to deliver courses, 40 hours for the year. That was part of the expectations. And, and what I found is I really loved, I just really loved doing that. So I moved from the technical side over into the human resource side. In the last 10 years there before I retired, I managed Intel University and then ultimately Intel's Management Leadership Development residential programs for the world for first and midline programs. And we did, we used to do 2500 managers and leaders a year for the programs I had developed in 10 different countries. And when I retired from intel in 2007 with two of my colleagues to start up our firm, Magna Leadership Solutions, we had just finished training our 40,000th manager. So I got pretty good at that. And yeah, my personal goal was retire at 50 and then go help smaller organizations and help other executives that, you know, didn't have $10 million budgets, you know, to, to get better.

That's great. And so how long ago you've been, you've been doing Magna leadership solutions for 15 years at this point. Yeah.

07. So, so this will be our 17th year in June.

Right.

Every year has been better than the, than the last. No complaints. We do, we have what we call our Leading Forward Academy, which is a six month leadership program, a transformational leadership program, completely turnkey that we, we get. You know, our sweet spot is probably organizations. We've done organizations as small as about 100 and we've done, we've done departments within larger organizations typically in the 600 to 1000 range. And we've been doing that for, you know, for almost 17 years. And it's been, it's been great. You know, getting to be able to see the, the change and you know, be able to work with the executives at a, at that level.

That's great. That's great. When you, when you roll it out, is it typically a class of 10 or is it the class of 600?

No, no, no. Yeah. What we found is that, you know, we've done classes as small as 6. You know, for very specialized companies, we've done classes as large as 36. But what we found is that's particularly, you know, when Covid hit, we had to move everything from, you know, on in person to virtual. We found that that's just a little bit too unwieldy to manage and give the people enough interactive time because it's a, it's an action learning as opposed to, you know, us speaking. So we found that our sweet spot is at about 12 to 18. Right. And if we can do. And that's what most of the programs do. And, and they're all that we don't do open enrollment. It's all done, you know, where we focus on specific challenges of an organization. And, and we take our foundational design and, and tailor it for, you know, for what, whatever the manager needs at the moment.

That's great. That's great. Are there. So you said it's turnkey. So there are very specific concepts that you bring pretty much to every organization. Adapting it to that organization.

Yeah. So. So the foundational, they're the foundational workshops. So first of all, we don't do training. Right. So that's the one thing that you won't see, you won't see anything that says training on our site or we won't talk about training because when you talk about training, it's an expense. And what we really want the leaders to think about is this is an investment. And when you come to the workshop, you have to bring your Real problems and challenges, just as if this is a real working day. And then we're going to give you a suite of new tools to apply to help you solve your problems. And there are six workshops and we have the ability to expand it or decrease this. But we found that there's this common theme of six different focus areas that we work on that seems to get the transformational change or. And actually does get the transformational change that you'd like to see. We focus on behavioral styles. You know, we use disc. Other people have used things like Myers Briggs or the Big five or Berkman or. We found that DISC is very, very manageable, understandable and usable.

It's easy to administer and it's easy to talk about.

Yeah. And I've been part of the Target training, International TTI Success Insights groups. You know, I've been part of them over 20 years actually sit on their research council. And the nice thing I like about their desk is it's, they do psychometric reports on it every five years. And the last one they did was on 120,000 people. And they, they integrate that with their brain lab. So. So I know that the tool that I'm doing is very, very well validated. There's lots of other disks out there, you know, some free ones that are,

that are validated colors and animals and people.

Yeah, right.

Yeah. So that instrument and turned it into all kinds of things. So yeah, no, I'm glad you're using a validated disk. And do you do coldly at all just to bounce things around?

I know about, I know about Colby. We haven't used it. One of my colleagues in the master. The mastermind I run. I actually run a mastermind for the last 10 years. Of all the people like me who have left intel to go on their own, we have I think close to 30 now and then we get together once a month and several of my other colleagues use, use the, you call me great instrument as well. But the, the six, the six workshops we do is first behavioral styles. Behavioral styles. Right. Then we move into communication and conflict.

Right.

