Be A Broker Of Fairness With Rich Gibbons
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Employee loyalty is a competitive advantage. So how do you keep them? In this episode, John Livesay has the guest who can boil it down to one tip. Rich Gibbons, the President of SpeakInc, dives deep into the value of becoming a broker of fairness and what it brings to the industry. The one thing that needs to be everybody’s North Star is that you are not trying to stack the chips in anybody’s favor. Rich emphasizes how being fair to everyone makes you more advantageous in your business. Also in the business of selling himself as a speaker, he then shares why he thinks the key to finding the right speaker is finding someone who listens. If you wish to know how to keep your employees loyal, learn the speaking culture, or simply gain great nuggets for success, then you should not miss this conversation!
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Listen to the podcast here
Be A Broker Of Fairness With Rich Gibbons
Our guest is Rich Gibbons, the President of SpeakInc, a bureau that books the top speakers in the world. He said, “It is important to be a broker of fairness. When you are easy to work with, it becomes a competitive advantage.” Find out his secret sauce to keeping his employees loyal. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Rich Gibbons, who’s a native of Connecticut and Glasgow, Scotland. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. He joined Speak Inc in 1991, which is one of the top speaking bureaus, and now serves as the company’s president. He has been closely involved with the International Association of Speakers Bureau, IASB, and is a past president of the organization.
Because of his knowledge and expertise in the industry, he has been sought after as an expert witness on legal issues involving professional speaking. He has also been involved with the Corporate Event Marketing Association, serving as a board member. He and his wife, Heather, have three children. Shout out to Julia, Jackson, and Max. In his spare time, he enjoys mountain biking, road cycling, windsurfing, motorcycling, and skiing. Welcome to the show, Rich.
Thanks for having me, John. That was a fun recitation there.
I’m always curious to have someone tell me their own story of origin of how you get started in the speaking business. You can take us back to being in Scotland and coming to America or wherever you want to start your story. You have been speaking for a long time, which is something we are going to dive into.
I first moved to San Diego, California, 33 years ago. When my wife and I first moved here from New York, we showed up in California. We didn’t have jobs and no contacts. We didn’t know anybody. I went to my alma mater and looked up the alumni directory and thought, “There is got to be somebody from our school out in San Diego.”
Sure enough, I saw that one of my fraternity brothers was out here. He was a couple of years ahead of me. I looked him up and came to learn that his wife, Ruth, had started a speaker’s bureau. I didn’t know what a speaker’s bureau was. When I paid her office a visit, I saw all these books, audio cassette series, and VHS tapes of these fascinating people. Ted speakers weren’t a thing back then. It’s that genre of subject matter experts and a lot of interesting people.
I would say to her on a Monday as I pay her office a visit, “Would you mind if I borrowed this series of audio cassettes? Can I take this book for a week? I want to look at this VHS tape.” It was almost like going to the library. I would check these things out and come back a week or ten days later and return that stuff and walk off with other stuff.
I was a real voracious curious consumer of the content of people like you that have a tradecraft and area of expertise. The arch of their story is endlessly interesting. She and her husband were working closely. When it came time for them to expand and grow the business beyond just her, they thought, “This Gibbons guy seems to be interested in the product.” This summer 2023, it will be 32 years. It must have been an idea whose time had come.
One of the things I found intriguing in your bio is you are being called an expert witness. I’m guessing there is a story there of some of the cases you have been called on. How do they even find you? One of the things that a bureau does, for those people who aren’t familiar, is all the contracts and getting the money upfront. If a speaker doesn’t show up, you have a whole roster of other people for backup, which gives the client peace of mind.
There are a lot of details and now, contracts are getting more complicated, from what I have been hearing. Tell us a little bit about what SpeakInc and your brand’s expertise is in those kinds of contracts. If you have a story of being on trial because we watched those shows on TV. We know how an expert witness is coming up and the defense is going to try to discredit it.
