How to Lead Like a Boss (4 of 4)

Overcoming 6 Hazardous Attitudes

This is part 4 of the podcast series How to Lead Like a Boss, we discuss six different types of hazardous attitudes and how to manage them in your company.

The 6 different hazardous attitudes are:

1. Anti-authority
2. Impulsivity
3. Invulnerability (aka bulletproof sydrome)
4. Macho attitude
5. Resignation (aka disengagement)
6. Get-There-Itis

Listen to the podcast here:

 

Read Along as Karla and Kevin discuss the 6 Hazardous Attitudes and How to Overcome Them

Karla Nelson: Welcome to the People Catalyst Podcast, Kevin Nothstine.

Kevin Nothstine: Thank you Karla. Happy to be here.

Karla Nelson: Yeah, glad to have you here and this is exciting. We started out doing one podcast and ended up doing a four part series because as we started looking at this, this is not only amazing information, there is a lot to it. Of course, leave it to the military to dump tons of paper cuts and then trying to figure out, okay, how do we communicate this in a way that is applicable. Then also not giving too much.

I love immersion. At the same time you also want to walk away with some bits of information that you can quickly apply in your business. I think I’ve learned just as much on this podcast as any. My goodness, it’s been fantastic. What we did is we started out in identifying the seven sources of authority.

Part one of this series was how to lead like a boss and then we moved into how to work as a team, like a boss. As we identified these traps, as Kevin said, or pitfalls in just human nature and how we respond to things and why it’s so critical and important to understand those 10 pitfalls.

Then working through those 10 pitfalls, we came about that there’s really one pitfall that is really, really critical and important in kind of a foundation for a lot of the other ones because it’s difficult if somebody has what they call a, well I changed it to bad attitude, but I actually went back to hazardous attitude. Especially after one of them I have that I’m totally happy to worry about where I want to go and what’s the itis called there Kevin?

Kevin Nothstine: It’s get there-itis.

Karla Nelson: Get there-itis. I’m like I’m happy to have get there-itis. It’s like I can see why they probably analyze the heck out of it and said, “Wait a second, bad attitude doesn’t exactly fit because I could be completely happy with this hazardous attitude of get there-itis.” It’s not necessarily just about attitude, but it really is about opening up your mind to be taught and to learn.

We’re going to dive deep into some of these anecdotes or how you solve, I love anecdotes. Of course, that’s what the military uses instead of solutions. Solutions to these hazardous attitudes that we talked about.

I’m not sure if everybody’s listened To the previous three podcasts, so I will take a moment to introduce our guest here today. Kevin Nothstine spent 21 years of active duty as an officer in the Air Force. He currently spends some of his time as a special ops air crew instructor teaching the same mission in an aircraft that he flew in Afghanistan and Iraq and my goodness, you did what, over a hundred combat missions there?

Kevin Nothstine: Yeah, around there.

Karla Nelson: Yeah. Oh, that’s all, yeah. Basically this mission is to find the bad guys and tell the good guys where they are. So if you think about the Bin Laden raids, there’s something called a stack, and this particular aircraft, the MC-12 is that the top of the stack and then there could be a whole different blend of aircraft all the way down to the boots on the ground. Kevin is also one of the cofounders of the People Catalyst and he is a prover shaker.

Kevin Nothstine: Prover Shaker as opposed to Karla, the host of the People Catalysts Podcast, who is an uber mover who likes to move things forward and make them happen.

Karla Nelson: I get a little shaker, I’m a shaker.

Kevin Nothstine: Yes, mover shaker. Yeah.

Karla Nelson: Every once in a while I come up with a good idea, but we’ve got Allen on the team. So it’s normally just minimizing his crazy ideas. Almost always the best ideas. Yeah.

Welcome to the show. We’re excited about this today because we’re going to talk about how to solve these, what they call hazardous attitudes in this crew resource management training. If you want to give us a little bit of a context around that, Kevin, we’ll start there and then we’ll roll right into these solutions to make sure that you don’t get into these areas as leaders.