Because that's really a foundation if you want to be a great leader, the one thing that you can do. And we did a study about, oh got 10 plus years ago for around using 1200 different. 1200 managers and leaders. And what we found is, is the best managers and leaders, the ones that are most highly rated, the one thing they do differently is their better communicators and better dealing with conflicts. So, so we do, we do behaviors, we do communication we move into understanding values. Right. The stuff that drives us, the stuff that really motivates us. You know, we use lots of concept likes, like the concept of flow and some of the work that I've done for my doctoral research. And we move from their values into critical thinking and problem solving. So how, how do you do that? What tools, what tools can we. We give you for that? And then we, let's see, that's four. And then we do, we do whole, whole workshop on, on leadership itself. Right. And the, the last, let's see, I missed one.

Behavior styles, communication, values, critical thinking, leadership

styles and oh, motivation and engagement. So we have a session on motivating and engaging.

That's great. I'm working on a massive project right now that I'm calling Culture of Caring. And it's always great to talk to other leadership development specialists, experts because, you know, we, we have similar concepts, we bring it in different ways. And that's what's great is that, is that there is absolute room to have multiple ways of saying similar ideas.

Yeah.

So it's. Again, that's one of the reasons you're here is I, I found what you're bringing very interesting. So. And you know, the, the whole idea of behavior styles, communication and conflict, you know, the, we were talking a little bit before the recording and my history is clinical psych. What got me into leadership development 40 years ago was when one of. I was doing couples therapy with, with gentlemen and his wife and this guy calls me and he asked me to do that thing I did with him and his wife and do it with him and his vice president. And it started with communication. It started with working agreements. And working agreements was what I called. It's how I imposed the idea of conflict resolution.

Right.

And then values, always values. We're just going to start there. So love, love that, Love what you're bringing. It's really interesting. The, just the six areas. It's really interesting. So.

Yeah. Well, thanks. And you know, one of the things I'll tell the audience is one of the things that we found. Give you my best, you know, one minute of tips here is we. I had read a book called Brain Rules. If you've read that or not, if you haven't, I highly Recommend it by Dr. John Medina, who's a neuroscientist. And he basically said, hey, this is the way people learn. This is the way stuff is absorbed. You have to do. You have to keep it interesting. You have to change things up on every 10 to 15 minutes or so. And so we went in and completely redesigned our academy 10 years ago when we, when we did that. So that was the first thing is. And then you have to bring in real problems as opposed to, you know, and solve it. Right. So our goal is at the end of each workshop that we do usually like once a month and so forth that, you know, we have a mastermind tied to it and we have weekly reinforcement messages. We have a, we have a tool called the Easy360 feedback tool that, that tracks all the progress. So you have a quantitative method to know, hey, am I getting better or not? You know, most of the training stuff is all kind of subjective and we like to keep things, you know, particularly as an engineer, like to keep things and a researcher very, very objective. I want the numbers, I want you to be able to see that, you know, you're going from a 2.5 to a 4 out of 5.

Nice. Very good, very good. So what were, what would you say are some of the leadership lessons along the way? What are, what are people having trouble with in terms of, you know, wow, I, you know, what's the, what's the, in your world? What's the leader's pain point right now or, you know, some of the top two or three pain points?

Well, let's see. You know, I think one of the pain points, the leader's pain points is retention, you know, of hiring and, and retaining their best people. You know, particularly if you're talking about engineers and designers, you know, losing an engineer, you can go hire another design engineer, but when you lose the engineer, you're losing all that intellectual property that goes out the door and quite often to, to a competitor. So that's the first thing I'd say is, is, is that people are not retaining their. First of all, they're not, they're not doing a great job hiring the best people. And as you know from your psychology work is the tendency for all of us is we're going to hire people like us. And if you really want to build a great team, you need to have a little bit of diversity. So the more you can have that diversity, the better team that you can build. So that's the first thing is the hiring and the retention. I think the second thing is that what we find, and when I work with a lot of executives, is they have a hard time keeping the teams motivated and engaged, right where they're not getting that discretionary value kind of out of the people, right where, you know, it comes to five o' clock and, and they're Gone. And one of the questions we ask in the motivation and engagement workshop that we do is we ask people, you know, as a manager, as a leader, can you motivate others? And true or false? And we say it's, you know, this is digital. It's not, you know, it, it depends. It. You have to pick one of those. And most people pick that. Yes. That you can motivate others. And, and as you know, that's not true. Right. That you can create a motivating environment. Right, by, you know, providing the right work environment, the resources, the, the money, the, the support systems. But ultimately it's the individual's decision on whether they're going to stay motivated and, and engage. So as a great manager and leader, you have to create that environment. But, you know, many of the HR people that we work with, particularly some of the newer HR people, they're out professing like, you know, you got to go out there and keep and motivate your people. I think the intent is right, but what they really need to do is they need to create that environment, and ultimately you're going to get them motivated. So that would be the second area.