Our company and companies like ours, my brethren in the industry, or industry colleague friends across the lecture circuit, we serve as an intermediary between the companies and the trade associations that engage the talent, and that universe of talent that is out there. We want to be a broker of fairness. We want it to be fair for both parties. The one thing that needs to be everybody’s North Star is that you are not trying to stack the chips in anybody’s favor.
[bctt tweet=”Be a broker of fairness.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Our role is to make sure that there are no areas of ambiguity and that everything is clear. We have all had more familiarity than we would probably like with force majeure provisions coming out of the pandemic. A lot of people pre-pandemic were like, “Force majeure? What is that?” Everybody knows what force majeure is now. We are being an advocate for a level playing field and making sure that expectations are set with a great deal of clarity.
The second thing you asked was about the expert witness thing, which was entirely passive. I received a phone call one day from an attorney locally here in San Diego, California, who had been referred to me by a colleague of mine in Texas. It was related to a medical malpractice case for a popular, prolific, and bestselling author that had been a host of Oprah’s favorite or Oprah’s Book Club.
She had a book club where she would pick a book. She had her favorite things. It could be products to buy during the holiday time. One author that she raved about was Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus. She had the whole audience participating in that situation where women have this wake-up call where he is not that into you if he is calling you Friday night to go out Saturday.
It wasn’t the Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus. It was a similar author who had his moment in the sun and sold a lot of books. He had a heart event and was purportedly mistreated in the healthcare facility. There was a lawsuit. The insurance company was defending. Oftentimes, expert witnesses are brought in to weigh in on arcane industries or cottage areas of commerce that are not that well understood by people who are extramural to it.
When I was invited to participate, I went to a friend of mine who was a litigator and an attorney. I said, “I got this phone call today. I’m shying away from it.” We found out that I was being collared to be an expert witness. He said, “You should do it.” I’m glad I did it because it was illuminating and fun. His prediction came to pass. That was, “You will be part of a deposition and a dialogue where your area of practice will be the topic of conversation. No one in the room will know what they are talking about except you.”
That was absolutely the case. I was shocked at how authoritative the old expression, “Often wrong, never in doubt.” These attorneys were definitive and authoritative. I would listen to them and think, “That’s not remotely a reality.” There’s always a place for an expert witness to inject a little bit of truth into the conversation.
Most people don’t even have a clue that it exists as a profession. I remember going to a doctor’s office. The doctor is looking at the job title or profession on the medical intake form. I wrote, “Professional speaker.” He goes, “Is that a thing? People make a living speaking.” He couldn’t wrap his head around it.
When I learned that my fraternity brother’s wife had started a speaker’s bureau, I said, “What the heck is a speaker’s bureau?” They were like, “We help these groups and identify talent for the platform.” I thought to myself, “That must be like shooting fish in a barrel. How many companies can be doing that?” You then get into it and you realize, “It is competitive.”
Let’s talk about speaking because what you do that I don’t think people first think of is selling. You are in the business of selling yourself as a bureau to get clients to pick you to find their speakers, and you’re in the business of selling the speakers that you have on your roster as being the right fit. One of the things that stood out for me when I was browsing your website is the key to finding the right speaker is finding someone who listens.
I have a whole belief premise that soft skills, listening, empathy, and storytelling are what make us strong. You got listening on your website. We are on the same page here of how important that is to figure out even if you are the right fit sometimes as a bureau, let alone a speaker. If you could speak to that a little bit about how important listening is, and how you have that be part of your culture.
For a company like ours, as a non-exclusive bureau, we don’t have a backroom with a dozen names under contract that we get gigs for. It is not like that. Our marketing communication, branding, and positioning in the market are not unique to us, but it is the wall we are leaning our strategic ladder against. We can be impartial assets and counselors to those people putting together agendas.
Broker Of Fairness: There’s always a place for an expert witness to inject a little bit of truth into the conversation.
