Special Operations Missions - Takeaways For Business And Non-Profit Projects

[MUSIC] In times of rapid acceleration, high pressure, and general uncertainty, the reality is clear. Professionals are struggling. They have become more mentally and emotionally exhausted, less curious, more stressed, and less giving. Adding to this is the complexity around solutions with the overabundance of protocols, supplements, and so-called performance hacks. The end result, as leaders are more distracted, and have less mental agility, poorer performance, and struggle to be the belief builder and energy multiplier for their teams. We don't want to accept that. Our passion is to help professionals be more. These conversations help illuminate your thinking into sustainable human performance, learning real solutions to improve your energy, focus, and ultimately increase your impact. This is the TIGNUM Thought Cast. [MUSIC] Today's episode, Special Operations Mission Planning. Takeaways for business and nonprofit projects with special guest Rob Lively. Rob is a former command sergeant major in US Army Special Operations Command's Special Missions Unit. We hope you enjoy it. [MUSIC] Hello, everyone, and welcome to our bold round table. Today at our table, we have all of you, of course, and a very special one of our founding members, Rob Lively. For those of you that don't know, Rob Lively has had an illustrious 28 year military career in the US Army, starting with the 10th Mountain Division to the elite army rangers, and then to the ultra elite first special forces operational detachment Delta, referred to as the Delta Force, or as we're going to call it today the unit. And in the unit, Rob worked his way up from an operator to a team sergeant, and ultimately to leading all of the day-to-day operations of the unit as the highest non-commissioned officer in the unit, the command sergeant major. And in this role, Rob had to lead up. He had to interact with global political leaders. He had to lead laterally across other agencies, and he had to lead down across his elite organization. So he has quite a repertoire of leadership experiences from that. And then since leaving the military in 2019, Rob founded and led a successful nonprofit that supports the unit members and their families. He's led a successful joint venture in the fitness industry. He's consulted on strategy and leadership for many corporates. He speaks at many events. And currently he works with 777 Partners, a private equity company that invests in sports, media, entertainment, aviation, insurance, and a fantastic tech company. So Rob, welcome. Let's jump right in. Hey Scott, thanks a ton. It's a exciting to be with you guys today, and I'm looking forward for the next hour. Awesome. And so as usual, you and I are going to start a short conversation, just like we're sitting at the kitchen table, which we've done many times. And then we're going to open it up to some questions from our members and get it going. So I think a great place to start Rob is simply just to ask you to share your story of your journey. I mean, you had an amazing career both in the military and now in business. But could you just take us all kind of through your career and maybe share with us some of the fundamentals that have helped you succeed along the way? You know Scott, if I go back to, you know, I can't really share that apart unless I go all the way back to the beginning of kind of when I sort of became who I am. And I think I think there was a time right after college when I went on a weekend hiking trip. Never been a hike. I was an athlete, but never a hacker, never a backpacker went on a weekend hiking trip and decided I wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail. And with no experience, you know, I hike the app like a month later, I left and hike the Appalachian Trail to 2,180 miles. From Georgia to Maine. And I think that is, you know, I didn't realize it at the time, but I think if I had to go back to who I was really becoming who I am now, that was sort of the beginning of it. There's probably a whole lot of high energy and low IQ involved in that. But what I was developing there was a beginner's mind. And that fundamental has stayed with me throughout. I learn from everyone. I watch people. I mean, constant observation. I pick up things. Even the other day I saw on Instagram a new exercise I'd never seen before and I incorporated it. And so I'm not afraid to learn from anyone anywhere and anytime over any topic. And, you know, I kind of go with that old Bruce Lee quote of, you know, catalog your experiences and adapt what is useful to you, discard what's not useful to you and then make it specifically your own. So I would say beginner's mind. Next, I am keenly self-aware. I'm extremely objective about myself almost as if I was critiquing someone else. I am a critical thinker. I'm not critical. I'm not being critical, but I am a critical thinker. I have a consistent relentless pursuit of excellence. I feel like it's my obligation to honor the gifts, the gifts that I've been blessed with. The gifts that people have given me, the time people have invested in me, the parenting I've received, the friends like yourself who've invested a tremendous amount of time in me and provided me tremendous opportunity. And I feel like I need to honor that and I honor that by a relentless pursuit of excellence in myself. I think we'll talk about this. We'll talk about this a little later, but vulnerability. I learned about vulnerability and courage. A lot of that I learned in combat, believe it or not. A lot of that I learned studying some Bernade Brown in the mix of combat. So I think we'll get into that a little bit later. And then lastly, the translation of experiences is a fundamental that I rely on. Probably one that I rely on the most right now because I'm doing things now. I'm currently winding down part of a company, never done that before. I'm currently building an operating model for a new