Kevin Nothstine: Yeah, and podcasts in this series number two and number three, we actually broke it down. We had 10 different traps or these things that can cause problems in how you operate. And just real quickly, we talked about excessive professional courtesy. We talked about the halo effect, haster syndrome, hidden agenda.

Karla Nelson: Oh yeah.

Kevin Nothstine: All of these.

Karla Nelson: These are not my new names. I gave new names to all these. They were actually in English.

Kevin Nothstine: And multiple ones there. You can go back and listen to two and three without getting in any detail. One of the big ones, number nine of those 10, was hazardous attitudes, or bad attitudes, or hazardous attitudes. It’s having the wrong mindset about things because your attitude determines how far you can go.

We wanted to dive a little deeper into this because there are some rough attitudes that you can have, but there are solutions to those attitudes as well. If you recognize them in yourself and the parts that can cause some issues and the negative aspects, there’s ways to look at them a little bit differently to try and overcome them for you or for your team members. It’ll work with your team to come up with how to fix these attitudes. We can all think of it and you can always say, “Oh, he’s got a bad attitude,” but we actually give names to some of those bad attitudes.

Karla Nelson: You know what’s kind of interesting, I didn’t think about before, doesn’t the plane when you fly, I guess I’ve been hanging around with you long enough that I’ve learned enough about, I would never want to actually… You would not want me to fly the aircraft, but I’ve learned a lot. Isn’t there a term for the attitude of the plane even?

Kevin Nothstine: It’s a different definition of attitude.

Karla Nelson: Of course but isn’t it?

Kevin Nothstine: But you do have some planes that… You know what? You’re kind of right about that. I fly a fleet of multiple planes and sometimes the planes, they don’t fly right and some of them fly a little bit more crooked than some of the others do.

Karla Nelson: You don’t actually think about that, but that is kind of interesting. Like the attitude of the plane and well it made me think about it because your attitude determines how far you go. It’s just so foundational and there’s so many very similar things, not only in the foundation but then also the training that goes into that. Both on you learn how to fly aircraft, but then also running companies and being a leader. There’s so much about what the military teaches and their training is so extensive. Companies should really pay attention to that.

Kevin Nothstine: Karla, that really does bring up an entirely different subject that could be a whole different podcast that we have one day. The plane is a tool. It’s a tool of what you use to be able to accomplish the mission. As you said in the introduction there, the mission that we do in the plane that I instructed in, the MC-12, our mission is to find the bad guys and tell the good guys are where they are and protect the good guys and to make things happen in that realm.

The aircraft, the MC-12, is a tool and just like any other tool, you have to know… one, you have to have the right tool for the job and two, you have to know how to use that tool. Sometimes if you think of a tool chest, you have a couple of different screwdrivers that are in there and you could have one screwdriver that it’s kind of bent or has a little problem with that and when you use that screwdriver, you’ve got to know how to use that tool effectively.

Karla Nelson: That’s so funny. That actually makes me think about the WHO-DO method, Mover Shaker Prover Maker. They all excel in certain things and not in another thing. So Allen always tells a really funny story. He loves baseball, he loves it so much, and he’s done a ton of work in that realm, but they put him in the finance area of it and it was like, are you serious? Like what are you? “Oh well, there’s this space and you love baseball, right?” I mean it’s like you have to understand how a shaker excels, a mover excels, a prover excels, and a maker excels so that you can utilize that tool or even the one are that we don’t talk about very often because 100% of the work is made for one percent of the population that are imbalanced across all four.

It’s like your utility infielder, right? They’re not super awesome at first base, but when that guy gets hurt, you can put that guy in and so understanding is, and of course we don’t want to identify people just as tools, but in business when the object of the exercise is to get something done, it’s critical that you understand your team or as you say, crew, right? And the mission that you fly. It’s understanding where you can put them in so that they’re going to excel to the maximum or understand where they might be miscast and you’re asking them to do something that they’re really, really stinky at.