Oftentimes, it’s the number of event stakeholders and executive leaders that want to get their fingerprints on speaker selection. They want to talk about a theme. There’s the almighty budget, and the cross-section and demographic of the audience. These event stakeholders can take 10 to 15 minutes to tell you about one slot, the opening general session or the closing keynote, what they want people to think and feel, and how they want their audience to change their orientation after the program as opposed to before it.
You can take the same briefing and description of all I have mentioned and share it with ten people, and you can get ten different answers. There is a lot to interpretation, follow-up questioning, and understanding of who has worked well in the past and who has maybe not hit the mark. Getting a feeling for the entire fabric of that entire landscape tells you a lot. It becomes the curation process and suggesting candidates that will align well with what is being described. It is not an art form, but it is not going to be reduced to software code anytime soon.
I want to double-click on something you mentioned, “Listening includes deep questions beyond the initial question.” In the world of psychotherapy, would you go to a therapist with your partner and say, “The romance is gone?” That is what is called the presenting problem. People think, “As soon as we get their romance back, everything will be fixed.” The therapist will usually say, “That is the presenting problem. There is something else going on that has caused the romance to go away like lack of trust and hurt feelings.”
That is their job to do that. As a sales keynote speaker, I work with the audience on thinking of themselves as doctors, asking questions like that, and not taking the first problem that a client gives you as, “This is our big problem. If you solve this, we will hire you,” or whatever. Sometimes it is as simple as saying, “Anything else on your mind? Anything else that you want this event to be? Anything else that is a concern to you?”
You get down to another level, especially if they are interviewing you and maybe elder bureaus or maybe other speakers, and I’m the one that said, “Anything else?” Everyone else goes, “You want them to hit their quota. I can do that. Bye.” If I say, “Anything else?” They go, “We also like them not to take rejection personally, be a little more resilient, or whatever else they are struggling with.” I can then go, “I can do this and this.”
If I don’t ask the question, they don’t often give you more than the first-level answer. I thought that is a great example of what you are saying there. With events in particular, there are many moving pieces. They almost need you to be a therapist sometimes and realize you are not alone in this. That is part of the messages.
That’s a great way to put it. I feel a little bit like a fossil making this observation, but so much of what my colleagues and I did when I first got in the business back when dinosaurs roamed the land in the early 1990s, everything was phoned and faxed. I don’t even think the email was a thing back then. There is so much automation, and everything is very digital that I will be diplomatically insistent.
A lot of my colleagues, both my partners here, as well as my industry colleagues, to the point you made two minutes ago about anything else. You can’t ask anything else over email or text. That is got to be eyeball-to-eyeball. That is why having these conversations over Zoom or Teams, there is more of a dialogue. It can be more conversational.
There is a famous speaker who came of age in the late ‘80s. He had a great firm that has stuck with me for three decades that is prescription before diagnosis is malpractice. It’s a lot about that to the extent you are making recommendations before you have heard the whole story and unpack all the nuances of the meeting landscape and direction.
There is such a huge ecosystem there that to have that conversation, and to the point you made asking open-ended questions, “What else would you like me to know about?” The stuff you pick up in those dialogues. Sometimes it is not possible if you are working with an agency or a production company and you are a couple of degrees from Kevin Bacon. You are not right at the coalface. It is a little bit of the telephone game. You don’t get that granular detail.
When you are talking with a CMO or a director of events, and they have a seat at the table, they understand the details and nuance of how they are putting that together with the energy and the theme, and where they sit in the evolution of their company and organization. When you have the dirt under your fingernails familiarity with everything they are dealing with, it makes you pick up these minute details in what they are communicating. To the extent you know the minute details, background, experience, and history of the speakers, you can make those connections that are hard to do when you get a macro, generic, or general brief.
