Essential Leadership Qualities for Effective Change with Kevin L. Ball

0:00 So maybe you want to go there, but what leadership qualities do you think are. Essential for driving effective change in a team that can be small or across a department or a larger organization? Okay, I'm going to give you a few words, topic words that I think are good leadership skills. Empathy is one. We've heard this one before, right? We hear it a lot. So we've got empathy. Right. So let me unpack empathy a little bit. Empathy is not sympathy. Empathy. Empathy is really putting yourself in that person's place without any judgment. It's really hard for human beings not to be judgmental because it's a survival technique. When you're out in the woods, you hear something crunching and maybe something coming to you, you're going to fight or flight.

0:44 You're walking down the street, you sense something, you walk into a party, into a room. This is what we do naturally. But when you're a leader in your organization and you have a team, you want to have that empathy and really draw a blank in your mind and be super curious. Empathy, be super curious and listen more than you speak. My dad told me one time, he says, Kevin, you have a set of ears, set of eyes and a mouth. He said, use them proportionately. I was like, wow, that's really deep, dad. use them proportionately. But the proportion word made me think about the OODA, like when do you listen more, speak more, and really be in the game with that person in front of you who you are leading?

1:31 Yeah, it's a great example. I'm taking it in. I'm using my eyes. I'm listening better. I've got high-def headphones in so I can hear all the little nuances in Kevin's voice. Yeah, I think this is really good advice to people. That curiosity part is something that That a lot of people overlook. And I think you're right to point out the confusion with sympathy because people are like, oh, that's too bad. And it even sounds cold. Right. Right. Versus like. Tell me more. Why is that? What do you think about that? What would you do? Because the right combination of open ended and closed ended questions, there is a skill set and a technique to get down to the bottom of things.

2:15 Some of us in the audience maybe have heard of the five why routine, you know, why, why, why, why, why, to get down to the bottom of it. I can give an example of that if we need it. Yeah, I think that'd be good, Kevin. Yeah, I'll give that example. Asking more questions to be really curious, like, so what about Harvard professors when I was in the psychology degree program at Harvard? They said, this week, we're going to think about how we think. What? We can think about that. So meta, like, slow down, professor. We're going to think about how we think, but that's a really deep notion because now you're really diving deeper into who you are and how you're built and the reason why you're built the way you're built and your experiences connected.

3:32 Now, to the show. Welcome to the show, Kevin Ball. Kevin, Kevin, my goodness. From the first time I saw you to now, it has been a dream to have you come on the show and talk about your experiences. I don't think I've had a scrum master with your depth, experience, challenge, expertise on the show yet. So this, I'm going to feel like I'm buckling in right now because I'm going to learn something that I'm going to take forward starting tomorrow. Oh, man. Thank you for those kind words. Thank you for those kind words. Yeah, you're welcome. I was looking at your background and I want to say, you know, thank you for your service. I saw you served in the Marines. Yes. Man, look at all this. One thing Kevin definitely probably has too much of is discipline.

4:15 Something that a lot of people that we might work with or know don't have. I was, true story. And we'll get into the shows. We were setting up for an event. This was a community event of volunteers. And one of the individuals said, you know, I just don't have a lot of discipline. And I think that they're contrasting the self with me. And I said, you know what? It's not healthy to compare your levels to my levels. I've honed this over a long period of time. And wherever you start, that's where you start. That's right. Yeah. So, Kevin, I'm thinking because of your experience, it would be fun to scrum this episode live. Ooh, I like it. Yeah, I've got a list of things that I want to pick your brain on, and then I'm going to visually show some scrum cards flying up on somewhere on the screen.

5:01 Oh, I love it. A little scrum board, how we're going to get this going. But I'm thinking probably, and you can tell me no. I think the first place to start before we go into the weeds, what is the most important thing for you to give to the audience by the end of the show? The most important thing. Well, what I want to do is make sure that I answer your questions to the best of my ability. To make sure that your listeners, your viewers, your followers get something out of what we're saying and the way that you set us up in terms of how we're going to actually scrum this conversation might be a good start for us, right? I hope that they find some value in our conversation and that's what it's going to be. It's going to be a nice conversation, but I'm really looking forward to see how you want to scrum this conversation.

5:47 Yeah, so I've got the goal, Thanks to you, you gave me a perfect goal. So the goal I'll restate it. So make sure I heard you, right? This is everything Kevin and I are doing is normal, everyday scrum. So for those that don't know. Listeners get something out of what we share using Scrum to share a nice conversation. So that conversation is going to have value for the listener. And you and I are going to enjoy ourselves simultaneously, a twofold goal. Copy that. So I'm thinking, you know, here's some topics I'm going to, I'm just going to machine gun you some topics based on that goal you just said. And you tell me if it's in or out. Should we talk about career journey and philosophy? Yes. Okay. That's in. Should we talk about agile and program management?

6:28 Sure it's like it's a little reluctance i'm gonna put like a little maybe so i'm listening i'm using all of my senses ladies and gentlemen yeah so maybe so but i want the audience to pay attention to when felipe asked me those questions those are really broad topics and you know for me i want to dig in a little bit more about the specifics of those two topics that's why i said sure so it's sort of open-ended that means i'm curious to learn more oh i've i've done my homework kevin i've got, questions in those categories to drill down if they make it if they make it so i mean people that don't know i do my homework i do my due diligence like i just don't hit record and then see to cross my fingers and hope we give you something good this show has not been that way not even day one so another area that might be is this could be hot i think this might this might actually be a hot topic leadership and organizational change absolutely yeah so that's That's a hottie. That one's, I think I'm going to move that one up.