operations set of problems that I've never done that before. And a couple other things that I've never done before. But really have I or have I not done them before? Because if I go back into all my experiences and I look at the fundamentals and the principles, how the same are they, how different are they? It's just in a different genre. And if you're open-minded and you learn about that particular genre, I think they're very applicable. So the ability to translate experiences from one industry to another or one project to another, I think is one of my top under the minute I have six of them listed here. And then, and I think probably the best way to talk about those experiences is David Epstein wrote a book called "Range." And I think I take my life as had tremendous range, which has set me up to go into things I've never done before. Pull out experiences from my past and apply and be successful. So interesting. Number one for you to combine Bruce Lee and Brunei Brown. I have to just smile a little bit because those are not too, Bruce Lee, I probably would have expected from an ex-special operations guy. But Brunei Brown, that throws a little curveball into it. But I think it does describe a little bit of the uniqueness and the way that you've approached your life and your leadership. And I also, you know, you make me wonder a question, does life actually impart qualities on us or does it expose those qualities? And maybe it can only expose those qualities when you take on difficult things. And you mentioned this thing about dealing with new things, dealing with uncertainty. And in a previous deep dive, we talked about how do you build authentic self-belief? And you just described the perfect description of how you do it. You go back to expose what you've learned and experienced before and ask yourself, what do I have in my toolbox that I can apply going forward? Did you learn that by yourself or did someone mentor you on that? Because I mean, even just going through selection for the unit is such a challenging thing. And then I know many of the challenging missions that you were on that you led. Where do you pick that up? Scott, that's a great question. And I go back and forth on trying to figure out, is that something that's natural within me? And I think, yes, it is. If I go back to the, you know, just to the Appalachian Trail story there, I mean, it's fundamental and as simple as that is, I go back to that. So I think, yes, some of that's natural. but I think some of it is, some of it is programmed in. But I look back on people, you know, people who have led me in the past and who have put me in positions that made me uncomfortable, but positions that I asked to be put in. Like, I always wanted to be in the arena. I always wanted to be a key player. I always wanted to be, I never wanted to write a book about myself. I didn't care about that. But I did want to live a life that was worthy of someone writing a book about. And so I always had a desire to be on the X. And a lot of times I didn't know what I was asking for in my own naive of a tale, but there were people who believed and trusted in me enough to put me there, you know? And, you know, and I think at some level I was successful in all of them. And at some level I screwed things up and intentions were always good. I was always, you know, I was always aggressive. I've always made, I may not have made the right decisions, but I certainly made decisions. I was decisive. And so I think I spent time trying to figure out, was that nature or nurture? It's probably a little bit of both. And then I forget about it and move on just to be like him. - Yeah, your statement reminds me of a great Senaqqa quote, and it's not often that I throw Senaqqa out, but Senaqqa said, "No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity, for he is not permitted to prove himself." And you just kind of describe that perfect, right? Which is that this adversity has helped you prove even to yourself as well as to others, what really lies within you, what you're capable of. And you mentioned in your fundamentals and you had told me once before, and I've shared this story, that one of the most shocking things when I had the opportunity to come to Fort Bragg and work with the unit that you led, was that you had shared with me that the most important mindset quality for a leader was vulnerability. And that really shook me because I thought, you know, here I was expecting these really hard men and really tough people, and why would vulnerability be the most important? So maybe just go a little deeper. What did you mean by that? And why do you think that's such an important quality of leadership? I think, let me tie the last topic with the vulnerability topic. I coach myself continually. And I think that I've learned about coaching oneself from people like yourself and others. And I could not be who I am and do what I've done without continual coaching, because I have all those things that hold you back like everyone else does. I have fear, I have insecurities, I have baggage from this thing or that thing, I have childhood stuff. We all have all the things that we have and I have to coach myself through that. And one of the things when you talk about leadership, I think vulnerability and, you know, also empathy in there, but we'll focus on vulnerability for right now. It's probably not, it's probably best visualized or probably best, the best example I can give is, if you go to combat, so I spent a couple of decades hunting human beings who wish to do horrible things to other human beings, like flat planes into towers and the list could go on. So I spent a lot of my time in my junior and mid-level career, or even the senior part of my career a little bit. I'm kicking doors. I'm going through doors and I'm in gun fights. You cannot, that takes courage. It's not the absence of fear. It is overcoming fear by courage. You cannot have courage unless you have vulnerability unless you allow yourself to