[bctt tweet=”‘Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.'” username=”John_Livesay”]
Sometimes if you are talking about the details, it can be as simple as when you land or get to your hotel, text the bureau and the client. Let everybody know you are there. That is one less thing they have to worry about, especially if there is bad weather, canceled flights, or 100 other things. That requires a speaker to not be self-focused the whole time and realize that you are just one cog in this big wheel. If you can take that, that is one of the easiest things you can do to be known as someone who is easy to work with.
From what I have heard from having the pleasure of being with you in person here in Austin, that is a big criteria on which speakers you recommend. Are they easy to work with? That is one thing you can do to be easy to work with. Are there other things that people should be aware of? Is that a competitive advantage of being responsive and easy to work with? I love you to speak a little bit about that.
If you look at a pie chart of these are the things that the event marketer and meeting professional has to worry about for the annual sales kickoff or the global customer conference, there are enumerable things they have to chase after and that are keeping them up at night. If you are a 6% slice of the pie chart, but you are 45% of the headache, you are upside down there.
I want to come back to what you said. Are there things that the speaker can do? The days and hours leading up to the start of a huge event are filled with heart attack emergencies and migraine headache-inducing problems that the event owners have to solve in real-time. Meetings start on Thursday morning, and here it is Tuesday afternoon and we have a huge problem. They got to figure that out.
That is not the time for a speaker or a bureau to be in their hair asking about AV tech needs or something that could have been dealt with several weeks earlier, straightforward and simple. We tend to think of that 2-week or 3-week zone leading up to the event. You got airfare, air itineraries, and ground transit. You will be like, “We will figure out the tech check as we get closer.” There are those things that are a bit more plastic in real time. If there is anything that can be taken care of far in advance, it should be taken care of far in advance.
What experience bring is anticipating problems before critical thinking in action. It is what you described. One of the things that I’m also impressed with because I’ve had the privilege of meeting not just you but several other people virtually and then in person, Lisa Warren and Jenna George, is this incredible loyalty. This is the problem that many companies of any industry of any size struggle with. How do we attract good talent? Done. How do we keep them?
The loyalty factor is huge in speaking. I’m sure a lot of people will go, “I got to lean in here.” Rich is the president. He probably sets the tone. There must be some culture that keeps people from being wooed away. For whatever reasons, people leave jobs because people say, “They don’t leave the job. They leave their boss.” I’m guessing reading goes into it as well, making people feel they have concerns and flexibility. If you had to boil it down to one tip you could give people who have employees, what could they do to keep people loyal?
First of all, thank you for your generous observation. The principles of this company are proud of our brand and our reputation. One of the things that we are most proud of, as you rightly noted, is the tenure of our team. Yes, if you have seen my business card, it says president on it. I am lucky to be surrounded by incredibly smart people and partners. It is not remotely a lonely experience because there is a new problem to figure out every day, and I don’t have a patent on being right. My wife would certainly confirm that I don’t have all the answers. I don’t have all the answers.
The extent to which we are a collaborative operation, and this is a long-winded answer to your question. It is a little bit hack need and almost a trope that the proverb like, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” We are emblematic of that. We have been in the business for 33 years. We must have some level of tenacity and longevity in the business.
It is a function of going together that every single time we run into something, somebody’s background and industry connection, the way someone is wired, whether it is a fellow agent, colleague, or journalist who is deeply involved in finance. Everybody has their little niche of experience. The collaborative nature certainly helps out. It is certainly not unique to our company or us.
Some of my best friends in the industry at other companies also have ESOPs. They also have some of the key staff that are stakeholders and shareholders in operation. I’m thinking of the company that went flying out of my head, Upstate, New York, a yogurt manufacturer founded by a Turkish entrepreneur. All of his employees are part owners in the company.
Broker Of Fairness: If you are a 6% slice of the pie chart, but you are 45% of the headache, you are upside down there.
Is it Chobani?