Kevin Nothstine: Yes. And your examples is, you’re exactly right when you’re talking about your role versus your passion. You know, you can be passionate about baseball, but if you’re passionate about baseball and you love being a pitcher and now all of a sudden we have you playing shortstop, your role is completely miscast even though you’re passionate about baseball.

Karla Nelson: Yeah. So I like that. I like that, thinking about what the attitude is and how that rolls into those different parallels. So, okay, so we’ll go ahead and let’s get started. How many of these solutions or anecdotes as the Air Force would say?

Kevin Nothstine: We’re going to go through six different hazardous attitudes and we did have the 10 different traps and inside of the 10 traps we have hazardous attitude is one trap. And there’s, it’s just layers upon layers of stuff.

Karla Nelson: It’s amazing guys, you guys, if you ever want, it’s the best training. They’ve obviously deduced this, the provers have eaten it alive and made it to the, you know, it’s awesome. It’s just really interesting because the language is all, it’s like the longer you can make the word, the better.

Kevin Nothstine: They’re trying to be as precise as possible.

Karla Nelson: Yes, there you go. See, the prover. So the prover says precise as possible, which by the way, I have to agree. When I said no bad attitude, it’s like you could be totally happy being the macho person. You totally could, or all those other ones that we went through before so you can be happy, so it’s not necessarily that it’s a bad attitude. It’s a hazardous. It could contaminate the team. Right?

Kevin Nothstine: What you’re talking about is leadership is both an art and a science, and the art is, “Oh, it feels right and we can do it this way and paint it that way and put these things together,” and they’re trying to boil it down to a science because you’re trying to take a multitude of individuals and teach them. If they’re not an artist in this area, we’re trying to give them the tools available, so to do that they’re trying to boil it down to a science and that’s why we have 10 different traps and one trap, we have six different.

Karla Nelson: I love that though because we’re a process, process, process, process, process, process, focus. 94% of failures, process failure, not people failure.

Kevin Nothstine: You know what? That really does bring up the first of these hazardous attitudes because you can have certain people and the first that hazardous attitude, the first one is anti-authority. Believe it or not, there can be people in the military and everywhere else even though they try to beat it out of you in basic training and everywhere else, you can have an anti-authority attitude and to put it in a nutshell, anti-authority is, “Well don’t tell me how to do it,” and as you might imagine, a few air crew or pilots might have a little bit of that anti-authority

Karla Nelson: Dun dun dun dun, pilots. No. No.

Kevin Nothstine: I actually had one pilot that I was trying to train and he was a pretty experienced individual and the instructor that worked with him before identified that he had not been doing some of his work on his checklist of knowing the checklist as well as he needed to. And so I had that piece of information going into a training session with him and it was specifically on checklist procedures. Well, this individual came to me and I very quickly identified, yeah, he hasn’t done it enough on it. And I was telling him, “Okay, you need to know the checklist to this level of detail. You need to have this part of the checklist memorized. You need to do it this way.” Well, that didn’t jive with what he wanted to do and he just had a very anti-authority attitude about going into this. And it ended up being a very confrontational training session and I don’t think the student got a lot out of it as a result.

Karla Nelson: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, of course, yeah. Now you’re closing yourself off and it’s why we wanted to dive deepest on the solutions to this because if you’re starting out that way, you are a threat to yourself and everyone else. If you have a hazardous attitude, you’re contaminating the team basically.

Kevin Nothstine: Yeah. This particular individual, he actually contaminated a team. That was about two years ago, that we had this incident with him. Well, his anti-authority attitude continued, and let’s just say it has led to not the best situation and he’s no longer a part of that team.

Karla Nelson: Yeah. And that can happen, right? So because we all have to follow processes and procedures, especially in the military. My goodness, you guys are the father. But outside of Edwards Deming, the military would be definitely the next place that there’s a process for everything and a procedure for everything, right.

Kevin Nothstine: And of course their antidote to this hazardous attitude, would they like to teach is follow the rules. They’re usually right.

