Ep. 19 - How To Hold The Burdens Of Leadership Lightly

In this powerfully illuminating episode, we laser-in on the big 4 burdens of leadership you must develop a lighthearted relationship with to save your sanity and boost your effectiveness: light-holding, decision-making, cat-herding, and shadow monitoring. We then provide four seldom-discussed ways you can lighten these burdens. Current and aspiring leaders will want to watch/listen to this "fire hose" episode multiple times to absorb all of its richness!

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How To Hold The Burdens Of Leadership Lightly

Transcending 4 Key Burdens Leaders Have

In this episode, we're going to explore the burden of leadership and laser in on core key burdens that leaders must develop a lighthearted relationship with to lead their business well.

This is going to be a meaty episode, so we're going to dive right in. The first thing that I'm guessing most of our readers, as I was when I first heard of this, are asking, “What is the burden of leadership?” As Dr. Gruder and I discussed, what it means is in leadership, you are burdened with the responsibility of daring to become who your business needs you to be so that success can happen inside the organization even though some will likely attack you for this type of leading without becoming tyrannical, maniacal or narcissistic in the process. Make sure that you are upfront and in charge, but you're doing it at the behest of the team and the organizational needs.

In leadership, you are burdened with the responsibility of daring to become who your business needs you to be so that success can happen inside the organization.

What I'll add about that at the front end is that I have never ever encountered a leader who says to me that they have never had arrows thrown at them. That arrow throwing is part of the burden of leadership, developing a relationship with the arrow throwing that we can remain lighthearted about. What this calls on us to do, if we are going to become whom our business needs us to be for it to succeed, then what we have to stay close to as leaders is a soundbite of mine. Leaders lead at the level of their unfinished business and self-development limitations despite their higher intentions. Do you want to say anything about that, or does that say it?

You said a mouthful. You did tongue twisters earlier. Now, you're filling our brains with info, so I love it. Let's dig into it further.

What we're going to unpack with you first is what we see as being the four biggest burdens of leadership. I'm going to say what those four burdens are and then we're going to discuss each of them one at a time. The first burden is light holding, holding the light for the company. The second is decision-making. The third is cat herding. If you haven't been exposed to that term, we'll explain it. The fourth is shadow monitoring. If you haven't been exposed to the notion of shadow, we'll discuss that as well.

As we talk about a lot in this show, once you can name these esoteric things that are weighing you down and you can describe what that name means, it gives you a level of freedom to embrace, capture and overcome these burdens in a way that you can't when they're nebulous gray things nagging at your ability to perform at your best. I love this structure. I'm excited to get into it. I'll start with the first one you mentioned, light holding.

What light holding is all about is leading with compassion, embodying the culture that you want your organization to have and upholding core values. It's about building a great team and then facilitating their success. A great leader is not the one who's always got their sleeves rolled up, head down in the trenches. Sometimes you have to do that but a great leader is also the one who's looking up for opportunities to build a team around them so that everyone can bring their best self to the task at hand.

The other part of this light holding is personal example and integrity. That's modeling transparency, modeling personal accountability and embracing personal positive growth. That means sometimes sharing with your team and being vulnerable to the team like, “I messed that one up. That one's on me. Here's what I learned from it, and here's how we're going to make sure that that doesn't happen again.”

All of these pieces of the light holding are the pieces that a leader needs to infuse all of these characteristics, the culture, core values, integrity, transparency and accountability and good heads up, honest level team building and delegation. It's the leader that's going to infuse those things into the organization and push it down from the top deck to the frontline staff. Without that light holding, the team doesn't have any guidance to follow.

Tied in with that light holding that you described is a leader's relationship with decision-making. I'll oversimplify this a little bit for the sake of this being a limited episode duration or length. There are two types of decisions. There are collaborative decisions where a group comes to a decision together and there are executive decisions where a leader makes the decision on behalf of their team, division or company.

Part of the burden of decision-making is knowing when to do which, when to select collaborative decision-making around a specific thing that a decision needs to be made about or to do executive decision-making. If you're doing collaborative decision-making, if that's the right match for the decision that needs to be made, then it's crucial that you, as the leader, assemble the right collaborators and facilitate them well.

Facilitate them in ways that lead to collaborative decisions rather than gridlock, polarization, divisiveness, siloed thinking and all of that nonsense. The key to collaborative decision-making in a quick nutshell is that what people have generally been trained to do is to take positions and say, “Here's the solution. Here's the decision should make. Here's the position I have.” That stuff is surface stuff, and it never ends well if the attempt at collaborative decision-making stays at that surface level.