be vulnerable. So it takes courage to do that. It takes courage to get in any arena. And therefore vulnerability. And if you're going to get in the arena of leadership, you have to be, you have to accept your own vulnerability. I let people that, you know, I was never, I was never the smartest guy in the room. I was never the most fit guy in the room. I guess at some point I became one of the most, if not the most experienced guy in the room. And if you're going to lead the best of the best and go in those rooms where people are elite and highly, highly skilled and talented, smart, and can process information extremely fast. If you're going to lead those type of people, you're going to be wrong. You're not going to be everything to everybody. You're going to have to figure out how to build a team, how to go in and lead, how to say what you don't know. How to let the people, even though you may be the leader, you may not be the subject matter expert in a particular situation. So you defer to subject matter experts who may be your peers, people that you've worked with for 20 years, they may actually be better at things than you. So in order to lead in an environment like that, you have to be vulnerable. And I think I, I think that was probably one of my greatest learnings and probably one of my, the things that was hardest for me to kind of coach myself through was to be an effective leader with people that were so elite that you knew you weren't going to be. You know, if I went back to my Ranger Regiment time, yeah, it was easy to know more than the private sore, the captains, you know, it wasn't so difficult. You didn't really require as much of vulnerability, but in the unit, you could, it requires a ton of vulnerability. And so what I learned in anything I've led since then, what an asset that is to be able to accept that you know, to have the courage to be vulnerable and have empathy. And that has, you know, once I learned that, it was like, there was a waterfall that came after that, you know, I learned how to be a better person, how to be a better father, how to learn how to be a better husband, how to be a better friend. And I think that was, anyway, and you know, Bernet Brown talked a lot about vulnerability. And you know, I listened, we actually brought Bernet Brown into the higher command there and listen to some of her philosophies. So, you know, back to that beginner's mind, you know, trying to learn from anybody, anyone, anytime, anywhere. Would have been amazing to be a fly on the wall at that conversation in that session. But isn't it interesting when we're younger in our career, we hide ourselves out. Sometimes we're even naive and we don't even want to admit to ourselves that we have self-doubt. And as we mature, and then often when we mature and take on more experience, we end up leading others, that that moment we actually realize, holy crap, there's a lot that I don't know. And vulnerability is going to be critical for me to be able to move forward. I remember we had one of the more horrific fires that I experienced in the Phoenix Fire Department with friend of mine died in a grocery store fire. And before that, we had all operated on the belief that if your partner went down, you picked him up through him over your shoulder, carried them out of the building. Well, this guy, Brett Tarver, he was 240 pounds. That was before you put the 75 pounds of gear on him. He was a big, big, strong guy. And in a grocery store fire, you can imagine that when everything starts collapsing, you're walking and crawling in zero visibility over cans and boxes and potatoes. Everything that's on those shelves is on the floor. And it turns out it took three crews of four guys to pull him out. And that was a moment where we realized, we're bullshit in ourselves. And I often think of your story because that moment of vulnerability, we changed everything in the way firefighters operate across the country. Because we rewrote all of our standard operating procedures. And what I hear from you and what I saw you do was actually, if someone said, can you do this, you'd say, I don't know. Let's go try it and see. And if we fail, that's OK. And that's amazing to me. It's probably one of the more liberating things that can happen to someone is when they get to a point where they can accept their own limitations. They can be vulnerable. And therefore, they'll end up being more successful. And we have been asked to solve asymmetrical problems in the geopolitical landscape there. But no one has ever solved before or no one has ever managed or attempted to manage. And I think the army operates on doctrine. And we don't really have doctrine per se at the unit because everything we do seems to be so different and so asymmetrical. So you have to wear tactical things, tactical decisions, tactical actions, literally have strategic impact. And so you really have to have that beginner's mind and that vulnerability to be able to go in and say, "Yeah, you're right. Can we do that? Have no idea." But we'll figure it out. We'll get on the ground. And we'll tell you. Probably one of the best experiences I had was in 2003. We had just invaded Iraq. We were in Baghdad. I was in a house downtown in Baghdad. It was one of Uda who's St. Talsas and we had sort of taken that over us as a little command post. And nobody knew what was going on in the country and the connectivity throughout the battlefield had yet to be established. Then I had a commander who had a tremendous amount of trust in me and he said, "Hey, I want you to grab one other guy, get a radio, some smartphones. I'm going to get you a helicopter." And I want you to go to Belod, to that airfield up there and figure out what's going on. I don't know who's up there. I don't know what's happening or what the enemy situation is and just go up there and figure it out. And so we've got an helicopter in the dark at night. Me and another guy. We landed and I stood in the middle of the helicopter flew away