7:29 Oh, great. And then we'll check. What we're doing right now, folks, we're prioritizing. We're pulling the goals out. Felipe has something in his head. We're just organizing. And the key thing, what folks need to remember is that we're being adaptable, right? We're adapting to what we're both saying and reacting to each other. And actually, in my book, The Invisible Visible Us, See Yourself as Others See You, that's on Amazon and Felipe, I'll do a link later. I blended two frameworks. The OODA loop and emotional intelligence. I call it the Thinking EI OODA, and we'll get deeper into that. And I'll be able to unpack a lot of things you're going to ask me with that framework. Oh, I love that. Thinking of frameworks is very powerful, people.

8:11 If you haven't practiced thinking of frameworks, I don't know why you're not doing it now. I mean, this whole show flows in a framework that in case you can't guess, it's Scrum. All right, so now, of course, we've got challenges and solutions because I love talking about problems. You know, I was just talking yesterday to a friend that they're asking me, like, do you like to gossip? And I said, unfortunately, I do. Unfortunately, I would admit it. I admit it. I do like a little bit, a little bit of gossip, not, you know, not untruthful things. So I'm going to put that ahead of agile program management because I think problems could give us some good cover and flavor for the future. Absolutely. And they might just be synonymous. Yeah, might actually be. and then i've got you know based on the goal we have now i'm even going to self-select impact and outcomes i feel like i should take out because it's going to be it's going to happen.

9:03 Perfect love it so i run out of questions but that's not that's not going to happen, then i'd like to pick your brain on insights and trends okay and then we've got see how he said okay like he was like that stays low so i'm not i he didn't say it in a way that i'm moving it up higher in the list and we'll check what the priority list is now then i've got uh personal development and growth love it see that that one that's going to go higher just because of how i'm reacting just to kevin he's observing he's orienting he's deciding and acting folks, then i would like to talk about your engagements okay perfect okay so then that's been maybe a nice close and then my my out question my final question out of the show will be based on on everything we heard, give the audience like one little nugget of advice to go do something because we like action.

9:55 Love it. All right. So here let me confirm. So our goal is listeners get something out of what we share. We're going to share a fun conversation. We'll start with leadership and organizational change. And I've got questions here that Kevin can't see yet because we're just prioritizing. This is the new priority. Then we'll talk about career journey and philosophy. Then from there, we'll shift into challenges and solutions, then agile and program management. I still have the maybe there because if we get to that point, I'm like, eh, I know Kevin's not in love with it, so we can let that go. And then we bring it home with personal development, growth, insights, and trends, his engagements, and then we'll probably run out of time in all reality.

10:36 Because that's just how awesome it's going to be. So I think we're going to start, I'll throw you a curveball right away, Kevin. What's something interesting that happened this week where you felt like you personally grew? You grew. Well, you know, I really had to tap into my emotional intelligence this week. My house cleaning crew was cleaning my home because I'm renting out my house. And the two upstairs bathrooms started bubbling and water started shooting out of them. Not really crazy, not like in a movie, but it started bubbling up. We're going like, what's going on? We can't flush the toilets. So I called the company that installed the equipment in my home. It's a new build. And they said, oh, we can't come out until tomorrow.

11:18 Now, tomorrow was the day my renter was going to move into the apartment. Apartment so let that sink in folks be my persona for a second you're a homeowner cleaning crews cleaning the house you can't use the water things are flooding we're dry vacuuming we're dry vacuum in the basement and i called the company that installed the equipment and they said they can't come tomorrow but your renter is coming at nine o'clock the next day yeah i'm already starting to feel angry right away. Right, right. So speaking of the framework, right? Observe, orient, decide, and act. Pulling in the emotional intelligence pillars, self-regulation, self-management, empathy, right?

12:03 So I had to pull all of those skills in to deal with this problem. So in order to deal with the problem, my buddy, my property manager said, hey, Kevin, And there's another company that could probably come out tonight because my blood was starting to boil, but I had to stay calm because everybody, I have like, you know, seven, eight people in the house doing things. So they're all looking at me. I'm the leader now. I'm the homeowner. I'm the, I'm the probably donor. Right. Right. Right. But with my scrum master, I had really fast as well. We know that's not really a dual role. We're just one person, but I did a split personality thing on the spot. He said, call the other company. So we called the other company. They come out. I get a little happy because they came out fast. Right. But more bad news came, Felipe. What happened? Oh, we don't know if this is a city problem or your responsibility because we dug six feet in the ground and your pipes might be broken.

12:54 That's about a $10,000 job. Ooh. So let that sink in, audience. Think about where you would be emotionally, 7 o'clock at night, knowing you've got 12, 14 hours to square this away before your new tenant moves in. He's already signed the lease and give me the deposit like it's a done things get even worse they say well we gotta call the city out now will they come tonight well sometimes it takes them a couple days to get out so I'm telling you this story about how. A person's emotions can get away with them, and you start making decisions emotionally. What I really had to do was dig in deep and make more intellectual, analytic decisions by asking a lot of questions.

13:39 We learn by asking questions. So I asked the plumbers, the two folks that came out, a bunch of questions about the scenario. And I actually kind of scrummed those folks as well. Yeah. Can't work finals, right? There's a whole bunch of handoffs. But just to speed the story up really quickly, the city came out and said, it's our problem. We'll fix it, Kevin. They came up the next morning, blew the pipes out. The renter moved in. My tenant moved in. Everything was fine. So sort of a mini long-winded story, but just to show you how that's a rollercoaster of emotions and how we have to invoke emotional intelligence, self-regulation, and also empathy with the people that are around me in order to get the job done.