Karla Nelson: That’s what they call it the rules.

Kevin Nothstine: Yeah. It should be follow your procedures. It’s not just rules. There’s a whole bunch of items that are not rules.

Karla Nelson: Yep. Well, we love process and procedures. I’ve already said 94% of failures, process failure, not people failure. Edwards Deming, he’s considered the father of manufacturing. I quote him all time because it’s so, so critical in business to have a process, a process by which you identify the decisions, what are we going to do, ideation, implementation, how are we going to do it?

And it reminds me of a friend of mine who, gosh, I’ve known for a very long time and most of you guys would probably know the name of the company that he sold a couple of years ago and we had the fortunate opportunity of doing his financing way back in the day when I was in the world of finance and he was a small gig set up at the time and had a couple of retail stores and when we walked in to do the financing, he pulled out the largest set of instructional manuals I probably have ever heard.

Now guys, this was before you could do it digitally and have it in the cloud and do all this stuff. So it literally was like, clunk. I remember looking at it and my associate at the time looked at it and said, “Oh, this guy is going to be really successful because he has got every process and procedure written down in how he was growing this,” and he ended up selling his company I think somewhere around $640 million. So, and this is a retail small chain that ended up going, I don’t even know, I don’t know if it was international, but it was a huge brand and so you know, it’s important. Process and procedures are absolutely critical.

Kevin Nothstine: Now, those processes and procedures and not only having them but training people to follow them.

Karla Nelson: Yeah. Oh, training. Imagine that.

Kevin Nothstine: Which brings up the, I’m sorry, go ahead. What were you going to say?

Karla Nelson: I was just saying and the military is the best at it because they not only have process, they probably overkill, right? They kind of go the other way sometimes probably where innovation is squashed out, but the military is awesome about this because everybody shows up and they train and they train and they train. Right? And so we can’t spend 100% of the day training. Right? We have to balance that out with doing other things, but explaining the process and procedures and then put, I hate to say a process around the process, but that’s what the WHO-DO method actually is because contextually you can apply it in any other area, right? So just, yeah, it’s not only critical but then using contextually over that, right, how you run that process and procedures. Not only communicating it like you said, Kevin, but communicating in a way that the team builds the process and the procedure together as well, if you have to start at ground zero.

In the military, I’m going to guess you get told a lot of stuff, especially after a lot of the bugs had been worked out. In corporate America, it’s a little bit different in the sense that if everybody can put their fingerprint on the process, if it’s starting at ground zero or look at it because everybody looks at processes and procedures differently, right? Shakers want to break the rules. Movers want to interpret the rules. Provers want to make the rules and makers want to follow the rules. So those were rules. That’s exactly what the anecdote just said. Follow the rules, they’re usually right. Well guess what? You got four sets of dang people that follow the rules differently.

Kevin Nothstine: And those rules can mature over time. You talked about in the military you run things through a process. I’ve got a great story that’s going to go with the next one that talks about how we used to do things that we’ve learned from and gotten a little better at how we do them now.

Karla Nelson: Awesome. Go ahead and lead us through. Ready to go.

Kevin Nothstine: Before we tell this story.

Karla Nelson: I got get there-itis. Come on.

Kevin Nothstine: Before we go into the story, the first one, well the hazardous attitude here is impulsivity. Do something quickly. Okay. Ah, it’s the knee jerk reaction. It’s this happened. I need to do this. Oh, this happened, boom, I’m going to do this and jump right into it without doing a good analysis of understanding exactly what’s going on. So that’s a hazardous attitude.

And the story on this and it’s actually not my story, this is a story from my dad. My dad was a flight engineer on T-29s so this is a story from a long time ago. The plane he was flying had two engines and he was a flight engineer so he’s sitting between the two pilots and at the time in the Air Force, the way they would train for an engine failure is the instructor pilot would actually shut down the engine and then it would go through the procedures. Okay. How do you deal with this engine that you just lost?