Well, and, and that gets tricky when you're talking about motivation across a hybrid space. Right. There's motivation internally. And we know that the research shows that that propinquity, right, the proximity that is that you have to somebody, if you're seeing somebody over and over, you're more likely that that person is more likely to get the raise than somebody who's on Zoom or, you know, reports in or whatever. And then the environment, you know, the mistakes of, hey, we're gonna throw a, we're gonna throw a party and sorry, if you can't make it, you know, go buy yourself a pizza and join us via Zoom. And it's like, that's not a reward, you know, that's. And that's not the environment. So it becomes really, it becomes a big task to keep motivation or create a motivating environment. Because that, from my perspective, and I, I think you'll agree with me, that is actually an individual exercise. Right, Right. It's where leaders need to know what motivates one person isn't going to be what motivates somebody else. Yeah, yeah.

Well, and I'll give you something that I had done 20, 30 years ago with my staff set when I was at intel. And, you know, when I was studying, you know, I did all my research in particular around motivation, engagement and flow. Concept of flow. One of the things that I would do is we would, on the shared drive, I asked people to say, hey, put, put the number three things that, that you like to receive as recognition. And then, and this can be dynamic. You can change it whenever you like. Right. And I want you to really think about it. And most people usually start with money and eventually money goes away and it's, it's, they, they want something different. And then the second thing that I, in the second set of columns, I'd say, and how do you like this delivered? Do you like this delivered publicly or privately? Right. Because as we know from behavioral styles and values, once you understand that certain people really appreciate it in a, in a, in a staff meeting or an all hands meeting and other people really would just rather you have it, do it one on one in their office or on, on zoom. So, so, and we used to keep that dynamic. And when I encourage all of the people on staff, hey, when somebody does something, the other thing we did was for recognition is it should be above and beyond. You shouldn't be recognizing people for doing their job. Right.

Thanks for showing up. Yeah, right.

Yeah, right, yeah. You showed up on the, on time for, you know, you haven't shown up in the meeting one time in 10 weeks and you showed up. So here I recognize. No, no, no, you, you don't recognize people. The first thing is you don't recognize people for doing what they're supposed to be doing. And the second thing is for the recognition, you need to make sure that it's going to be taken in the way that it's, that it's intended. Right. So that you need to be careful about overuse of recognition. Oh, and the one thing is, one of my rules was absolutely no, no recognition for diving catches. Like if you've been delinquent on, you know, you're planning and you have a 10 week project and you're supposed to get, you know, 10 elements done one per week and in week nine you haven't started it yet and you manage to pull it out at the last minute, that is not rewarded. Now other people jump in to help you, you know, outside of their job. That's, that's a little bit different. But the key is, is I think we have a tendency, at least what I've seen in lots of industries that I've work with is the tendency is to reward the diving catches. And usually the problem is, is the diving catches turn in. They, they, they turn off. They are diving catches because of the inability of the individual to plan, get the right resources, build a team, maintain Communication all. All the other elements and, and they bring it upon. You are listening to one sharp sword cutting through to what matters most. With your host, Dr. Wayne Purnell. You know you are bigger than the life you are leading. It really is time to attend to that thing you've wanted to do or have but you've been putting off. It's time to step into that dream. You've parked for someday. It's time to claim true well being both personally and professionally without giving up the success that got you here. It's time to check out Dr. Purnell's signature small group retreat, the Exponential Success Summit. Explore exponential success summit.com Seats are extremely limited as this is a very special small group event. Www.exponential success summit.com

so I said that I would be building bridges between the leadership concepts and kind of daily life and what you can do in your family and such. And I love the idea of looking at motivation and what three things do you like as motivation? And it's interesting. All of the studies that I've seen show that money was at number five during COVID It actually popped up to number two on people's lists. And now it's starting to slide again. And what people really want is acknowledge me, recognize me, show. Show me that you know I'm human and show me the love.

Right?