14:22 I like about that story too, Kevin, is that you were through empathy, never blaming. Blaming is something like super, I think it must be ingrained in us from early on. We get in trouble and it just carries forward, but it's totally useless to blame. Like once you get older it has no value because it doesn't create action it just assigns responsibility temporarily and it's not it's not permanent so you were you're pretty cool and quick to to ask now what i just got out of curiosity like what what did you scrum with that plumber what did what sequence did you change with them and i'm sure you optimized the sequence absolutely it was more with the city folks because they said well we're going to put the order in I said, can I have the order number?

15:09 Oh, we can't give you the order number. Just use your address. I said, who are you going to give it to? Well, I'm going to give it to my supervisor, and my supervisor is going to give it to the other department supervisor, and then they're going to put it into the system. So let that sink in about how many handoffs there were. Right? So what I did was just give them examples. I said, I wonder what it would look like if you could put the order in right now directly into the system without all the handoffs. He says, Kevin, that's a really good idea. We never really thought about that before. The same thing with the original plumbing company. The first person that came out did not have all the equipment. He had to call someone else out because they're specialists. They only do a thing. So I went to the whole T-shaped, you know, thing with them, how you're expert in deep in one area, you can learn and teach other stuff.

15:54 I think we all learned something that night, myself, the plumbing company, and the city workers as well. That's a great story of learning and respect for people too. I appreciate that, Kevin. Definitely, if you're not following Kevin on LinkedIn already, check the show notes to get that direct link to follow Kevin on LinkedIn. He's putting out some really cool posts, especially using some AI stuff. I've been looking at some of those. He's got some whole mind things happening here that I think are good for anybody in any industry. So while you all are going down there, you know, while you're down there in the show notes, don't feel bad about hitting like a like button or leaving us a comment. So the Kevin and I can get some feedback about what you really like about the show as you listen in. Right. That's so good. Love rapid feedback.

16:39 We do. That's the theme for the year. Everybody rapid feedback, rapid feedback. It'll be the theme of the show. We'll call it rapid feedback. Back with Kevin Ball. Don't drop it. Okay. So we got, so I want to dive in right away, Kevin, with you on leadership and organizational change, because this is a topic that, you know, everybody, we were talking about blame at the beginning of the show and everybody wants to always point the finger to somebody above them or below them. And they never point the finger this way. And I remember I was talking to an old carpenter superintendent. He's like, you know, when you point the finger at me there's three fingers pointing back to you one pointing at me and one pointing up sometimes depending on how your how your hand is right it's like you're three times as responsible for whatever's happening so he's like stop pointing at me that was a good good lesson learned i've heard that one before too that's a good one right but i want to start with asking you know what leadership qualities you talk a lot about emotional intelligence, so maybe you want to go there but what leadership qualities you think are essential for driving effective change in a team that can be small or across a department or larger organizations.

17:47 Okay, I'm going to give you a few words, topic words that I think are good leadership skills. Empathy is one. We've heard this one before, right? We hear it a lot. It's about empathy. Right. So let me unpack empathy a little bit. Empathy is not sympathy. Empathy is really putting yourself in that person's place without any judgment. It's really hard for human beings not to be judgmental because it's a survival technique. When you're out in the woods, you hear something crunching and maybe something coming to you, you're going to fight or flight. You're walking down the street, you sense something, you walk into a party, into a room, this is what we do naturally. But when you're a leader in your organization and you have a team, you want to have that empathy and really draw a blank in your mind and be super curious.

18:38 Empathy, be super curious and listen more than you speak. My dad told me one time, he says, Kevin, you have a set of ears, set of eyes and a mouth. He said, use them proportionately. I was like, wow, that's really need that. Use them proportionately. But the proportion word made me think about the OODA, like when do you listen more, speak more, and really be in the game with that person in front of you who you are leading? Yeah, it's a great example. I'm taking it in. I'm using my eyes. I'm listening better. I've got high-def headphones in so I can hear all the little nuances in Kevin's voice. Yeah, I think this is really good advice to people. That curiosity part is something that That a lot of people overlook.

19:24 And I think you're right to point out the confusion with sympathy because people are like, oh, that's too bad. And it even sounds cold. Right. Right. Versus like. Tell me more. Why is that? What do you think about that? What would you do? Because asking the right combination of open-ended and closed-ended questions. There is a skill set and a technique to get down to the bottom of things. Some of us in the audience maybe have heard of the five why routine. You know, why, why, why, why, why to get down to the bottom of it. I can give an example of that if we need it. Yeah, I think that'd be good, Kevin. Yeah, I'll give that example. Asking more questions to be really curious. Like, so what about Harvard professors when I was in the psychology degree program at Harvard?

20:10 This week, we're going to think about how we think. What? We can think about that. That's so meta. Slow down, professor. We're going to think about how we think, but that's a really deep notion because now you're really diving deeper into who you are and how you're built and the reason why you're built the way you're built and your experiences, you bring that to the table, right? And that's where our judgment comes, because we're coming from that world. I'm talking to Felipe. He's coming from X amount of years. I don't know how long he's been on the planet and how long I've been on the planet. We're bringing all that stuff to the table. But the key is we need to park it. Let's keep the table clear.

20:55 Let's build the table together with the conversation by being curious, by asking open-ended questions and really having true empathy, not sympathy. to think really quickly on the five right routines. So this is in one of our decks. You've probably seen this before. Persons walk in the park, they cut their foot on a piece of glass. Oh, what happened? Why did they cut themselves on a piece of glass? Oh, well, here's one reason why the people who supposed to clean the park didn't clean the park up. Why didn't they clean the park up? Oh, city funding got cut. So they had to cut back on people who go out and clean the park. Why was the funding cut? Well, the funding was cut because some other political entity of the federal government had to slash budgets to, you know, move money around.