and I stood there and I looked and I saw a light in like a tent way over there near the south air. So we walked over there and we found out who was in that tent and that led to, "Okay, well who's down here? Who's there? Who's downtown? What army units are here?" And so if in about 24 hours we had pretty much mapped out who was there, what they thought of the enemy situation, we got in a helicopter and we came back and we got some plans together and we went and supported some of those operations up there and hunted some terrorists. The back then it was the old deck of cards. We were hunting some of Siddharms' regime back then to include obviously Siddharms. So just to have people to put you in places and have the desire and the courage or sometimes I'd call it stupidity, to be put in situations where you can learn. So when someone says, "Hey, I want you to lead an effort to wind down a company that's making a few million dollars and has 50, 60 employees." It doesn't seem so insurmountable. Yeah, you may have just described leadership perfect, which is getting dropped off of a helicopter standing there alone with one other person and saying, "I got to figure this out." And that's the way many of the leaders that we work with, probably many of the members today in our bold circle would describe leadership. So maybe a good question to ask you is, you know, in the military you went from being led by others on special missions to leading special missions to leading the entire unit, then you went outside of the military to being a CEO and then now to working with 777 partners and all the portfolio companies. What would you say you've learned about leadership that you would share with new and even experienced leaders? This is a good one. I'm going to talk about this in a way that is not meant to be critical. Leadership is one of the strangest things that I have experienced in all these different places where I have gained experience. And what I mean by that is people don't really understand it. Everyone will tell you, "Hey, you know, if you're going to have a great company, you need leadership." No one's ever looked at the success of a sports team and said, "You know, they won the Superbow in spite of their horrible leadership. It's never happened." People of less talent, organizations of less talent, less financial resources are successful because of great leadership. So everyone agrees. I mean, that's unanimous across the board. But the amount of people who truly, who I've encountered, who truly understand what leadership is, who truly understand that leadership is a significant portion of their job. Therefore a skill that needs to be honed and trained so it can be applied to increase probability of success and vision attainment is unbelievably low. And I think most of the organizations I've been a part of, they're starved for leadership. They may not even know it, that they're starved for it. I've watched people talk about, you know, I've had people throw out spreadsheets and think that's strategy. I've had people throw out, you know, their website and talk about their culture, which was completely aspirational and untrue. It's just, I've had a four star general tell me that he wasn't even sure he knew what leadership was anymore because he is so busy in the day to day grind of his particular command. But he said, I don't really think I'm impacting or leading anyone. I think we're just executing tasks and actions. And so I've seen that at the CEO level and throughout. And I think it's, I think it is, and then, you know, those are the first programs that get cut, you know, if a company starts to struggle, personally, I think they should invest greater in their leaders and they'll cut programs and say, we have to cut this out because it's not a priority. I think it's, I think it's dangerous for American corporations. I think the military focuses on it. Believe it or not, the military focuses on leadership better than any organization I've seen to include all of the other government organizations, CIA, FBI, all of them. And I think, you know, it's leadership is really, really hard. And it's not complex, but it's really, really hard to do. It takes a lot of discipline and leadership back to vulnerability. It takes a lot of vulnerability. So people say, you know, a lot of times I've watched people in leadership positions not want to do leadership development and not want to do leadership training because it exposes you. Exposes your weaknesses and it exposes what you're not doing well. It exposes all those things. And people don't like that, you know. They don't want that. It's a very personal thing. And it's painful. And so you don't have vulnerability and you don't have courage. Obviously, you're probably not going to train your leadership. And I believe in, I believe in later on the table and, and, and get in real with it and training it because the end result, the end result is absolutely unbelievable in how you can impact people and organizations. And as a leader, you know, I probably, I can probably go, I can, I can go like 20 years. I bumped into a guy, 20 years later. I honestly, I didn't recognize him. and he said to me that he re-enlisted in the military and he became who he is because of my leadership 20 years ago. And I didn't even remember having that much of an impact on this young kid. And holy smokes, man, is that worth a million dollars? So I think there's probably nothing that people are starved for more than leadership. And I think people in leadership positions are doing a disservice to themselves and those they lead by not really focusing on developing the skills of leadership and the kind of leadership competence. And I see it all the time and I see it everywhere. Isn't it fascinating when you think of, in many ways, we hold leaders up on a pedestal? And we also sometimes paid leaders just extraordinary salaries and yet it probably is one of the things that people are least prepared for. And many times in you and I