Yes, I see it in the grocery store every time I go. He is looking at the world through a prism of abundance and realizing that you can’t dominate your team and ring their best effort out of them without them coming along for the ride. Any successful operation has that notion of, “We are all in this together. Whether we fail to succeed, this is our success or problem.” If you look at a company like Chobani, it is emblematic of the notion that when people feel like their opinion matters, their perspective is valued, and they have a stake in the action, how can that not breed loyalty in ownership and buying?
I want to take that one step further. Thank you for that wonderful answer, and show it as not just nice to have. You are not spending a lot of time training and interviewing people. One of my favorite phrases as a sales keynote speaker is, “What this means to you is?” When you are presenting your bureau to a big company, and they are saying, “We are looking at you and two other bureaus. One of our big points of differences is we have one of the most, if not the most, loyal teams out there.”
You insert the phrase, “What this means to you is?” You can start painting that picture of if someone has got a turnover all the time and you are working with the bureau that has a different agent servicing you year after year. There are no history and no frame of reference. You are starting from ground zero versus us. We have a history together. That allows us to build on that history together. There is a shortcut in a language we develop and trust. That is the other ROI that people don’t always put together and connect those dots.
Some of my aging colleagues who have these incredibly immersed, deep, and loyal connections where they know the entire events team have spent innumerable hours at these events and chasing after things that are maybe technically one of my principal partners of the last 25 years. I think of him at an event and receiving this celebrity who had traveled to the event with her toddler in the entertainment industry.
He found out at the 11th hour that the car service that had said they had a child’s seat did not have a child’s seat. This car service, like an hour, needed to go pick up this celebrity at the airport. It is like probably a Lincoln Town Car thing. There he was. He was running off to Target to purchase with his company credit card a car seat.
Nowhere in your job description say, “You will be responsible for purchasing a car seat.” There is enormous loyalty that is earned on the part of the agent to the degree they are swimming in the water column with the event pro onsite, “We found out about this problem.” To the degree, we as a team are able to say, “No problem, we will chase it down.” That creates an enormous amount of connection and loyalty that is not unique to us. There are lots of other colleagues I have in the industry that would do the same thing, but I think buyers, to a great degree, understand who is leaning in and who is phoning in it.
Any last thought or a quote you want to leave us with, Rich?
My colleagues love to give me heat and static. As my Scottish mother would say, “That is good. It will knock the sharp corners off you.” I don’t have any sharp corners left, but one of the things they tease me about, and it is well earned, and I am guilty as charged, is how somewhat hand-ringing and OCD to the extent to which I overthink things.
One thing I have been trying to embrace and move forward on, and I can’t remember who said it, or it could be a dozen different people that have said it, but the quote I read that stuck with me was, “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.” That notion of the 1.0 version of whatever you try that is new, might not be your best effort and product. You might be trying, but the end result might not be the best.
As one of your guests shared, when you were talking about speaking with Wayne Dyer’s 74th birthday, “Did I live the same year 74 times in a row or 74 different years?” I’m butchering that quote, but the point is to try new things, get outside your comfort zone, and be okay with doing it poorly because you can’t get to the 6.0 or 7.0 version of anything without doing the 1.0 or 2.0 average mediocre.
[bctt tweet=”Loyal employees create value.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That is something that you asked for. Is there anything you like to say in closing? That would be it. All of us during a time of such, it is awfully hack needs observation, but we live in a time where market change, technology change, and all the tools that we have at our disposal are changing fast, radically, and yet so powerfully that we need to be comfortable.
Particularly me, I need to be comfortable with maybe coloring outside the lines once in a while and being okay with imperfection because I’m not like that. I have colleagues who I admire because they are quick to try new things and new approaches. I’m a little too hand-ringing in the corner with a T-square and a protractor. In this day and age, that is not how to be.
Thanks for inspiring us to remember to loosen up a little bit, how to create people who are loyal by letting them feel seen and heard and creating a culture of us, and more importantly, reminding us all that we can all lean in a little bit more instead of phoning it in. Rich, if someone wants to hire speaking, what is the best place to send them to?