21:42 So it wasn't just, oh, some person was dirty and just threw it on the ground and didn't care. That might have been the reason. But, you know, things happen. So going through that five why routine and also thinking about Simon, a cynic who talks about start with why. That's a question that we always want to ask. Oh, yeah, we're going to do this project. We're going to do this thing. My question is, why are we doing it? Where's the value in it? And this is a perfect 5Y example. I was in the park this morning with my son. He has to do volunteer work. And we had a broken 40 that could definitely cut somebody. It's just a little bit off the path. A 40 is a 40 ounce of beer, folks, if you don't know what that is.

22:26 For those of you that didn't grow up like I did, you don't know what a 40 is. Your life has been very sheltered. And for those of you listening to the show that do 40s for lunch, I know the type of good life that you have. Yeah so yeah it's a it was a big bottle broken i can't remember the brand on the label and my son's like wow it's a good thing that we we're picking this up as volunteers, and the reason why we started this volunteer thing it's a shout out to dry creek conservance conservancy dcc they told us like the reason we're out here cleaning up is we're trying to make the habitat better for the salmon because the salmon run in this creek need a clean habitat I tell you, it's like the salmon run all the way to here, 100 miles in from the ocean.

23:11 And we found that when these areas are cleaner, we see a direct proportion in salmon population numbers increasing. And so, like, picking up this trash actually increases salmon population. I was like, wow. That's really amazing how that's correlated. And that brings me to how everything in the universe is tied together. Just a little side meta statement here. We are not separate from the universe. we are a part of it. Every mineral, every cell, every piece of speck of whatever that exists in the universe, we are a part of it, not separate from it. And I say that to say that we as human beings, sometimes we separate ourselves, we box ourselves, we draw lines and borders and barriers.

23:58 As we know what this work we do, we try to break those silos down and break those barriers down so that we can work better together and make all of our work visible. Thank you.

26:18 Yeah, I love that. So we've got that good five why that you can use. We've got empathy with curiosity. It's super powerful. What else is good for a leader to have? What's another good leader quality trait? And everyone listening, these traits can be developed. These are not innate, born in. If your level's here, you can get it to here. You can increase this dynamic. Absolutely. We all have ideas. We all have ideas. If you're a leader in an organization and people are looking at you to lead, it's really important to know how to articulate your ideas and why you have the idea. With that, the whole proverbial roll up your sleeves and get in there and do the work with them side by side so that there's no big U's and little I's, if you will.

27:09 Right. You get that statement. That sounds like a story. That sounds like a scrum story right there, Kevin. Right, exactly. And another thing I've heard in the industry, we never want that hippo effect, the highest paid person's opinion. The person who may be making the least amount of money in the company could have the biggest and brightest idea. So I say that to us leaders, don't suck all the air out of the room. Call and push your people to the front. If person A has an idea, you know what, that's a great idea. Come to the meeting with me and sit down and tell that story. But what you see happen, well, this is just for the C-suite executives, or this is just for the managers. Oh, this is just for the leaders.

27:55 So now we're already segmenting ourselves and our thinking and our thought leadership versus being open, just like the universe really is. The universe is really open and we're in it. That's right. Together. Kevin, it's true. There's really no natural borders that we can't traverse as evidenced by people and every climate, every environment, every geography. And there's all these interconnected things. I really like that. That's a powerful thing for people to think about. And I think that's a shift where a lot of leaders get put into position sometimes because they're really good subject matter experts or practitioners, but not necessarily have these other social components that are kind of invisible.

28:36 Everything you've mentioned is invisible to see. You might see examples of it, but they're so transient. You couldn't point at that and say, like, look at that leader being empathetic, right? You have to be in there, hear it, be sensing it in the space with them to really know that they're operating with empathy. Absolutely. And what you're getting to, you know, what Felipe is talking about, it's invisible, but we can feel it. You can go to a room and it's silent and you can feel the energy. If you're standing in front of an audience and you're speaking, you're sitting down at the board table or in a meeting room and you're speaking, you can feel the energy. Not only can you feel the energy, we can also use our body language and watching body language and being able to adapt and to react with people or how they're moving.

29:24 Some of this might just go right by some of us, but if you notice your audience, oh, they may be in a certain position. I can feel when Felipe has a question, like, Felipe, I can feel the wheels are going. What's your question? Oh, thanks, Kevin. Yeah, I got this question about. So we have to use that sensing thing that you talked about. Kevin, you know, it's so much fun to talk to somebody with a high empathy because that ability to see somebody and feel a question coming from them is something that I've been doing a lot with, especially with all these virtual meetings. Looking at faces, I'm like, you know what, Kevin, I think you're ready with your question. Go ahead. But sometimes, you know, with the technology, you can see people come off mute.

30:04 They'll like spark it on and off. And you're like, oh, hold on. I just saw you come off mute. Why don't you go ahead? Absolutely. And this is a whole nother way we've adapted, right? Because right now we have a medium shot, right, where I Zoom during the podcast. So it's just, you know, midsection body up. But when we're in person, you get the whole picture. We get to see the entire, you know, body language and body movement. them. And actually research shows that more than half, I think it's closer to 70% of what's being communicated is in our body language, not the words that are coming out of our mouth. Yeah. Now you got me curious, Kevin. Kevin, you got me curious. I'm sorry I'm cutting you off. I'm just getting excited. My energy is going up. Are you doing this show standing up?