Yes. Yeah, we don't talk about love in a, in an organization. And yet that's really like, people aren't connected until they feel connected. And that starts with the manager or leader. And. And so it's like, do you know, like, think of, think of your team and think of the third person on your team and what's their eye color? Like, have you even bothered to recognize that? Like, do you know them that much that you can say, oh yeah, they're blue or brown or whatever. It's like, do you know? Do you know? And so what three things do you like for recognition? I think that's important for each of us to actually check. You know, what do we like? What's, what's a great way of being recognized? It's like, you know, so, so that's great. Is it money? Money's always nice. And that's not usually a primary motivator. When you, when you get down to it, it's a great thing to have. It's a great thing to, to use to support. And it's not usually primary. When you, when you actually get down to it, how do you like it delivered? It's a great question. You know, some people Do. And I've seen leaders blow this badly. But also, like at home, what does each of your family members. And that could be a spouse, it could be a child. Like, what do they value? What would motivate them? And, and really finding that out. And you talked about be careful about overuse of recognition. Hey, good job. Hey, good job. Hey, good job. But also one of the, the things is if you're going to give recognition, be very specific.

Right, right.

It's not, hey, see everybody? Good job. Today is a really bad management statement. It doesn't help anybody. Makes you feel good. Is the manager going, good job? Yeah, he said, I told. But really catch people doing the thing that made the difference and be as specific as you can and, you know, tie to the values of the company. Like, you did this and that helps our, our department or our family or me personally, whatever, and thank you because that ties to the values that we have as an organization.

Yeah, I think, I think you're, you're spot on there. Is the, I think the one thing that you can do. Well, first of all, there, if you've anyone that hasn't read the book Drive by Daniel Pink, that's the first thing you want to do. I mean, he's. Daniel Pink is an aggregator. He's taken lots and lots of different topics and brought, brought them together. It's a really easy read. It's all based around some really good research. I think the number one thing that he talks about in there with, you know, how you stay motivated is, you know, autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Right.

That you have. You give the people individual autonomy. Right. So you give them the ability to feel under control. You know, great leaders, you know, managers manage things and leaders, you know, lead people for autonomy. You want to tell people what the, what has to get done and hold them accountable for it, how they do it, you should leave up to them right now. It doesn't mean that you don't train them and so forth. If you have a certain way to do something, you shouldn't be imposing the method to get there. As long as they're getting there, you know, with boundaries, you know, using the right resources and, you know, not ticking off a lot of people and so forth, you give them an autonomy. Second thing is you need to make sure they have mastery. And mastery is that they're, that they're continually learning and developing and, and, and just getting better at. That's not only if the stuff that you need for the workplace, you want to make, get do that, check in with them to make sure they're getting better at things that they, they want to get better at. And the last thing is the purpose, as you had mentioned, it's making that tie to hey, you know, because you stayed over the weekend and you finished this project. You know, the one thing the leaders have a tendency to say is hey, we're going to make our bonuses or we're going to get, you know, we're going to, going to get raises. And, and that's the, that's absolutely the wrong thing to do is you want to tie the, to it. To the purpose of. You know, my son in law works for, for a big, he's a QC person, QC manager for heart valves. Right. So, so when he, when his team performs rather than saying, hey, you know, we, we met all the schedules and

this, we, we didn't kill anybody, we didn't kill anybody.

And this is. Right, but what, what he, what he said is, you know, what you realize is we were able to get, you know, 400 additional valves out to, to people and that's, that's another 10 years of life that they're going to have with their grandchildren. Right?

That's amazing.

That's completely different than, you know, 400 valves that, you know, 10,000. Right. So you have to make sure that you made our quota. Yeah, you tie it, you tie it to the, to the, to the purpose. And if you can do that, generally things are pretty good. I mean it's, it's, it's not rocket science here. And then I think the other thing that Pink talks about in his book, which I like, which goes back to your point about money is what he says is you have to make sure you can take money off the table. Right. So that, that if at the point where you're not making your mortgage and you know you're ending up in deficit at the end of each month or you really, really need to, to get this next lump of money so that you can move out of a housing environment that you're, that's, that's not conducive to you. Once you can get that off the money off the table, then you can start focusing on the stuff that's, that's the true motivators. But our tendency particularly for people, you know, we work a lot with call centers and, and service organizations where they're hiring people in, at entry level, you know, minimum wage kind of jobs and the challenges for them is, you know, you on Maslow's hierarchy. Right. You want to try.

I was just going to say Maslow's you're talking Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And, and when people are focused on their survival.