Well, the first step was to pull what’s called the T handle. You’d reach up high and you’d pull this T handle and it would shut down the engine. Well, nowadays we’re a lot better and before you pull that, you would verify with the other person that in the plane that, “I’m going to move this T handle. Yes, the left engine failed. I have the left one. I’m going to pull that T handle and shut it down.”

Kevin Nothstine: Well, when my dad was flying, they had not worked through those processes yet and the pilot would just reach up and grab the T handle and pull it. So he’s in the plane. The instructor pilot shut down the left engine and his student goes, “Okay, first step is to pull the T handle for that engine.” And he reached up and grabbed the wrong handle.

Karla Nelson: That would be bad.

Kevin Nothstine: He grabbed the right handle instead of the left one.

Karla Nelson: No way, he shut down the other engine?

Kevin Nothstine: Yes. So now this two engine plane has both engines shut down.

Karla Nelson: So now it’s not like in the previous glider, right? Because remember the other guy in the other example.

Kevin Nothstine: In the other example, he just shut off the electronics and the planes still flew. This particular one my dad was on.

Karla Nelson: So now you’re a glider at however far in the air.

Kevin Nothstine: Yes. Now they’re able to restart the engines and able to recover.

Karla Nelson: Thank goodness.

Kevin Nothstine: But it was that impulsivity. Somebody just said, “You know what? I know what to do to respond to this emergency situation. I’m just going to do it without any analysis and just jump right in with both feet.”

Karla Nelson: Yeah. You might want to read what side of the aircraft to a shutdown first to be able to restart that one and not shut down the other one. But yeah, exactly, and this happens in business a lot.

Kevin Nothstine: Yeah. In flying, we say that the antidote or the solution to that is no fast hands or not so fast. Think first.

Karla Nelson:  Yes. And the process can help you with this guys, you’re provers, you’re provers, you’re provers. When you run the process, ensuring that you know we need you all, we need you at different times. And there is a previous podcast, Alan and I actually go through ideation and implementation, the exact steps because of the same players, it’s a different process and understand that your provers can help you so much in thinking through it.

Now when you’re flying an aircraft, obviously you have to move super fast. In business, we’ve got a little bit more time when we’re making decisions. But when you run the process, having your provers be a part of the process, they can help you think this through. I would even say the shakers as well can help a lot of times when for them to overcome the obstacles, the provers are really great at bringing up and then the shakers really great at innovative ways to overcome those. So I love the think first. The only problem is that’s only the really the provers and the shakers that naturally will fall back on thinking versus doing, right? So, but leverage those other people in the process so that you’re thinking through it and before you take action.

Kevin Nothstine: Before you turn your aircraft into a glider.

Karla Nelson: Yeah, exactly.

Kevin Nothstine: All right. Here’s the next one. The next hazardous attitude on ones is, okay. Well, the official term for this in Air Force speak is invulnerability. Okay.

Karla Nelson: What? I guess vulnerable, not vulnerable.

Kevin Nothstine: Yep. Invulnerable.

Karla Nelson: I’m going to rename this bulletproof.

Kevin Nothstine: Yeah. Yep, yep.

Karla Nelson: Superman syndrome.

Kevin Nothstine: Yep. It can’t happen to me. Yeah, this can happen to other people. It won’t happen to me. I am bulletproof. Okay. And a good one on this, you may have heard of, this is a, heck, it was probably 15, 20 years ago now, had a B-52, an air crew flying a B-52 for an air show up in a Washington state and the pilot wanted to put on a great air show and well he didn’t think it would happen to him that the plane could actually mess up. Well, he pushed the plane well beyond its limits and he was known for this. He was known for having this attitude to the point that the leadership would not let anybody else fly with him except the highest people.

Karla Nelson: I wouldn’t want to fly with him. Geez. It’s kind of like a little far in the sky to have this invulnerability or bulletproof syndrome.