30:47 No, I'm sitting down. So you're moving around so much. I was thinking that you're standing up and I was like, man, Kevin is standing on my show. Well, there's a certain thing inside of me that's standing up, and that's my energy, my happiness, my desire to really be here and be present with you. Yeah, and you're making it feel so much better. Now, with all that, are there any other leadership characters or characteristics that you think are important for people thinking about that they could develop in themselves? When you're working with people, and you definitely go back to what you have in your book, what are things where you work with newer leaders where they're underdeveloped in these skills? Where do you see some underdevelopment, bigger opportunity? Yeah, I would say be honest. Be transparent.

31:32 Don't be self-deprecating, but also know that you have limits. And with your limitations and the people that you hired around you, pull them in. Right you know the whole weakest link makes the chain you know break whatever right right so when we see leaders who are empathetic when we see leaders who are honest open and transparent about where they are, I think people who look at them go, you know, I like this leader because they're open, they're honest, they're really honest about what their limitations are. You know, they really, they pulled me in because I had that skill set and they may not. They're showing me that we are really a team. They're the leader of the team, right? They're the quarterback.

32:13 They may be calling the plays, but sometime I may have a good play that I can write in the playbook, or sometimes I might have a good idea that might incorporate to further the mission of the organization, the goal of the organization, whatever that might be, wherever you are working. I've had trouble as a newer leader earlier in my career and even on my podcast with self-deprecation because as a facilitator, you learn about it early. You can use it to modulate the energy with a group. You can always pick on yourself. No one's going to get mad if you pick on yourself. Right so like i took that skill and then incorrectly used it some of the earlier versions of my show and i was editing my show i kept thinking like man i'm so hard on this poor host this poor host is just getting beat up by the host and i had to change how i talk to my guests and think this is not that type of thing this is different and where's the value and i actually had to think about how i was thinking i had this habit of self-deprecation kevin and And this thing would play like a record every time I got to a certain scenario.

33:18 I can almost pinpoint exactly where in the conversation I was just about to, oh, it's going to be right there. And then back and pull it back. Yeah. Understood. That's good. Well, it's good. Well, what Felipe is talking about right now is how he has evolved. How you, Felipe, have done your rapid feedback for incremental improvement over time. And we all know that it takes small incremental changes, and then we can see the ship move. We can't turn the big ship in one fell swoop. It just takes a little bit by a little bit. And before you know it, those movements, those patterns, those habits do become innate. And now we're curious for more stuff.

34:01 Like, what else can we learn? What other hard problem do we need to solve to take it to the next level? Because you know how the diagram works. You know, when the arrow goes up, it kind of flattens for a little bit. And then what does it take to go up another step? And that flattens. And then another step, we can go into infinity because the universe is endless. Yeah. No, when they say here's an oxymoron, the sky is the limit. What's beyond the sky? Right. Like the, like the movie. I like that one. Yeah. Yeah. So I would love to hear an example where you were working with a leader and you, with your coaching or help or guidance, or maybe it was you inside the organization, because I know you've been a leader inside of many organizations.

34:47 Where can you see a fingerprint of Kevin Ball with a significant transformation? So I think that is, I'm super curious to see. And I know you've worked in finance and some other industries, and they're famously resistant to change. They are. They really are. All right, well, I can tell you one, two, three stories. Actually, four stories. I'm just going to name the industries, not the companies. Okay. Higher ed. Well, I can say Harvard because I teach at Harvard. So there's one story from Harvard where people that I used to work with, and there's a thread in this story from these different people. I would get an email or a note on LinkedIn or a text saying, saying, hey, Kevin, I channeled some of that stuff that we learned together that you taught us in this or X situation.

35:38 Same thing happened when I was doing consulting. Same thing happened again when I was working in healthcare. And more recently, when I was working in fintech, I would get those little notes of the footprint that was left behind. But I want to just say that we collectively made that footprint together. And the reason why I said we made the footprint print together because they were willing to change. They were willing to improve. They were willing to try something new. I had one leader in the fintech industry made a comment to my manager saying that, Kevin really makes me think a little bit differently and challenges me in such a way, right? So we could have more thought leadership together versus, and some of us do this.

36:21 I did it before in the past. It was like, okay, leader, sure. Yeah. Okay. Yep. I agree with you. Wait a minute, like, let's really think about this together and go through it together and add your perspective to it. And as leaders, we want to be receptive to that. As leaders, we also want to help implement it. As leaders, we also want to be accountable. And like you say, you first started up with this blame game, right? Because we naturally do that. Well, that's Felipe's fault. That's his department. Versus saying, let's get down to the root of the issue or the problem. And usually it's the system, not the people, the way the system is constructed. I'm always hard on the process and easy on the people. People are working in the system rarely. Rarely, I mean, I'm going to just ask it to the audience.

37:06 Audience, I want you to think about this. When's the last time you were working and somebody said, what can we do to change how we're working? It's a super rare question. Let that sink in. But all the time when people are like, well, I need you to, we need to work harder or we focus on the KPIs and metrics and I need more widgets. I need more widgets. What can we do to just get more widgets, not change how we work? Kevin and I have seen where we can influence system processes, and you can double, triple, quadruple, quintuple your throughput with changing processes, but it's a different view. I want to come back now to your next story, Kevin, because I want to pull these threads and see where we go with these.

37:54 So the next story, when I was working in healthcare for a big organization, and I got a phone call from a person that I really, really worked closely with. And this person brought up the idea about handoffs and breaking down silos. This was one thing that really stuck with this person. And they actually moved on, working in the same industry but for a different organization, and brought that thinking to the new organization. It was really hard for that second set of people that she worked with to really grapple what that meant because some of us, so many of us, are just really sitting down in our own bubble with a very myopic view of what we need to do.