have experienced this in some of the organizations we've worked with. where the leaders were brought on just because of their experience, but it didn't matter that they were good leaders. So what I hear from you that I think is really fascinating is this constant connection with their purpose. Why am I here? Why am I here to lead? And you hit on a couple things that we often talk about being the chief belief builder, building people's belief in themselves, belief in each other, belief in their leaders, and belief in their strategy. And then probably the chief strategist or visionary, keeping clarity about where we're going and why we're going there. And so that everyone knows exactly where the map leads you to. And then probably the third, and I don't know if you would say this is important in the military, but I would think it would be chief energy multiplier because hard work takes a lot of energy and great leaders energize people. Whether it's through clarity, whether it's through vulnerability, whether it's through listening, whether it's through building trust, they energize other people. And they're when they're exposed to those people, like the example you just gave of the person you led 20 years before, he's essentially saying, you energized me and you made me believe in myself. So does it sound like I've summarized a little bit of what you're talking about? Yeah. And then that guy 20 years later came back and energized me because after that I was inspired for days, if not weeks. Because as a leader, you often plant trees who shade, you will probably never enjoy. And that was a perfect example of it right there. Yeah, I think you and I sat down one time. I can go through all my military manuals and you can breed HBR and you can get a ton of different John Maxx. Well, you can get a ton of different definitions of what leadership is. But I think you and I sat down one time and you did a good job of sort of pulling it out of me. But essentially, it's just building trust in relationships with people that you wish to impact in a positive way so that they can do. So they can do and accomplish things, become things that without you, they otherwise would not have. And I continue to use that and I think, and I use that as sort of a metric for myself, you know, am I doing that with the people that I'm working with today in triple seven? Am I doing that for them? And if I'm not, I should check myself. And I should maybe realline, readjust. But to me, that is what leadership is. It's not about me. And that was a big lesson that I got from one of my leadership consultants one time. You know, I was having trouble getting over a hurdle and he sort of had an epiphany. And so I think I just figured you out. Like, you're arrogant. And you think this whole leadership thing is about you. It's not about you. It's about the people you're leading. And you know, I felt like he just kicked me in the gut and took me a few minutes to get over it. And I was arrogant. And it was about me. And I wanted the glory of being the leader. And that's not what leadership is. And so I had to gain some humility and understand that, no, it's what I'm doing for them. Now granted, it starts with me and being the best that I can be in my systems and strategies and mostly physically, spiritually, and so on. But once I get that straight, you know, and I get out of bed and I'm ready to go and I'm hydrated and, you know, I take care of myself well, then it is about everyone else and how you can help them be the best that they can possibly be. And I think that's when I really understood what real leadership is. And when I meet with a lot of business leaders, they talk a lot about business. And when I ask him, I went to the athletic director of a Power Five conference asked me to go to basketball game with him and just talk about leadership. And one of the questions I asked him was, so how do you hone your leadership skills? Kind of silence. I said, okay. What leadership books have you read lately? Silence. Who do you study? Silence. Okay, so you, but you're a leader. And so what are you doing to get better at that, at that part of your job? You could tell me about recruiting. You could tell me about budgets. You could tell me about, you know, building a new facility here there. He could tell me a little bit about culture as he saw it. I'm not sure that it was accurate for what was on the ground, but it was really happening. But he wasn't really doing anything about leadership. And that just, it was just, when I get exposed to people like that. But yeah, yeah, I mean, I would, you know, I would call him successful, you know, and by most standards, when I get exposed to people like that, I think, holy smokes, how much better could he really be? How much better could that athletic department really be, or maybe even that conference, if they could just take it over the top a little bit? And I think that's, that's the difference that you see in some of your outlying organizations. You know, maybe that's different. You see with like, I live saving an Alabam or Nick Sabin and Alabam, you know, I don't know. Well, you hit on one thing that was really interesting, this concept too of self leadership. And, and investing in how you show up and you gave a couple examples. And we've had many deep dives talking about the need for recovery and building cognitive resilience. And I just came back from working with a team of leaders. And one of the things that came out is that they were sacrificing themselves to where they were literally all on the fringe of burnout, thinking they were being servant leaders. And I was trying to explain to them, you're not serving anyone like you're exhausted, you're not your best. And that, and that leads me to a question. You turned your old home into the lively resort and spa. And I'll never forget, you know, that I stay with you one time and there was a robe hanging on the back of my door. And you scolded me when I came out for coffee and I wasn't