They can certainly go to our website, which is SpeakInc.com. We are on social media and everybody’s got an email.
Thanks for sharing your wit and your wisdom with us, Rich.
It is a pleasure, John. I admire how present you are, and it is super fun talking to you.
Likewise.
Important Links
- SpeakInc
- Rich Gibbons – LinkedIn
- International Association of Speakers Bureau
- Corporate Event Marketing Association
- Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus
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Build Your Tribe with Philip Folsom
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
It is not anymore about the team, it is now about the tribe. Industry leader in team building and leadership Philip Folsom shares how to build your tribe in business and in life. Moving away from the concept of a team, a tribe has become the people who are beyond acquaintances or transactional business partners. Philip talks about how to build a legitimate relationship-based collaborative connection. He gives great insights into creating an environment where people feel safe and healthy, which ultimately increases productivity and loyalty. Making a play on words, he also puts forward the notion that to decide is connected to suicide and homicide where you are literally killing off other ideas. Philip goes deep into all of this as he lays down in metaphors on why we need better relationships in our businesses.
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Listen To The Episode Here
Build Your Tribe with Philip Folsom
My guest is Philip Folsom. He’s gone into the dark woods. What he learned there is that individuals and organizations can do and be anything if two things are in place. One, a model of success and two, the tools to reach it. He’s got game-changing tools that have improved over 500,000 people’s lives in the last many years through his work. He’s acknowledged he’s an industry leader in team building and leadership, especially the Los Angeles High Ropes Challenge courses where he has a Professional Development Adventure Program. He came from Washington State. He has a great story he’s going to share about being raised by a single mom and joining the Army at seventeen. His own hero’s journey of hitting rock bottom and coming back up and helping everyone who works with him and encounters him heal. Philip, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. It’s a pleasure and an honor being here.
I like to ask my guests to take us back as far as they want to the story of origin. Did you always know you loved animals? Tell us about your journey. You can you can start when you joined the Army or you can start earlier than that. I want to give people a timeline of what happened to you that caused you to become an expert in this.
Part of the theme when we talk about the hero’s journey or any type of narrative related to that is that it’s only by going into the shadow that we are able to excavate our gold. That’s a vital component of my story and all of ours. I grew up in classic pre-trauma environments of some neglect and some poverty. It was pretty abject challenges when I was growing up. My dad left early. I went into the Army at seventeen. Like a lot of us, I didn’t go in out of patriotism. I went in there as a means of escaping the situation I was in. In the Army, I had some acute trauma piled on top of chronic trauma. When I got out it was brought to my attention that I had some challenges that I had to deal with. I dropped out of grad school and went on to as a contemporary Vision Quest experience where I studied meditation. I studied equestrian therapy and Outward Bound adventure programming and archery.
What I discovered about myself was that there was healing to be done. It was a choice that became available to me. One of the big themes is the choices of the function of awareness. A lot of people simply aren’t realizing that they have the opportunity to heal and expand and grow and connect and claim the title of hero of their own story. I was always a minor character. In fact, inside of me, there still is a little kid who is marginalized, unsuccessful and terrified of being revealed. I have to acknowledge him. I keep him right next to me. I don’t let him get behind me. I don’t let him blindside me and undermine me. I want to have that little rat sitting right next to me so I can keep an eye on him. I can choose to have him sit down. I get to be the full king of my kingdom now instead of the minor Prince character.
[bctt tweet=”Going beyond team building is tribe building. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Let’s talk a little bit about the equestrian therapy and how that tie into also what you’re doing with the SPARTA Project?