It's our job as leaders to ensure that the team we've assembled does collaborative decision-making when that's the appropriate decision-making style to use for a particular decision. We have to be prepared to be able to facilitate the process of looking underneath surface positions and premature solutions to identify everyone's deep concerns and core intentions, their high intentions.

When you've assembled the right group to do the collaborative decision-making together, and you help the group get everyone's deep concerns and high intentions out on the table related to that decision, you then have a complete holistic picture out of which you can make a collaborative decision. The group can make a decision that takes into account all of the deep concerns and high intentions that are on the table related to that decision.

That facilitation skill is, in my experience, generally not taught in leadership training. It is a crucial leadership skill along with or inside of the overarching leadership skill, with this particular burden having to do with deciding when a collaborative decision-making process is what's called for and when an executive decision is what's called for. I'm going to unpack one last part of this before I turn it back over to you, which has to do with executive decisions.

When that's the appropriate decision-making format that you've selected regarding a specific thing that a decision needs to be made regarding, then your first step to do is to get truly diverse input. When you are collecting input, you don't have to, nor should you ever take a position. All you're doing is listening. You are making an executive decision. You're going to decide what portions of the input you get you're going to utilize and what parts you're not going to utilize. You don't have to tell them about that because you're making an executive decision.

In that first step in executive decision-making, all you're doing is getting truly diverse input. You're listening. You're not debating, poking holes, criticizing, judging or supporting either. You're just gathering diverse perspectives regarding the decision or related to that decision. Once you've done that, then you get to discover a decision or a solution that hopefully is one that no one that you've consulted with.

None of these diverse sources of input has been advocated. They're unlikely to see because each of those diverse sources looks at the decision and situation through their particular lens and temperament, which is great but because they're looking at it through a particular lens, they're not going to come up with an integrated decision that you are going to be coming up with. You're going to be discovering a decision or a solution that no one else is likely to see and yet account for all of the diverse input that you've gotten.

I refer to that as the wisdom of James T. Kirk. For those of you who are Star Trek buffs, this is a Star Trek reference, but if you're not a Star Trek buff, don't worry because I'm going to describe this in ways that make sense regardless of whether Star Trek is or isn't your thing. The way that the captain of the original Enterprise in Star Trek made decisions is that he consulted 2 or 3 of his top leaders. He consulted his chief science officer, who was his second-in-command. For those of you who are Trekkies, that was Spock.

He consulted his chief medical officer for the people side of things, that was Dr. Bones McCoy. He oftentimes also consulted his chief engineer, Scotty. Each of those three people had vastly different perspectives on the issue at hand that he needed to make an executive decision about. Every time, he would come up with a solution that none of the three of them suggested and yet that incorporated grains, kernels, pebbles or boulders of each of their perspectives. To me, that is high-level executive decision-making. Did I articulate that okay, Jason, before I go on to the last part of executive decision-making?

Yeah. Even for those of us who don't watch Star Trek, we get it. You did a great job. Thank you.

Once we've made our executive decision, our job is to communicate it well and allow expressions of discomfort. I'll touch on the communicate it well part and then talk about allowing expressions of discomfort. In communicating it well, what is necessary is you're never justifying a decision as a leader but you are illuminating your decisions as a leader.

This is not about justifying. First of all, it's about disclosing what your concerns and intentions are related to the decision even before you say what the decision was. Just conveying, “Here are the concerns and intentions that I have and that I heard from the people that I consulted with before coming to this decision.”

The second is for you to provide a rationale. You describe your process of arriving at a decision that honors the concerns and intentions that you've described, in addition to the decision aligning with your company's vision, mission and values and guiding principles. You lay that out. You don't leave it to the people you're communicating this decision to figure that out for you. That's your burden as a leader. It's on your shoulders to convey that rationale. The rationale is illumination. It is not justification.

The rationale is illumination. It is not justification.

With that rationale comes the decision that you've arrived at. You're then going to adopt a compassionate stance as you listen to people's reactions. You are not likely to change your mind. That might happen based on people's reactions. I'm making up numbers here but 1 out of 10 times. What I'm trying to convey there is that you might change your decision based on new information you get when you're listening to people's reactions, a very small fraction of the time that you've made an executive decision.