38:37 Like, this is my job. This is my role. This is what I'm doing. And not looking on either side of the table. And I'll bring you to a story that I did in Boston in a surgery room. They wanted to decrease the turnaround time after surgery, from when the patient is wheeled out to the new patient that was wheeled in. I worked with this hospital for two weeks. The turnaround time was over an hour. So we can imagine how expensive a surgery room is, right? It costs a lot of money for elective surgeries and more complicated, you know, the mess that they are in, but the more money that they make, right? So after talking to the cleaning crew, working with the surgery team, and just having Having simple conversations and doing what I call innovative sprints, doing the daily scrum, the sprint review, the retro, and building a backlog in three minutes between the surgeries to make small improvements.

39:36 Over a couple of weeks, they got it down to 30 minutes. Wow. Which is a $600 million evaluation over a year. Just saving time and people talking to each other. There's the perfect example i want to throw that 600 million dollar mini scrum done in two weeks and that time period matters like i think for the hospital you can do a lot with 600 million dollars you can build another surgery center easily exactly or paid better dividends. It depends right it's up to them but they'll have the option right they don't have the option now Well, what's the next story, Kevin?

40:19 I want to take you to a story back to when I was really young. This is a really great leadership story. There's a lot in this story, I believe. I'll just tell the story and then I'll have you unpack it. I'll have you connect the dots. How about that? I'm ready. 18 years old, signing for the United States Marine Corps. Go to Parris Island and I get off the bus and go, what did I get myself into? to. If anyone has seen the movie Full Metal Jacket, if you have, start thinking about that movie if you've seen it. If you haven't seen it, you're into military movies, it's an intense movie. But the movie really depicted what we did on Parris Island. So back to my story, after about a month or so, I figured out this is not a physical challenge.

41:06 This is an emotional emotional, and intellectual challenge of what the Marine Corps puts you through in order to condition you to be a Marine and be a military person who possibly might have to go into combat. Once I understood that it was an emotional and intellectual challenge, I started using my early developed emotional, my emotional intelligence and became the squad beater. After the first six Six weeks of boot camp. Boot camp is three months long. Started in September. Around October, became the squad leader. Was the squad leader all the way through until... I'm going to get to the until in a second. As time went on in boot camp, they give you more responsibility.

41:50 You could be alone a lot more. I could march my soldiers to the next spot. I can take them to breakfast by ourselves. We can go do that. We can be a little more independent, even though eyes are always on you. Going back to emotional intelligence, I let it slip away because the next door then over, there was another platoon. They were like two or three weeks ahead of us. And they were sharp. If you know anything about the Marine Corps, our uniforms are the cleanest, the most crisp. We have discipline. When we march, our drill instructor said, I want to hear one boot. It was 50 of us, Felipe. Let that sink in, audience. When we marched, we want to hear one boot.

42:34 A little side story here. In business, we want to hear one boot. Meaning that we all know why we're here and what we're doing. and how are we doing it? Back to the story, I was a little jealous because the platoon ahead of us was a little bit better and the platoon leader ahead of us would always tease us. I ignored him for a very, very long time until one day, the picture story, right? Once upon a time, there was a Marine Corps leader. He did great until one day he broke rank and was going to walk over to the next platoon and start a fight with the other leader.

43:14 I barely got a foot away from my squad and the drill instructor, he just popped out of nowhere. It was like magic. Like, how did you appear here in front of me? And what he said, and here's the lesson, give the pole to, I'm going to say you, Felipe, give the pole to Felipe because you're next in line. You go to the back of the line private ball and that's where you stay until graduation. Now, just I'm going to let you unpack it in a second. When you're the platoon leader, dress blues. I mean, you get the whole outfit, the recognition in front of like thousands of people. I was in the back of the line for graduation. The next guy for the last month or so, three weeks or so, got that job.

43:57 Now, based on everything we've been talking about, Felipe, up to this point, connect that story to this leadership stuff we're talking about. Yeah, I think that, you know, right out the gate, what happened is you had massive amount of space made for you. When you go from first to last, now you have to live inside yourself with what you did, that split-second decision. So you're going to run the whole gambit of probably like grief. You're probably grieving the loss of the status you had. You had the taste of that sweet power, and it was taken away from you in seconds. Yes. Park on sweet power for a second. Unpack that a little bit more so we can understand as leaders, when we have that sweet power, we have to be careful.

44:43 Yeah it's very like i've read quite a few books on power and there is definitely an allure to power with people we're drawn to it as i mean it's fractal it happens in the family unit with friends you can always see like people positioning for the alpha there's alphas betas and people just naturally credo chart themselves you know to others and compare i think it's part of the sensing to some degree. It could be like raw strength or quickness of thought, ability to speak quick on your feet, all kinds of different ways to have power and exercise power and influence. But I think, you know, in this story that you're telling what I'm, what I'm thinking about is to me, the most interesting thing is you graduated.

45:31 So you, you shifted and it's, you could have just walked off, right? Cause you're still in, You're in training. This is training. So, I mean, you can get out, walk away, or get punished, right? Because you could have been insubordinate, and you could have been punished. What would have happened if you would have actually confronted the other person and gotten into physical altercation? You're not guaranteed to win. No. Right? You could have got injured, and you're only 18, and this is like your career. Now you've got this fight and this mark, and it goes in your record. And the military is really good about keeping good detailed records oh yes right so this now you have this reputation being like fire starters so you and your drill sergeant did you before i even unpack i'm just curious did you have any separate conversations about this after that day when it first happened no no talking it was done and over with but there's another lesson in here.