Equestrian therapy is incredibly powerful. My horse guru is Cheyenne Price. She’s an amazing six-foot blonde horse guru. She has the ability to utilize her animals and tap directly into whatever secret stuff is going on. Horses are prey, which is different than us. We are predators. We have eyes in the front and we are designed for acquisition. One of the secrets of success is to be able to turn whatever it is that we want to have a shift in our life into an acquisition story instead of an avoidant story. Predators don’t like to lose anything including weight. Instead of losing weight, I want to gain fitness. All of a sudden, this reticulate activating system gets triggered and we look for opportunities to gain fitness. The horses are the opposite. They are prey animals, so they move away from energy. It’s a different dynamic. If you can learn how that communication system works, all of a sudden it allows us this tremendous desktop experience of being able to manage our emotions and connect with those things. They see right through you.
The moment you walk into the round pen, here’s a big naked 2,000-pound animal that knows exactly what’s going on with us energetically. We’ve stuffed down our animal nature to the point where we are in our head a lot of the time. Horses can’t afford to do that and they don’t have that available. They know if you’re a bully. They know if you’re an impostor. When I trump in with all of my masculinity and my boots and whatnot, they call me immediately on it like, “You’re not all that.” Come down to your real level and then we can engage with a conversation and a relationship that’s healthy. Once you’ve earned that respect and trust, now we can engage with some different forms of more robust conflict. The horses are one of the animals I use. The other one are wolves. That’s probably not been my favorite thing over the last couple of years.
In fact, your tagline is, “The time of the lone wolf is over.” If you wouldn’t mind sharing why does a lone wolf cry? How does that relate to wolves never biting each other as dogs do? That’s a fascinating insight you have.
We have to start with the reality that we are pack animals. In addition to being predators, we’re pack animal. We have things called mirror neurons, which is this synaptic, legitimate neuron-type that we have that gets triggered when we are connected with another member of our tribe. It releases serotonin. It also is the source of empathy and compassion. We need each other. We need it at a cellular level if we’re going to feel good about ourselves. Wolves are the same. Wolves are also a pack animal. They’re predators. They have mirror neurons and so do horses. What’s happened in our society is that instead of being in our kinship-based tribal systems, we have gotten successful that we’re living in these giant mega tribes. We have moved out of that sweet spot of about 50 to 75 people that we can maintain deep relationships with. We’ve shifted from being personal, connected and collaborative, vision, mission, value-sharing partners to these impersonal relationships we move around with and it’s anxiety-producing for us.
Build Your Tribe: One of the secrets of success is to be able to turn whatever it is that we want to have a shift in our life into an acquisition story instead of an avoidant story.
What happens is when we’re looking at the big drivers of wellness, health and success, it comes down to relationships. This has been studied scientifically from not only longevity but in your specific field of sales and business success. It’s all about relationships and getting those skills. The wolves, why I use them are that they are designed to hunt big game. We are also designed to hunt big game. Except for our big game now and we start looking at our lives is the game of doing something that provides meaning, purpose, service and something bigger than us. If we are going to be able to move towards those big goals in our life, we need other people. We need them beyond an acquaintance or a transactional business partner, but a legitimate relationship-based collaborative connection.
It always comes down to the team and over and over. No matter how big or small the company is, it’s how well does that team get along and respect each other.
Beyond team is a tribe. The tribe is people who are not only connected at a mission or accomplishment level and a visual level which is here’s our job. Beyond the job is what’s the why? What’s the meaning? Why does this exist? Why am I being willing to share and donate eight hours of my day to this cause? It needs to be that important. That’s a tribe.
Part of the way the wolves operate as a pack in their particular tribe is they may fight, but they don’t ever bite each other. Can you explain the difference of how dogs fight versus wolves and how that impacts us in our business life?
When we need somebody, if you have a partner that you need to be able to show up and deliver for you to sell a house or in the case of SpaceX to be able to get to Mars. You’re talking big game stuff. You need those people to do their job. You can’t afford to have them be compromised in any way, which means instead of vague, undermining, politicking gossip, competing with those people. You want to now be reciprocal and be the best cheerleader those people you can because they are an extension of yourself. When we’re talking about tribal or partnership relationships, you want that partner to be absolutely at their sharpest, their most powerful and they’re most resilient. You can’t afford to undermine them. In the case of wolves, they can’t afford to bite each other. It takes ten wolves to pull down an elk.