It still might happen sometimes, but mostly not. Your job, after you've conveyed and illuminated the need, the concerns on the intentions and your rationale and the decision you arrived at is to maintain compassion as you listen to and honor the discomfort that some of the people you're expressing your executive decision to have.

If you maintain that lightheartedness and compassion, whatever arrows come at you because of the decision you've made will slide off your back. You're not going to get poisoned. You're not going to get hit by the arrows that come your way from some of the people who have authority issues where they feel like they need to attack people in authority. You're conveying what the need was, your rationale for the decision and what the decision was.

You are not rebutting people's concerns or discomfort. You are showing up for their discomfort so that people know you have received them, you've heard them and that you are sticking to your decision again. An exception is in those unusual situations where you hear crucial information you didn't hear while you were doing information gathering, which might occasionally cause you to change your executive decision.

I want to piggyback on this decision-making thing because the vast majority of what great leaders do is make decisions. One thing that is required for that communication and compassion piece to work for you is to remember that you are not your decision. When somebody doesn't like the decision that you've made, it doesn't mean they don't like you.

The other piece where Dr. Gruder started with all of this was knowing when to do which. We've all had a leader that loves to make executive decisions unless they know that the decision that has to be made is going to make people unhappy, and then they want to collaborate. That is not the right use case. One of the things to consider in executive decision-making is time. If time is of the essence, then it's almost always going to have to be an executive decision because collaboration takes a lot more time.

The other piece is in collaboration. If the executive doesn't have the capacity to gain full perspective, full understanding and the diversity and scope of the decision that's being made, that's the most common appropriate time to bring in experts and stakeholders from other places so that the decision-making body can have full perspective and understanding of not only the decision but the consequences of the decision that's going to be made. That is the only other time that collaborative decision-making is requisite.

There are other times when it can be helpful, but when its requisite is when there are key stakeholders that need to have a sense of ownership of the decision before they'll be able to champion it. Those are some simple, straightforward guideposts. “Is this an executive decision, or should I collaborate?” I wanted to jump in on those things.

I'll do one quick piggyback on that because that's so spot on. The fundamental principle that you are illuminating with your last comment is that if the people who are responsible for implementing a policy or a procedure haven't had some level of involvement in crafting it or inputting it into it, they will not implement it. They will not adhere to it.

You can still make executive decisions that fit that case as long as you're communicating effectively. You're listening well when you're gathering input, and you're communicating your decision well when you're passing it on. As you're thinking about, “Is this my decision, or is this our decision?” Thinking about the capacity to achieve the expectations of successful decision-making is a big part of determining how and by which mechanism we make that decision.

With all that said, we spent a lot of time on decision-making, but this is a big deal. This is 98%-plus of a leader's job. It's worth spending some time. Let's move on to burden number three, which you've eloquently named cat herding, and I love cat herding. It's one of my favorite things to do. We see it in every organization, and it's important, but cat herding isn't what it sounds like ineffective leadership.

It's not just chasing these feral creatures around and hoping you can get them where you want them to go, but usually not. Cat herding is about three different things. The first one is the collaboration thermostat. What that means is paying attention to the temperament of the individuals and the organization if they're running inappropriately hot, whether that's anger or enthusiasm that causes them to get over their skis or something else.

If they're running inappropriately hot, then as a leader, you got to cool them down. You got to bring them back to focus and in balance. When they're insufficiently engaged, when they're cooling off on a project or the vision of the business, that's when you heat them. You get them a reason to reengage and give them that emotional incentive to take pride and ownership of the organization and the projects at hand again.

Once you manage temperature, then you got to make sure that you're breaking down barriers, avoiding silos and making sure that your organization is a platform as a whole, not a cellular structure where there are walls and divisions between each of the parts. Monitoring, we talked in the light-bearing about leading by example and driving the core values, personal growth and all of those things down.

In this cat herding piece, you're looking at best practices and frontline processes and making sure that we're always asking. We talked about kaizen in a different episode but always asked, “How do we improve? How do we move the needle? What needs to be updated?” Make sure that the team is updating best practices always, implementation and processes in all of those things.

From that comes personnel development. As you're upgrading your process, improving best practices and raising the bar in quality for your organization, it's important to do the same thing for your staff. Make sure that as you're innovating, growing and diversifying that you're bringing your team along. You don't make your team obsolete through your raising of standards, expectations and technical know-how. You're bringing your team along so that they're always the experts in what you do as an organization.