Right.

You know, I, I need to show up to get this paycheck to go to the next job or whatever. It's. That's a different mindset and a different kind of motivation.

Yeah. And, and the key is, is as a great manager and leader, you need to recognize that. And you. We always say meet the people where they are.

Right.

So focus. And if that's what they need, let's focus on how do we get them additional dollars. Right. You know, if they're, if they've met the foundation, let's figure out what's next for them. You know, maybe they're, they're challenged where they, they really want to manage, but they don't have the skills. Let's get them, you know, educated on that. So the key is, is there was a great study and you probably know this, people know this, done by named Marshall, Marshall Goldsmith. Right. So everybody knows, at least in our industry. Right.

Not all of our listeners or viewers are going to know Marshall.

So, so Marshall. Marshall did a study, oh, over 20 years ago, about 20,000 people. I actually, he gave me a copy of the study, which I was very, very grateful for because it, I don't think was ever officially published. And one of the things that he found, found which I thought was fascinating, was if you really want to get the behavioral change that you're, that you're looking for, that your, your feedback mechanism, your engagement mechanism with the people is all about frequency, not intensity. So if, if you as a leader. Right. For people listening today, how can I get my leadership better? First thing is figure out ways to be a better communicator. That's the first thing. And the second thing is, is as you become a better communicator, rather than having that meeting once a month for an hour to give feedback to your, to your people is meet with them 15 minutes a week. Right.

It's.

It's having that continual being able to, to adjust things or change things in an iterative way that gives you the ability, one, to make a deeper connection and two, to make sure, you know that, you know, things go wrong on day one, on day 30, when you meet with them, that's the bad time to, to figure out, oh, this is a problem. You should be doing something different. But if you're meeting with them on Friday of that week, you know, seven days is a whole lot better than, you know, 30 days.

Absolutely correct. Just the whole idea of, of Propinquity is a great word that one of the leaders I had recently interviewed talked about. And, and that is a fancy term for being close to somebody, being in a proximity with them. That allows each of you to get to know the other better and build a bond. And so the more that you can be in front of somebody, acknowledge them, have them give you feedback. That's so perfect. What's the thing about positive intelligence? Should we talk about that and then

we can absolutely talk about that and

then task management and then, and then we got a wrap. So.

Yeah. All right, so we'll do the, the, the, the, the Spark Note or Cliff Note version of these. If people even know what those are. I'm really showing my, showing my age is the. Yeah. So Positive Intelligence is a, is a book highly recommended. I had gotten certified a couple years ago in Positive Intelligence. I run a six week program, an open enrollment program for people that are interested. A six week program. And it's all virtual and basically at a very high level. What I'll say is the guy who wrote the book, Shirzad Shamin from Stanford, awesome book, very well written. Easy, easy, easy to read and understand. He's taken the concept of emotional intelligence that was done by Daniel Goleman, some work by Harold Gardner. He's taken some things like from David Rock from neuroscience. He's put all these different concepts together and what he's done is he's taken essentially he's advanced emotional intelligence as the foundation, which is very descriptive of what to do. And he's really created a prescriptive methodology. He brings in mindfulness and meditation and all the different things that, that feed that. And if you really want to know, you know, in fact one of the things that we do or that I do, particularly when I do executive coaching is I put, put all of the people that sign up to work with me as a coach is I put them through the positive intelligence for that's just part of the, of what I include and what it will do. And if you go to PQ coach, PQ training and coaching.com which is my site, it'll, it'll give you a quick start so you can take the assessment for free. And what it will do is it will tell you your, your saboteurs, your, your, the nine saboteurs that you have that keep you from, from advancing and then also talk to, talk to you about how your sage, your sage portion of your brain is that work works with those. So once you understand that, it gives you much, much deeper understanding so wonderful, wonderful, wonderful program. Well done. It's an app that runs on your phone, so you get reminders for doing all mindfulness stuff. And it really helps you build those neuropathways that are so necessary as a leader so that when you get to the situation, the catastrophic situation, that you can maintain that clarity to be able to help people, you know, you know, where you can demonstrate your resilience.

That's great. All right, so I'm gonna have, I'm gonna have show notes. And in the show notes they will find magnaleadership.com, right? They will find PQ training and coaching.com and then you're going to talk about a gift for our listeners and viewers. Yeah, and but first, talk to me about task management.