in my robe, I was in my shorts and t-shirt. And you said, hey, you're out of uniform. What was your thinking in creating and calling your house for lively resort and spa? There were two different, two different points in my life where that happened. One is when I got to the unit, I found out, I mean, I didn't know much about it before I got there. When I got there, I found out I'm going to spend half my life on alert where I have to be at work in a finite amount of time and have all my gear up and be gone in hours. And so I listened to people complain about, you know, we're on alert. I can't do anything. I got to stay by the house. My wife went to shop and blah, blah, blah. So I found this little subdivision on a lake that had a golf course. I don't know if I called a country club or not. It wasn't that nice. It had a golf course and a lake. So we said, hey, we're going to move there because I can go from being out on the water or hitting golf balls or working out or walking in the neighborhood or business friend. I can be at work in the amount of time I need to be at work and be deployed when I need to be. So that was one. The second was our 20th wedding anniversary. Kathy and I went to, we went to sandals. I think it was, we were in the grill in Jamaica. And we kept looking at that swimming pool. We had a boat and we kept looking at that swimming pool over our balcony and we kept saying, holy, snow, how peaceful is that? And so we just kind of cataloged that in our brain and went back and took a whiteboard. And we were in the hot tub one day and we said, okay, we had to spare a lot beside us that we had purchased a while back, had a bunch of trees on it. And we said, hey, let's take this up a notch. Let's instead of having to get the boat and go down to the lake. Let's just sell the boat and get a pool. So I started getting out of the hot tub and she said, where are you going? I said, well, I'm going to get the chainsaw because I got a lot of trees I need to cut down. So I started cutting trees that day. And we put a pool in so that we could, when we were home, when we were not working, when I was not deployed, when I was with my friends and my family at our house, we were grilling, using the outdoor kitchen. And you may be picturing something super, super nice. And it was nice enough. And the pool was actually pretty nice. And we turned it into, we started calling it the loudly resort and spa. And when people came to visit, we wanted them to feel that. You were in a place where you could relax, have great conversations, get in the pool, get in the hot tub, grill a steak, and learn from each other and become better people and feel regenerated when you left. It became no longer a place, it became a mindset. We've tried to keep that, we don't live in that house anymore, but we've tried to keep that same mindset and we're going to build another house here in a couple of years. We're definitely going to do that. I think it's so special to be able to offer that to your friends and your family and give that to yourself, that your house is a sanctuary, it's a place of reflection, it's a place of fellowship and it's a place where you can think and share thoughts and collaborate and disagree and grow. I think that's why we did it. We've got coffee mugs, we've got robes, who knows what will come next, but they all say lively resort and spawn. I think you underestimated what an amazing job Kathy did and talking about vulnerability. I think that was the first day I ever wore a robe, I was not a robe guy. Mission accomplished. I'm going to ask you one last question. I know our members are chomping at the bit and probably have tons of questions, but I just have to ask this because the world has evolved so much that there's so much paradox and I can feel even the younger people, the younger population, the people that work in all of our organizations who don't know how to deal with paradox. They're really now, they want everything to be black and white and you can see that. I can imagine as a leader and an elite special missions group, you dealt with a lot of paradox. Who are the good guys, the bad guys? Emerging the human side of combat, to so many other things that you've done. What have you learned and what can you teach us about how to deal and lead better through paradox? Scott, this is where I do what is natural for me to do and that is tough love. This is where grown ups need to be grown ups and professionals need to be professionals. This is where I say, "Hey, put your big people pants on and be a grown up and accept what the world has for you. I lead in reality. The reality is not necessarily what I want, but reality is what it is. I accept the world for what it is. I accept the world's history for what it is and what it was and what it contributes to this day. It's not right. It's not wrong. Sometimes it's right. Sometimes it's wrong. Sometimes it's indifferent. Sometimes it's the same. My decisions in a world full of reality that I freely accept that I can't change. My decisions, some of the very best decisions I may make, maybe just slightly better than the worst decision I may make. That's what a grown up does. That's what a leader does. I try to see around corners. I try to mitigate risk. I gather as much information as possible, turn it into intelligence. At the end of the day, it's my job as a leader to mitigate risk, gather intelligence, set a plan, cast a vision, be flexible and agile. The world is dynamic. It's ugly. It's beautiful. It's fantastic. It's difficult. It's all these things. If you don't think it is, just think about Israel and the Gaza Strip right now. It doesn't get any more complex and more difficult than that. This is where I tell people spend some time understanding the realities of the situation. Understand what your role is in it. Understand what you can affect, what you can affect, what you need to accept as reality. You can't change it and you move on and impact where you can. It's grown up work. That's what separates really, really great leaders. It's just reading an article in Henry Kissinger. I had the opportunity about five years ago to meet and spend some time with Mr. Kissinger. If you go back through what he led through and his opinions, that is the epitome of what reality is and some of the decisions he made and some of the things he supported, the best decision and the worst decision were a fraction apart. Take your paradox, just, hey, you've got to really, really center yourself on what reality is, what you're trying to accomplish and then go on from there. It's tough, it's difficult. That's an awesome answer. I apologize to the members that I've kind of bogarded Rob's time. I'm going to turn it over to you, Anne's because I can imagine we have some great questions waiting. We do. Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Rob. We have got some great questions. I'll try to bring nine of these together. You've talked a lot about leadership and there's a question here. What could or should be a feedback metric for a leader to look for to know if they're leading well because a lot of the examples you gave, you know, were people weren't leading well. It sounded like they had quite low self-awareness. Like, do you have any thoughts and insights on that? What these metrics could or should be? Two things. One in formal and one formal. A leader message is incessantly. I've actually never realized at the executive level how much I would need to message in order to get points across. I would message until I was blue in the face and I would go two levels down and no one even heard of anything I was talking about. When I would message, I would try to get, I would try to, I did as many things in person. I did as many things remotely, but I always had cameras on because I want to get as much nonverbal cues as possible because that's information for me. Am I getting through? Are people understanding? Are people green or disagreeing? Then after a lot of different engagements like that, I would sort of circle back with some, maybe a mid-level person or a lower person or a higher person. I would say, "Okay, tell me what you heard me say. Tell me what you interpreted from that and make sure that, am I aligning forces, am I synchronizing our thoughts and our efforts appropriately and I messaging well?" So that was one. Two, and then always, I'm always in constant assessment of myself objectively like, "Ah, I do that well and not do that well." You always have to have an inner circle that you can sort of, that will certainly come to you even if you may not want to hear it, they're going to come to you and say, "Yeah, you've screwed that up 10 ways this Sunday." But then the formal method is, "Hey, you've got to do, but you have to do 360s. You have to do 360 leadership assessments at least once a year, maybe twice a year." I got some of the most painful, heartbreaking things that I still remember and that still affect me and still draw a positive action in me today from 360 degree and they weren't anonymous. I knew who was saying it and they cared enough about me to give me good, true, honest. Now if you're in an environment where you don't know that you think anonymity might be better, then do it that way. The goal here is the end result. So 360 feedback mechanism is fantastic. But that's dangerous information, if not fed to you through a professional. So you just can't do a 360 degree assessment of myself and send that out to everyone and then everyone sends it to me and then I set no room by myself and interpret it. That's dangerous. You should never ever have it. do that. You have to have sort of a leadership consultant sort of aggregate those things, grab the things, who also knows maybe your disk profile and can help you through that so it's a positive experience. So a formal 360 degree assessment with a consultant and professional to help you aggregate those learning so you can apply. I think that's those are the two things that have been most impactful for me. There's two different methods. Amazing, thank you. And this one here from Michael and it kind of chimes with a few others. How does effectively the ship translate into culture and what levers have you used and seen used effectively to do that? Let's start with culture. If you're a leader, you should know the culture of your organization and I don't mean what's on the website. You should actually know what it is. So when people talk about, oh, I've never heard anyone say, oh, we have a horrible culture. You know, and if this is what it is, everyone will tell you, everyone will put on their website what a great culture they have. It's probably not true. It might be true, probably not. So what I like to challenge people to do, leaders to do is, first of all, define your culture, whatever it is, define it. You know, work through the, work through the ranks of folks you have and figure out, hey, what is what is culture? You know, it's how you believe how you behave. So what is it? So define how you're behaving, which how you behaving must be how you're believing at that particular time. So define what it is and whatever it is, it's good, bad, or ugly. And then what do you want it to be? What should it be? What do you desire it to be? And it's probably on your website and in an aspirational way. So then you have to figure, okay, so we want to get rid of the bad stuff that we think that is actually our culture or parts of our culture. And we want to enhance those things that we want to be a greater part of our culture. And that truly be our culture. Then that's where the leader grabs it. It says, okay, this is who we are. We may not like it, but this is who we are. Nope, but this is who we're going to be because I am the leader here. I will make sure that we get there. And then that leader begins with modeling and enforcing and accountability until you change the culture. And it happens over time. The culture of the unit, I inherited. I probably codified it, but I