Pay specific attention to not just developing skills but developing mindsets, developing good habits and elevating the alignment of your team behind your organizational vision. There's the part we all love to talk about within cat herding, which is dealing with those egos and challenging individuals. I have empathy because I am a challenging individual. I like to break things, ask why and challenge the status quo.

When I had actual jobs as an employee, I was deemed tedious by many of my managers. I was well-meaning and well-intentioned. I was committed to the work that we were doing but I was always trying to break things so that we could build them better. That's a challenging, difficult person in your team. You've got the contrarians, the people that like to cause trouble or will never be satisfied with their work, their job and the team around them.

As a leader, you've got to figure out which one's which. You've got to learn how to mitigate the challenging impacts, bring out their best self in the workplace or invite them to practice their talent someplace they might be happier. This piece of leadership takes a lot more time than any of us want to spend on this. It takes a lot more energy to do well than most of the things that you will do as a leader because the energy is twice as burdensome. It's not only hard effort, but it's hard ego work at the same time.

You are being beaten up as you're trying to lift. This is doubly hard work, and it's the work we don't like to do. Turning a difficult team member into a leading asset is very powerful for organizations. When I was that difficult person, and I was empowered to go try it out and make some changes, I got stronger and our team got stronger around us because there was this positive energy. There was this kaizen moving forward and improving.

Turning a difficult team member into a leading asset is very powerful for organizations.

When you can turn a challenging team member into an asset, they're going to be among your most powerful assets. When you can't, then you've got the other opportunity of kindly, graciously and generously helping them recognize, “We're not fitting well together. You are not happy. We're not happy in your unhappy presence. Maybe it's time for you to practice your talents elsewhere. Can I make a couple of recommendations of organizations you would fit well in?” There is a generous and gracious way to let challenging people go away without giving them a sharp boot in the keister.

I'm still a fan of the boot, but good leaders do it in a compassionate and graceful way. Everybody is a bad person when they're in the wrong environment. This isn't a judgment about the person as an individual. This is a wrong-fit situation. If you keep that in mind, it's a lot easier to be compassionate and supportive, inviting them to go away.

The thing that I'll add briefly to that is that I have often seen people labeled as difficult people who aren't difficult people. There isn't a culture mismatch. There aren't the things going on that should cause a leader, in the good way that you described, to disengage the person from the company. Sometimes what's called a difficult person is someone who's got a very different perspective or temperament from your own as a leader. You may not recognize it.

I'm going to do one very quick example of that, which is matchers versus mismatchers. Some people, by temperament, look for the common threads and themes among things that various people are saying. Mismatchers are the ones who will always find the fly in the ointment. What's missing? What's being neglected? What's a problem area that isn't being discussed or sufficiently addressed or a risk factor that's not being sufficiently addressed?

We have all known people who are that type of mismatch but who do that in abrasive ways. That's simply because they don't recognize they're a mismatch, and they don't feel like they're mismatching temperament, which is incredibly valuable to have on a team and is welcome on the team. That's an example of potentially a person who gets labeled as a difficult person, who isn't a difficult person. We are the difficult person because we don't understand the gold they bring to the team and how to draw out that gold in constructive ways.

Let's move into the final burden of leadership that we're touching on in this very meaty episode. That is shadow monitoring. Shadow is things about us individually and collectively that we repress, deny, ignore or unjustifiably justify. We're aware that they're there and they're not helpful, but we justify them anyway. There are a number of different types of shadow that need to be monitored in an organization. I'll quickly say what they are, and then I'll say a small amount about each type because what I'm about to cover is a 5-minute encapsulation of a 2-day training program.

The first is about the individual shadow in us as leaders or in our personnel. The second is co-created group shadow. The third is culture shadow. The fourth is institutional shadow. In the individual shadow dimension of shadow monitoring, we break it down into our shadow and the shadow of those who we are on our team. Leader shadow is largely around us not having a good comfortable relationship with being in power, having power, being in authority and having authority designated to us.

Some leaders abdicate their leadership. They try to be likable and agreeable. That's the abdication of leadership. That's a version of authority shadow. Another is a leader who is in denial about the gaps that they have in their leadership skills. The fact that leaders have gaps is never a problem. Denying the gaps is where the big problem is because if we're denying the gaps we have, we can't ever make decisions about which of those gaps we want to fill and expand our skillset with. With our gaps, we are going to have other people on our team manage and handle for us. Gaps denial is a huge leader authority shadow issue.