Kevin Nothstine: Yeah. And he took a B-52, a very large airplane that the maximum you’re allowed or the maximum bank angle is 60 degrees and bringing it way up and that’s actually pretty high. They usually never even reach that. But for the air show, he brought it up to 90 degrees.

If you know anything about flying or if you’ve seen a plane, there’s no lift, there’s nothing keeping you in the sky at 90 degrees. Well, it was a rather tragic result that when he did this thinking, “Oh, it wouldn’t happen to me,” well, physics doesn’t care what you think. Physics is physics and the plane fell out of the sky and it destroyed the aircraft and the four people inside of it.

Karla Nelson: Gosh, I’m not even a pilot and would realize, no, you might like the wings kind of are important. If you bring it to a 90 degree angle, there’s nothing underneath of you. That’s crazy. How sad. So yes, bulletproof syndrome, not good.

Kevin Nothstine: And the edit on that is to realize, ah, it could happen to me. You know, what you think is the most tragic thing, that just very well could happen.

Karla Nelson: Well, the other thing that makes me think about is, especially on innovation, businesses especially, it’s easy to talk about today because there’s so many examples of it, but it reminds me of GM and Chrysler. So GM actually created the minivan. Most people don’t know that, but they did not want to roll the minivan out into the market in fear that it would take over their station wagon market, right? And yeah. Yeah. And so Chrysler obtained the intellectual property, rolled out the minivan and everybody, I mean how many minivans do you see on the streets today, right?

And then as soon as the SUV came out, when was the last time you saw a station wagon? Right. It just decimated the station wagon business. But yet they don’t have the minivan business. I’m sure they’ve come out with their own version of it.

Kevin Nothstine: Of course, they didn’t think it could happen to them. They didn’t think that they would fail.

Karla Nelson: Not only that, you would still crush the IP. Why would you sell it off? Kodak did the same thing. Right? They created the digital camera, but in fear that it would compete with their other products they sold it. Why would you sell it? Yeah. Now at least don’t sell it to somebody else, but it could never happen to them because they’re the big guys on the block. So, yeah. Okay, go ahead, Kevin.

Kevin Nothstine: The same thing with vacuum cleaners. Forever, they wanted to stick with vacuum cleaners and they wanted to sell vacuum cleaner bags. So all the big names, Hoover and the others refused to switch over. Then Dyson came in and had a bagless vacuum cleaner.

Karla Nelson: Yeah. And Dyson’s the best. And they made it swivel for goodness sakes, because you couldn’t with the bag, right?

Kevin Nothstine: The other companies didn’t think they’d be able to fail, but lo and behold, Dyson took over major market share.

Karla Nelson: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Awesome. All right, what’s the next one?

Kevin Nothstine: Okay, next one. That’s invulnerability. It can’t happen to me. Well, the next one is kind of, it’s the other side of the same coin a bit and that’s the macho attitude. That’s the, “I can do it, dump it on. I will make it happen. I am full on capable of doing this with no problem at all.”

And just to quick little story on that, I was flying with a guy, he was a CEO of a very successful company and he’s a great guy, really good dude. But what made him a very successful CEO did not transfer well into the cockpit and to fly in a plane. He owned his own plane and he was flying it and I was flying with him and we’re flying into a runway at night in the weather and he had the autopilot coupled up and was letting it apply and I told him early, said, “Hey, you probably want to disengage the autopilot early and just to work with your hand flying and get back to flying the plane, playing yourself and being comfortable with it.” And he’s like, “No, I can take it. I can take it later on. I’ll be no problem at all and I will be able to fly the plane with no problem.”

Well he let the autopilot on for a long time and then as soon as he kicked the autopilot off and started hand flying, well, it was very tight tolerances and he didn’t stay within those tolerances and I ended up taking the plane from him. We had to go around to keep the aircraft in a safe situation and come back and do the approach again.

Karla Nelson: Yeah. That’s why I would be a horrible pilot, although with the right instruction and training. All right. Okay, so what’s the next one?

Kevin Nothstine: Okay. The next one and the big correction to macho is instead of, I can do it, a sometimes taking chances can be foolish or a better way to put that, listen to your mentors.