inherited it. And it was the golden egg that I made sure that I didn't drop and I didn't break. And in my time there, I hope that I made the shell even stronger. And when you went around and asked people what our culture was, you got a lot of different answers, which means we have culture confusion. So what I did was I codified it. And we had a bunch of leaders on an offsite. And we came up with our culture is that we have a relentless pursuit of excellence in everything we do. That means that whether we were jumping out of planes, whether we were shooting, whether we were leading, whether we were creating intelligence packets, whether we were liaising with foreign dignitaries, whether we were parenting or being good spouses or being good citizens in the community or maintaining our yards or teaching our kids out of play a sport. We pursued excellence in all that. And we did that to the best of our ability. And that was that was when in all of the time that we had that organization, there were a lot of people who talked about culture and it sort of went in the same direction, but it was never completely codified into something that someone could lead and hold others accountable to. And as a leader, that's what I tried to do. And what I did do. And I think that's still hangs on the wall at that place. So back to your back to kind of the question, you can't separate the leader in the culture. And it is the leader's job to make sure that they define it and then build it rebuild it if necessary, but then hold people accountable to it and that starts with modeling. And I'm working with a few organizations right now that have a real modeling problem. It's negatively impacting the culture in a dangerous way. Yeah, no fascinating. I think maybe we've got time for one more. There are a lot. But this one from Anna, I think, is really fascinating. You've talked about the importance of vulnerability for leadership. How do you, any advice, any tips on how we can nurture vulnerability? Well, Anna says she does people resisting kind of showing vulnerability. How can we help shift that in ourselves, spot it in ourselves, but also for others? You know, I go back, I go back and forth on this. Is it a, did I get this way because I really work on being vulnerable or did I become vulnerable because I got old enough and mature enough that I could become vulnerable? Or did I get vulnerable? Was I able to get vulnerable because I had done enough? I had experienced enough. I mean, I had been in enough gun fights. I had done it. I had enough success to where I could say, okay, I'm somewhat, I guess, I've kind of arrived to the point where I'm okay with being vulnerable. So at 25 years old, maybe I wasn't as vulnerable, but it's also maybe because no one can help me be as vulnerable. So it's, I kind of go back and forth on how I got to be vulnerable. But I, but okay, that's, that's almost interesting, I guess, that in the dollar or buy a cup of coffee. But I don't believe in safe spaces because I, you know, what you hear a lot is why I don't want people to be uncomfortable and I want everyone needs to have a safe space. I, what we, what we're really saying is we want to create a space where we respect everyone. We appreciate everyone and we make it a place where they're going to be expected and appreciated and it's okay for them to be uncomfortable because you cannot grow unless you have discomfort in some level. Growth is uncomfortable by nature. We can't change it. That's just a fact. And so I think if someone had at 25, someone who was older and experienced had come to me and said, this is, this is how you be vulnerable. And this is what vulnerability actually is. It's not a weakness, you know, and a young Rob Lavley would have told you that that was a weakness. I think, I think it's the leader's job to create, create the understanding of vulnerability, the understanding of discomfort and how safe spaces are actually just not, they're safe, you know, in terms of being respected and appreciated and valued so that you can be uncomfortable a little bit so you can have uncomfortable conversations. So you can become vulnerable and have the courage to be vulnerable and then you can grow. But you have to, when people come to that, you have to be able to, you have to be able to convince them and show them that this is what we're trying to do. The end result is going to be, that you're going to be a better person, you're going to be a better leader, you're going to be a better professional, you're going to be a better, you know, son, father, daughter, whatever, and you're going to grow. And that's what we wanted. And when people see that you care enough to go to those extremes to help them be who they want to be, they're okay with being a little uncomfortable. They're okay with, you know, with that vulnerability. Yeah. So I'm going to wrap this up and I know there's a lot more great questions and they will be answered in the Q&A session and post it on your bold hub. So don't worry, we will get to that. But Rob, I love what you shared with us and I appreciate your vulnerability coming on. And it's so interesting how important and you said it, just having the right intentions already sets the stage that relentless pursuit of excellence, caring about others, being deeply honest and self-aware about yourself and where your shortcomings are, how even those just automatically lead you and maybe I'll add one more being curious about how much better I can be and what I need to know to get there, get you there. So I so much thank you for the conversation, thank everyone for the questions, thank you Rob so much and thank you to our members and we'll see you soon. Thank you for listening to the Tignum Thoughtcast. If you've enjoyed this or any of our other Thoughtcast episodes please subscribe so you don't miss out on future releases. If you'd like to get in touch with Tignum please email us at [email protected] until next time be bold, be more and keep ruling your impact.