The fact that leaders have gaps is never a problem. Denying the gaps is where the big problem is.

The last is something we have all seen, unfortunately, which is tyranny. That is where a leader is power drunk. That's a misuse of authority and power. Follower authority shadow. The authority shadow that you'll see in your team takes a number of different forms. One form is where you've got people who are constantly deferring to people who are the decision-makers, who are in the authority, power or leadership role. They don't speak up. When they don't speak up, leaders don't get the crucial information they need to have to make good executive decisions.

If you've got somebody who's doing self-sovereignty abdication, they're giving up their voice. They're not speaking up when they have something important to contribute to their knowledge so that they can lead and make decisions well. You've got another form of follower authority shadow, which is the overt arrow throwers, the people who are constantly attacking people who are in authority or power positions. It’s because they have unresolved wounds around power abuse that they've sustained in prior jobs, in their family growing up, their religious affiliations or wherever. That power abuse can happen anywhere. It's not just in our original family. Sometimes it's not there. It's elsewhere like a power-drunk teacher who did a lot of abuse, like verbal abuse.

People come by their arrow throwing honestly. Arrow throwing should never be tolerated but should never be attacked back either because arrow throwers come by their arrow throwing for good reasons that deserve compassion, not indulgence and tolerance. You get the people who are in covert rebellion where they'll rebel behind the scenes, behind your back. You have people who do covert undermining where they're throwing arrows but you never know that the arrows are being thrown at you because they're recruiting other people against you behind your back, which is a little different from rebelling. This is active undermining.

You've got a group co-created shadow. The most common version of group co-created shadow is something that I refer to as the projection magnet dynamic. I can explain this very simply. In a conflict situation, you will have certain people who have decided so and so is the problem. If only they got their act together, we'd all be fine. They throw arrows at that person and oftentimes, it's a person in power, or it could be a difficult employee too. That will happen too where that's who the arrows are thrown at.

You have the arrow throwers. You have the ones who are having the arrows thrown at them. You have everyone else who's doing one form or another of collusion where they're either trying to jump in to be the hero when nobody is asking for a hero or they're trying to be the peacemaker when nobody has designated them the peacemaker. They are going and gossiping at the water cooler about all these negative bad things that are going on, but they're sticking their head in the sand because they're not doing anything about it.

You've got triangulators. You've got people who go to someone else. I have a problem. I go to Jason. I tell Jason about the problem that I don't have with Jason. I have it with a third party. I go to Jason to tell them about the problem so that I can get input from him about how I can handle that problem with that person in a better way. Instead, I go to Jason to try to recruit him to do my dirty work for me and confront that third party for me.

I feel like you've seen me as the weakest link here.

The thing about the magnets, the ones who receive the arrows and the arrow throwers, and the colluders is all of them self-identify as victims. Every one of those groups identifies themselves as innocent victims. Learning how to recognize when a projection magnet dynamic is an operation and how to intervene in a good way with that is an important leadership skill that rarely gets taught. Leaders wonder why their culture is going to double hockey sticks in a handbasket.

The final two forms of culture shadow come up a lot with diversity and DEI training. It's where you've got diversity initiatives in your company that some people are resisting or that are being misused to either reinforce guilt on the part of those who have privilege, power and the ability to get stuff done, be heard or things like that or it's being misused to reinforce victim thinking on behalf of target groups that are more disenfranchised and don't have as much power.

That's culture shadow, and it takes both of those shadow forms where the initiatives are either resisted or the initiatives are misused. Institutional shadow is where you don't have enough diversity in perspectives or temperaments on your leadership team or work team. You've got institutional shadow because the entire organization has an attitude of when a blind spot is pointed out, it's cast aside. We're impervious to input and blind spots being pointed out.

There's a punitive attitude about whistleblowing, whistle calling or where you've got a culture that is coercion-oriented or compromise oriented rather than collaboration oriented. Those are the different forms of shadow that leaders have to be aware of, monitor and know how to intervene effectively or designate someone who will do that on their behalf.

Prior to this conversation, I hadn't heard of shadow monitoring, but it makes a ton of sense. I appreciate the way you broke that down.

It breaks my heart because it is a shadow that kills organizations. It's the stuff we deny, repress or indulge, even though it's not good. That's the stuff that kills organizations.