46:30 It's another lesson about the overall Marine Corps, the way in which they approach leadership. They didn't say, oh, Kevin, it's okay. Just don't do that next time. They didn't say that. Why do you think they didn't say that? Because you had a number two ready to take your spot. And what happened? There's 50 people ready to take your spot so that as things change and adapt, any one of those 49 next people can just move and take it. Because the mission is more important than the individual. That, this is what I want people to hone in on. The mission, the overall goal of the organization is more important than our individual. I say that a lot. I say, what does the organization need?

47:12 What does the mission need? Not what you need, Felipe. Not what Johnny wants. Not what Sally wants. What does the organization need? The other thing, the other lesson in this was the organization of the Marine Corps gave me a really good life lesson. And here's an extreme, right? I can relate it to business. If I make a mistake in the field, that's a life. We make a mistake in business unless you're working in healthcare in the operating room, something really extreme. It's still costly, right? There's still a cost to it. So that lesson is there's no mulligans. There's no gimme's, right?

47:56 You have to be a strong leader. And that sweet leadership thing that you were talking about, how that power is, we can't be so consumed with it that we don't see the trees for the forest. And I think, you know what else that tells me, that's got to flavor your level of preparation for things. I think that's why you go so deep into emotional intelligence, being holistically there. Because you could be getting good results with the lower EQ. You could get decent results. Now, you're not going to get extraordinary results, right? But you're Kevin. You're going to prepare. You're going to be ready. I have to prepare. And I think that's a, Kevin, you know, it's a good contrast.

48:40 Right. You described in the Marine Corps, does not exist in business. And I know this, I'm reading a book right now called The Triumph of Classical Management Over Lean. And in this book by Bob Emiliani, Bob statistically shows through his research that leadership, and this was first postulated by Taiichi Ono, that influenced lean as we know it today, which influenced scrums. We know it today in agile. And Taichi said at the time that half of what a manager does or a leader does is wrong every day. Half of what they do is wrong and the other half is right. He said the good managers learn where the wrong stuff is and they change it so the next day they don't make the same wrong things and they get better.

49:22 But what Bob is putting in this book in business, the predominant ethos of business today, when leaders make mistakes. And I'm going to just pick on AI because it's such a hot topic. Last year, 2023, we had almost 850, call it 900,000 jobs vanished because of AI. And people said it was because enhanced productivity. But in reality, it's the leaders that set groups of a certain size with certain number of employees, and they made a mistake. AI didn't come out in 2023. It's been around for over a decade and longer, even longer, right? So you had all of these big companies, household names that made a mistake.

50:05 They made a gamble. They made a forecast. They forecasted wrong. They made a mistake and they cut staff to correct their mistake. So they eliminated people's jobs, but the market reacts to those leaders is like, look at those smart leaders, like making the right call, but that destroyed, you know, 950,000 families. That's people, right? And that's just across four companies. That's not even like the rest of the planet. That's just categorizing the top four. But if this was like, if the mission of those businesses was better known and the people were aligned, they would have adapted and kept their job. People could have kept their jobs. Leadership could have done something different, could have adapted.

50:46 We have businesses all the time where companies can adapt and change. But we get into these situations where we have too much regulation or too much sticking to bad things and no adjusting. I'm just going to say, forget regulation. Anytime you just don't adjust. Anytime you can't adjust, you stop at adaptation. This is where you get these catastrophic errors. That's one of the things I really like about the military and the people can learn like the mission right or wrong with, you know, what you're thinking about the military, that process, that system of mission first, then the people, right? The people carry out the mission. The people make the mission happen. That's right. That's powerful. That type of alignment, I think, is one of the first things we see in Scrum when we implement it.

51:32 I mean, we started right here at the beginning. We said, like, what are we going to do so the two of us are aligned on what's in and what's out for our sprint? Right. And it's all about our mission and our goal for this conversation that we are, you know, 48 minutes into. And I can't believe that 48 minutes has gone by that fast. I should have warned you, Kevin, that a conversation with me to unpack these things is never going to be fast. And the sprint like all the people listening is kevin's like mentioning this time mark right that's the unedited 48 minutes so who knows what that's going to be when you get to this part of the show. Because you know sometimes i gotta i gotta cut out of course i don't know what i would cut out like now just leave this one unedited this could be wrong you maybe just want to do a three-part series with kevin ball exactly we could do a three-part series that unpack is um so for those paying attention to the the scrum board that we set up at the beginning i'm only at item two i just not got to item two that's why we call it a wish list that's exactly this backlog we didn't we didn't actually put it in kevin and i did not have data to tell us like how fast do we go through these topics ahead of time so we don't know so we're just trying we're just trying now we know kevin you and i we get about one topic every 20 minutes yeah yeah about one every 20 minutes or so.

52:50 This is how like you're, if you are hanging out with me outside, this is my life. Everyone. This is like when I meet and hang with people like Kevin, this is what we do. We could just talk all day and night. Absolutely. But I want to pivot now, Kevin, because I know we're going to bring it home to the mission of our show here for today's episode. What are some of the common challenges? You've been in so many different industries and everyone thinks that my industry is the unique snowflake. They all think that, right? They all think that construction is no different. Design is no different. I've heard architects make the same observations that general contractors make, that trade contractors make, that owners make. I've heard all of them say the same exact things.

53:35 So I want to hear from your perspective, what are common things that people are like, no, this is a challenge that we're having trouble with? What are the common troubles? The common troubles that I hear across different industries? Yeah. Okay. Or you just pick the industry and I'll just tell you, Kevin, that's just like X or that's just like Y. Yeah. Okay, great. I can't say X because we're not giving any money. Twitter is not sponsoring this show. Right, right. Exactly. But here's one. Okay, let me pick an industry. I'm going to pick aerospace. All right. Take me out of the sky. Sky's the limit, Kevin. Where are you going to go with these troubles? That's right. The sky is the limit, right?