Karla Nelson: And trainers. Listen to your trainers. Go back to your training, right? The process. Go back to the process. You always use the process.

Kevin Nothstine: Now if you do that, do some other things too much, you know what? You can end up with the next big, bad attitude, which is resignation. Resignation is, you know what’s the use? Nothing’s working. This isn’t going to work well. This is Eeyore.

Karla Nelson: Yeah, I’m going to call this engagement because employee engagement, right? Or disengagement. We’re going to write the whole handbook over again.

Kevin Nothstine: And so if you or obviously not you, our podcast audience is a lot better and of course they would never be disengaged, but other people might be disengaged.

Karla Nelson: Yeah. That’s why our number one post always have to do with how much it costs for turnover and 70% of people hate their jobs in the US, 89% internationally. There are tons of people out there doing things every day that they don’t like. And so we talked about this earlier, is the recent Gallup study and how many people not only are actively disengaged, but then just disengaged. So if you add those two groups together, it’s 53% were disengaged. 13 actively disengaged. This means they will do anything to ruin what it is that you are up to. So when 66% of your workforce is disengaged, what do you think that does to a business?

And on top of that, I think what we missed in the scenario is everybody disengages for different reasons. You know, shakers disengage if it’s not their idea, movers disengage because I’ve got another project and something to do anyway and nothing ever comes of these meetings. Provers disengage because there’s too much wrong with it and makers disengage because they need to get back to their desk and do some real work. So we have to approach disengagement from different aspects.

When you’re using a process and letting them shine in the piece of the work that they do, again, both in ideation, what are we going to do? Implementation, how are we going to do it? Then it’s an easier way to understand why people disengage.

I had before learning the process, many times would be in a meeting, if I was not running the meeting, taking the notes, telling everybody what to do after the meeting, coordinating it, I just sat back and didn’t say a word. I had other things that I wanted to do, right, and that’s how a mover disengages and I think we don’t necessarily take that into consideration of you can’t just tell somebody, engage, engage, engage. I mean it’s just ridiculous. You can’t bring in the speaker to speak for an hour and tell people how to be engaged. It doesn’t make any sense when the object of the exercise is to get something done. So they obviously have to do the part of the work that they excel at, right?

Kevin Nothstine: And you know something that the WHO-DO process really teaches is we need everybody just not at the same time. So when do I really want you engaged? At the right time in the project. So as a leader in a different, as you go through the process, it’s getting the right people with that engagement.

Karla Nelson: Yeah. Awesome. Love it. Love this one. That’s a great one. And finally.

Kevin Nothstine: Okay the last one. Get there-itis.

Karla Nelson: Yeah. I got something to do. I think I’m going to have to end the podcast now.

Kevin Nothstine: Sounds like a hidden agenda going on there.

Karla Nelson: That’s a good one. And that’s actually funny because it’s one of the 10 that we went through as far as the traps. Yeah.

Kevin Nothstine: The get there-itis is, in flying, it’s like I must get there tonight. I just need to get to this destination. We want to make it happen and get on the ground or if you’d ever done a long road trip, I have got to get to grandma’s house now or that kind of item. And it can lead to having, for whatever reason you need to get there.

We actually had a time. I was in Guam, we had two C-130s in Guam and we had that day we were going to fly from Guam to the Philippines and back across the ocean. Well my crew, we all, we were staying in the same hotel as the other crew. We checked out of the hotel, we packed all our bags, we had all of our bags and we’re sitting there in the lobby of the hotel about to catch the bus to where the planes were.

Karla Nelson: Even though you’re going back to Guam?

Kevin Nothstine: Yep. We’re coming right back to the same hotel at the same place that night. And the other crew was looking at us and they’re like, “Well, why are you guys doing this?” And we said, “Because we’re flying a C-130 that was built in the early 1960s to another location and shutting down the engines. So just in case, we’re going to do it,” and they’re like, “Yeah, okay, whatever.”