Yeah, the task quotient. Right. So once again, we'll do that. We'll do the abbreviated version. Here is. So when I did all my doctoral research just a little over 20 years ago, I wanted to show that there was a correlation between task balance, right? So we each ofUS does three different types of tasks. If you look at your, your day to day work, you do routine tasks, you know, like email and so forth, you know, very predictable, have to get done in the moment. You do troubleshooting tasks, unpredictable, also has to get done in the moment. And you do project tasks, right, you know, like finishing your taxes, for example, is a great projecting example.

What was the middle one called?

What'd you call the troubleshooting or problem solving? Is the same, the same thing. And what when I found through my quantitative research was that I wanted to see, is there a relationship? Each one of us has a. There's 496 different mixtures of those three. And if I can determine your mixture of what you, what motivates you, I prove, I was able to prove that you can raise job satisfaction, motivation, engagement. And then we did some additional work with another doctoral student of mine on empowerment, that it actually raises this, the sense of empowerment. Once you can kind of start structuring your day, that works, works for you and it'll give you a split. So for me, my ideal day or week or month or year, whatever you want to look at it, I like about 50% project work, I like about 30% troubleshooting work, and I like about 20% routine work. And what I do is each day I structure my days because I have a different cadence. Project work I can do for about two hours troubleshooting about 90 minutes routine work on 30 to 45 minutes. What I do is rather than doing like Tuesdays of the project data to write the new course or do the outline of the book or whatever. What I do is I break them into two two hour segments and I split them up. So I go from project to routine to troubleshooting problems I need to do and then I, then I repeat it and then at the end of the day one, I get the stuff done but I don't feel drained, I feel energized and I want to come back and do it again. And it's just, it's just re. If you have the ability in your job to do some restructuring rather than redesigning or do some redesign of your task splits, you can create a motivating environment every single day.

Amazing. I'm smiling so big as you were talking about that when I write my books, typically I've done it in two hour blocks and 20 minute segments in those two hour blocks so that I'll work for 20 minutes. I'll get up, I'll you know, get more water, hit the bathroom, whatever, stretch. And then because it's 20 minutes, it's like there's something that compels me to get back into it. And knowing that it's only two hours doesn't feel like I'm spending all day writing this thing. Right. So that, so as you're talking, it's an interesting thing to, to think about. We all have a rhythm. We have a time of day that we prefer for certain tasks. What would you call the distracting tasks? Things like. Well, I've not only checked email, but I got a Facebook notification and. Oh, that Facebook notification led me to watch 17 videos.

Yeah, well, well the thing is is you need to manage your just your distractions, right. That you have to, you have to do it, you have to turn like when you're work, when I'm working on an article or a book or whatever, I. You have to turn the other stuff off. You just have to do that. Right. Because the restart time that you have to do from a distraction usually extends the amount of work that you can get done by 50% additional time to be able to do it. So you have to be able to stay focused, you have to be able to stay in the zone, you have to stay in flow. That was the other thing that I did with my task. The task quotient that I designed, you know, on this balance was I was fortunate enough and very, very privileged to have on my committee Dr. Chik Singh Mihai, who was the author of Flow. Right. So, so I was trying to expand his, his theory so he said, yeah, hey, I'll work with you. And the assessment we're going to give away is the one that I developed with him that's so great.

I think it's worth underscoring that, that people think about being great multitaskers. And the truth is there's no such thing as multitasking. It's about toggle tasking and you do you shift from one to the next and to shift back and what you just said, there's been great research that actually validates.

Right.

It, it extends the time of the task by 50% when you're oh, I can do it all. No, don't do it all. Get really focused. That's where flow comes in. Great. You've, you've hung with some amazing people and you know, your contributions are going to be already are and will continue to be amazing. So I'm so glad you're here. You've got, I'm going to say the, I'm going to say the link and then you're going to tell me what it is and then we'll say the link again. Ready? Magna. It's M A G N A MagnaLeader Co, slash gift. All capitalized, capitalized letter for gift.