54:19 So the common thing I've heard in this particular industry is, oh, we're very complex. People don't understand what we do. Yeah. Your turn. Yeah. So, I mean, I heard that. So in design, like healthcare design, I go to this conference every year and every year people that go, it's a mix of different sectors of construction. People are like, why is it always like these healthcare people complaining about how hard it is? Like I'm in industrial construction. It's just as hard for me. I'm in solar construction. It's just as hard for me. And in solar, it's like a 10 step process, depending on what type of field, You know, there's different, and even with just 10 step process, because you have people changing environment and you have different jurisdictions, you have so much complexity, like it, it matters.

55:09 I think it is also the people's experiences, you know, like, you know, we're, we're living at a time right now where you've got five generations working at the same time. And there's a lot of differences in how each generation communicates with each other. And so aerospace, especially, aerospace is kind of a younger, relatively speaking, it's a younger industry. It's not as mature as agriculture, as an example. Right, or manufacturing. Right. Or from the general sense of manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century. That's right. So you've got, yeah, you've got like, I mean, the first thing for aerospace was probably the rocket, right?

55:51 Which was made by a tinkerer. a tinker or develop a rocket it wasn't like born out of a mathematical equations it was people just kind of messing around and getting some thrust and magic happened absolutely so i think that complexity is that's super common everyone's like you just don't know okay super common that's a good one what's another one people what did you hear in fintech i'm kind of curious to see what What the banking, the banking doors are closed and we can't see what they're saying. What do they say about closed doors at the banks? Let me think of a good one from the fintech finance industry. What did I hear that might be common that you could, you could pick up on?

56:34 Let me switch that up. Our customers don't really understand who we are. Our customers don't understand who we are. Our customers don't understand who we are. That is like, so I remember being a new student to Agile, and Jeff Sutherland was talking about the yellow book that Mike Beadle had when they were signing the Agile manifesto. And the whole point of that book was bringing the customer into the conversation for what you deliver. And I thought, how was that revolutionary in 2001? And then I remembered my parents had worked in the automobile industry and cars, the car industry famously told people we're tastemakers. We make the taste. We tell you what kind of car you want to drive.

57:16 You don't, we don't have to do feedback. I mean, people listening to the show, think about the 1970s. Did anyone ever ask you a survey? Like, did you get surveys? No. You got what you got. You got what you got. They told you. You got what you got. Exactly. And now we get surveys. I had my internet went down yesterday and Xfinity Comcast sent me three survey attempts, two text messages, and one email asking me how was my service during the outage. I was like, it's an easy question. Like, I don't know, because you weren't giving me what I needed. So there was nothing. It's not, that's not even a good question, but they want feedback so much because there's an in the ethos since 2001. and one, as agile started to grow, people are thinking, oh, maybe asking the customers like what they like about what we deliver is valuable.

58:08 And I've had a lot of companies contact me on social media, Kevin, asking me for advice. Like I've got product, this product or this service. And I was, my first question was always like, how do your customers actually use your product? Especially software companies, because they have so much data. They don't even look at, I was like, you got all these features. What do people actually use? And don't listen to what they say. Look at the data and see where they're actually spending their time. It's empiricism. I tell this story all the time. When you take your car to the mechanic, what does he say? Open the hood up and start your car. I want to see the moving parts. I want to see how you interact with it. That's what I tell organizations when I work with them. Open up your business hood. Let me watch you work and listen to you move and watch you move.

58:51 Then we're able to dissect maybe what the problem could be and start to solve it from a holistic approach. Perspective i guess that's such a good one we're like you know now in this age of zoom i'm like share your screen let me see what you're clicking on, they're like oh no the menu is on the left side left side people are like what do you mean like how do i share it's the big giant green arrow in the middle the only thing green in the middle. Right. So, so true. Those are, those are two big ones, but Kevin, I want to thank you for coming on to the show. I love, I love it. We scrub, we scrub the show and in, in the scrubbing of the show, our, I would say our velocity was three.

59:34 We had three topics in an hour, three topics in an hour. It was good. I want to give you the last word, Kevin, because I think that you've got so much to share and I see you overflowing. I want to give you a chance to overflow. close. I've got my cup here. I'm going to let you fill my cup a little bit. So, Kevin, when you're thinking about the people listening to all the things we talk about, what's one piece of advice that you touched on that you want to go deeper on so they can make their work easier today? Well, I'm going to add to your question a little bit. I'm going to embellish that question. Make my question better. Yeah, because we're going to make it not really better, but let's expand it a little bit.

1:00:17 I want to take the word work and just obliterate work. And I'm going to tell you a story about what I did that I can pull back into the word work. I resigned from my corporate job in December without having another job lined up. So let that sink in for a second, Philippe and audience. So I took the leap. Let's use the leap Take the leap as a metaphor for what we're doing in our lives, homework, whatever. Take the leap to improve. Take the leap to be curious. Take the leap to observe, orient, decide, and act. Take the leap to really be a leader. Take the leap to be curious. Take the leap to ask why.

1:01:01 Take the leap as a leader to really pull in the experts and people around you and bring people to the table. I will say in my last role, a really senior leader pulled me in and put me at the seat at the table. That's what I want to leave everybody with. Take that leap and pull it in. Thank you so much, Kevin. Thank you, Felipe. I appreciate it. Music. Very special thanks to my guest. I'm Felipe Engineer Manriquez. The EBFC Show is created by Felipe and produced by a passion to build easier and better. Thanks for listening. Stay safe, everybody. Let's go build.