Well, both planes flew to the Philippines with no problem. Well, guess what? The other plane, lo and behold, their plane broke. They had some issues with the plane and they were not able to take off. Our plane, we had no problem. We went back and we had to check back into the hotel and everything, but that plane that broke, as they were going through their decision making process, it could very, very easily saying, we want to get back to Guam because that’s where the hotel were checked into. That’s where all of our clothes are.

Karla Nelson: That’s where our dinner is.

Kevin Nothstine: Yes. And all of that. And so they could very easily have some get there-itis that could lead to making bad decisions. They were willing to accept things on the plane and push it. Now they didn’t. They maintained the professionalism, but I know they really did want to get home.

Karla Nelson: Yeah. Being aware of that. Super important. That reminds me of a client of ours, and this happens frequently. So you’ve got your early adopters, your movers and shakers, you got your later adopters, your provers and your makers, right? And which one do you think probably has get there-itis the most? Probably the doers, I would say. But even shakers, like shakers and movers get together and then it’s like, woohoo, here’s my idea. Yay, that’s a great idea. Let’s do that. Ooh.

And so what can happen is this particular company ended up spending a lot of money and investing it into technology and it was a great idea. It actually was a good idea. And the problem was they didn’t think about people actually using the technology that they put millions of bucks into. And so now all of a sudden you just invested all this money, but you didn’t figure out all the things that could go wrong about how to get your return on investment, because the way this company works for every user they’re already paying for and they’re giving it to them to a mass, mass reduced amount, right? It’s not like they wanted a profit margin but they didn’t want to invest so much money that it was like sink in the company and putting it in the red and they didn’t think about it. So we were actually brought in to help that process.

And when you think about technology, this happens frequently. And this was seven different ones integrated with each other by the way. So how do you break that process down into its simplest form in order to then have somebody actually use it? I mean all of that stuff you have to run through the process before you make the decision. I think some, get there-itis, we need technology, we need to go, we need this in place. And they did need all of it. And the problem is when you start watching that video on the first technology, you’re excited about three minutes into it, five minutes, you’re like, oh, and then 30 minutes into going through all the features and benefits when you don’t even need all of them, you need about 20% and not breaking any of that down. And they had already been trying to kind of shove this down everybody’s throats for a year and they weren’t swallowing. So you have to think through that process and get there-itis can really get you in trouble when you make a decision without engaging all different core natures of work.

Ask me how I know it, because get there-itis is my definitely go to on the hazardous attitudes and I said that instead of bad attitude again because I’m happy with get there-itis. What happens is then you hit a wall you can make and you’re not taking everybody with you, right? So the object of the exercise in leadership and working with a team is we all go together and as Kevin said, we need you all just at different times. It’s absolutely critical and so well, awesome.

Okay, so anti-authority, don’t tell me what to do. Impulsivity, do something really fast. Invulnerability, which I renamed bulletproof syndrome. It can’t happen to me. Macho, which is dun, dun, dun, dun, I can do it myself. Resignation, which I changed the name to disengaged. We call it employee engagement frequently and then get there-itis. Awesome. Those are definitely six things to take a look at to ensure that you have a healthy way of communicating not only internally with yourself but externally with your team and also helping your other team members identify those hazardous attitudes that can really get you into some trouble.

So any last words, Kevin, before we sign up off for the podcast?

Kevin Nothstine: It’s been a great series. I’ve really enjoyed going through this and working through it. You know, we started off this whole series of four of talking about what your sources of authority are in leading a team and then we talked about the 10 different traps that can mess up with people and we did a deep dive into one of those traps of those bad attitudes, so or hazardous attitudes. So overall, I think it was a great series and a lot of lessons to learn and I’m glad we reviewed it. It helps me to be a better leader and to work with our teams better as well.

Karla Nelson: Fantastic. Well, I’ve enjoyed it. It’s definitely been an amazing leadership series. And until next time, remember we need you all, but we need you at different times.

 

 

 

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