Right? That's correct. Right. And what that is is if it's, it's a five minute assessment. This is the one that I developed with Dr. Csik Singmihalyi on on Flow. You know, the author of Flow or you know, people that haven't aren't familiar with Flow. It's be how do you get in the zone that was returned back in the 90s and what that'll that you will take that you answer those 15 questions and you will instantly get your report that will identify your ideal task balance of how you can stay most motivated and engaged. And like I said, if you have the ability in your job to be able to structure that, it can make a big difference. Now if you're a line worker or you're, you know, you're, you're feeding plastic into a machine and that's what you have to do for eight hours. Having that ability to, to work between project and routine and troubleshooting is going to be a little bit more challenging. Not impossible, just a little bit more more challenging. But if you're an executive, if you're a project manager, if you're a manager or a leader, I say 95% of the people we work with have the ability to manage the balance.

Also I'm going to say think about, even if you've Got a job where you're working in a warehouse or, you know, you're, you're fixing machinery and, and our audience does range from bank presidents to machine operators. So it, it's great. And all are welcome here. And here's the thing, on weekends you could still look at how do you balance your tasks?

Of course. Yes, absolutely. And, and even if you're, even if you're like working in a warehouse where you have the, where things go wrong and you have to do some troubleshooting or there's a big project that they're doing an expansion or there's regular routine work for you have to do every day just to, to keep things running and you have the ability to structure that in, in the, in the, in the blocks and in, in the frequency, then you can make a difference. The, the only time we found where it's really, really difficult is where you're locked into a single position and you're essentially doing what automation can do. Right.

All right, I'm going to give the link one more time. Magna Leader. M A G, N A leader. L, E, A D E, R C O forward slash, all capitals gift G, I, F, T. And that's the only part that's all capitals. That's awesome. Anything that we left out, anything you want to add last, amazing insights, anything you can throw in here.

Two things, I think the first thing is if you really want my leadership model and what that looks like of how to build the team, I encourage people to get our book. It's called the Leader of Oz and essentially it's the methodology. We took the story of the wizard of Oz and we created a business parable about this company in Kansas that gets whisked away and dropped in the Silicon Valley and you got the wicked VP from the east and wicked VP from the West. So it's fun. It's fun, but really it's, it's heavily academically grounded and it really tells you and, and it shows you through a story of how do you build a great team? Things you have to do. That's, that's the first thing. And then second thing I would, I would say is that we just launched this yesterday we launched our site, which is coachsultants.com coachsultants, which is coaching and consulting dot com. So one of the things we do is we offer executive leadership. One of the things we found, Dr. P, is that most people don't know if they need really understand if they could benefit more from a coach or consultant. And what we've done is so we do, we do what we call coach salting, where we do heavy coaching, which is all the reflective pieces and we also provide the leadership elements necessary to come out of the, of the coaching. And I will say if you want to get your, your, your cq, your coach quotient, you can go to the site. There's a quick assessment on there as well and you can find out, you know, what's your degree of strength and which should you benefit more from.

So good. Yeah, it's interesting when you go into organization, when I do, when you do it naturally is a little bit of coaching, a little bit of consulting. Coachsultants.com Very good. All of those links will be in the show notes. I am so appreciative of you being here, Dr. Kevin Gazzera. And, and I assume we can find you on LinkedIn as well.

Yeah, please connect with me on LinkedIn. You can send me email kevinagnaleadership.com one of the things, if you want to talk about any of these topics, I will promise you I will respond within 24 hours and you will get absolutely no sales pitch for me. It's, it's, I really want to just help you and if I can help you, great. If not, I'll point you in a direction where you can get help.

That's awesome. All right, look for Kevin Gazera. I'm going to spell Kevin's last name because he's, he hides an extra Z in the middle. A Z, Z a R A Kevin Gazera. And I just thank you so much. It's, it's been a fast kind of time together, fast session. So I appreciate you being here. And yeah, with that, we'll give it a wrap.

It's been a pleasure and thanks for, for what you do to help others get better.

Awesome.

Very good, Very good.

It is a pleasure. It truly is. This is one sharp sword cutting through to what matters most. My guest today is Dr. Kevin Gazzera and please like and share this episode. Please comment on it. We love to have the word spread. There's so much information in this. Please also go look at what Kevin's got and what he's offering to you. So check the show notes for sure. Again, this is one sharp sword cutting through to what matters most. I AM your host, Dr. P. Dr. Wayne Purnell, the exponential success coach and the president of Dynamic Leader. We will see you here next week. Thanks for tuning in. Thank you for listening to one sharp sword cutting through to what Matters Most with your host, Dr. P. Dr. Wayne Purnell, the breakthrough success coach and your powerful presence mentor.