Nothing good happens in the dark. I love it. Let's get positive here. How do we have success and solve these burdens or at least learn how to live lightly with them?

There are four areas we're going to touch on briefly. Envisioning, embodying, facilitating and feeding. Envisioning is as the leader, it’s on our shoulders to continually hold the vision, mission, values and guiding principles for decision-making to voice those consistently rather than assume that in a particular situation, everybody's remembering those things. Voicing them and reminding people about those, that's the envisioning responsibility that we have. If we do envision, that lifts the burden because we won't feel alone in holding that vision, mission, values and guiding principles. We're reminders. We're not the police.

The next one is embodiment. It's realizing that leadership is a responsibility. It's not an award. Also, becoming who the organization needs to facilitate success within the organization. It's not just carrying the light but it's shining the light into all the dark corners. It's having hard conversations. It's being a mentor. It's making good decisions and knowing how good decisions are made, and communicating. Embodiment is the responsibility of being the beating heart and the thinking mind of the organization so that you can put blood, sensory and knowledge throughout the whole body.

The third of the success roadmap dimensions is facilitation. This is another thing that, in a lot of leadership programs, it's not taught. Leaders are taught to lead. The notion that a leader is a facilitator, midwife or catalyst is not talked about often enough, let alone the skillsets for effective facilitation being trained and offered to leaders.

The image that I'll use around facilitation is a musical one because I'm a recovering musician, among other things, trained in conducting. Imagine that you've got an ensemble of extraordinary instrumentalists, people who are good at their musical instruments. They need to be helped to make beautiful music together. For there to be a high-performing ensemble, you have to have talented people playing the instruments.

As a leader, the facilitator capacity of a leader is where we're helping them make extraordinarily beautiful music together. We're facilitating. Using the music metaphor, there are times when a particular instrument needs to be played louder in a particular session, a section of the music or softer in a particular section of the music. That's not an insult to the instrumentalist. It's about being the steward of the overall product so that all the instruments are heard, and they're at the right volume in relationship to each other. You are the conductor. Your job is to become a superb conductor of a brilliant ensemble of instrumentalists.

The last one is feeding. Feeding is one of my favorite things to do, but feeding in the organization is promoting growth for the individual, the team and the infrastructure of the organization. It's providing a positive perspective but having a whole perspective to share and encouraging people to own the organization with you and bring out new, exciting opportunities for growth, improvement and expansion. If you are feeding your organization, it's going to grow in many ways.

One of the ways is that everybody will have that ownership and help you in this quest to promote growth, optimization and diversification. With that, we've done it. We've gotten through the challenges and success roadmap. Let's talk about some key takeaways. With all of this information that we've thrown out and discussed, what are the most important things for our readers to latch onto, the little mustard seed that we can plant in their brains to grow as they go through their leadership journey?

This has barely been a fire hose episode, hasn't it?

It's been a lot. For me, the biggest thing is understanding that leadership is a burden. It's a responsibility, not a privilege. It needs to be treated in that way. As leaders, we have to determine how we thrive, energize and bring vibrancy to an organization when we're burdened with this responsibility. It all has to do with coming into a lighthearted or symbiotic relationship with understanding and executing these burdens.

Leadership is a burden. It's a responsibility, not a privilege. As leaders, we have to determine how we thrive, how we energize, and how we bring vibrancy to an organization when we're burdened with this responsibility.

The other key takeaway is to tie this back to something that I said toward the top of this episode. I hope that now that we've unpacked all of this, you're seeing what I meant when I said that leaders lead at the level of their baggage, unfinished business and self-development limitations despite their higher intentions. The takeaway from that is without shame or blame toward yourself because a lot of leadership programs, in my judgment, most of them have all kinds of gaps and holes in them so it's not your fault. Simply recognize which burdens that we've covered are your self-development growth edges and get training and mentorship with those.

On behalf of Dr. Gruder and myself, thank you so much for going on this journey with us. I hope that you took away some pieces that will help you be a better leader. I hope you had fun with us. We had fun doing it. We'd love to ask you to subscribe. If you like what you read, we're doing a lot more of this type of thinking, so please subscribe and comment.

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It's not just free. Don't be fooled by free. These are way better than free.

You'll see what he is talking about when you get into it. Please subscribe, comment and take advantage of the tools that we have provided for you. You're also welcome to be in touch. With that, we thank you so much. We'll talk to you again in the next episode.