[bctt tweet=”Choice is a function of awareness.” username=”John_Livesay”]
If they compromise the strength of the pack by infighting, they all starve. This is a hard-wired behavior amongst the wolves because they have that taboo against biting each other. It’s a survival mechanism. All of a sudden, they have the opportunity to express and discharge conflict almost nonstop. They squabble. They talk. They snarl. They posture. They also play because once they have discharged any of that immediate conflict that they’re having, then they get to be completely clean with each other. They run off and play and engage with whatever they’re doing without having that weird, toxic, stuffed down experience that we have when we can’t express our feelings. Sigmund Freud calls that the Theory of Hydraulics, “Whatever we shove down, it’s coming out somewhere else.”
I’ve heard the term that it’s leaking out the anxiety or the stress. What you’re doing with the SPARTA Project, it’s a non-profit for veterans and emergency first responders who are dealing with post-traumatic stress. How does your work with the wolves if at all impact that? What are you doing to help people overcome that?
We are running a cohort. It’s a five-day residential free program for veterans and first responders. This is an all-female cohort starting. We’re proud to be running this program. We run off donations. If you or somebody else you know is interested in giving back to a lean, non-profit, TheSPARTAProject.org is the name of that. We use what’s called a parallel process, which means we are going through this journey along with the veterans because all the good facilitators, all the good storytellers, yourself included. You’ve come from a place where you had to go on that journey. You had to go into the woods and you discovered that the only way out is through. We have to get all the way through the story. We have to resolve.
It’s different than the medical model where there’s a smart person telling you how you should live your life or how you should refill your strategic objectives at work. Good people are co-creators. You mentioned that even when you’re talking about engaging with your clients in a co-creation process. It’s the difference between a doctor and a midwife. The doctor gets to deliver the baby. The mothers who are reading this blog, you know the doctor didn’t deliver the baby. You delivered the baby. The truth is that we’re here to facilitate the creation of whatever that project or healing is for our clients and where they are to be. Sometimes a cheerleader, sometimes its support, sometimes it’s an accountability partner.
That’s what we’re doing with the veterans and first responders are we’re going through this journey with them because we’ve been through the dark woods. We know what’s in there. We know the road that will get us out. The wolves heal each other. Here’s another shout out to a great lean nonprofit, ApexProtectionProject.org. They rescue and rehabilitate wolves and wolf dogs that have been abused, mistreated and neglected. They bring them out to their sanctuary. They slowly integrate them into their healthy pack and the pack heals the wolves. This is how we as humans are going to heal each other are that we need to build the relationships. We need to be able to discharge our shame. We need to be able to go through and feel the pain and get honest with each other. This is true at a relationship level and also at an organizational level. When you’re looking at all the big societal challenges that are happening in our industries, at some point we’re going to have to go all the way through this piece and get the healing done.
Build Your Tribe: In our own journeys, we had to go into the woods and discover that the only way out is through.
The other thing that is surprising about you because you present an extremely alpha male. The way you dress and the fact that you’re outdoors with animals and wolves and horses. You’ve got the hat. You’ve got the whole Indiana Jones vibe going on. Yet you also spent several years as a professional ballet dancer. I’m fascinated to hear that story. How did you go from being in the Army and hitting rock bottom? Ballet is traditionally something that people start very young or something that typically only wealthy people are involved with. It’s a cultural artsy niche. How did that come about?
If I have received any divine blessings, one of them is the ability to go on weird journeys that for some reason people are not allowed to do. I can thank my strange parents for that. I grew up on a commune. I grew up pretty alternative and maybe that little chunk of experience allowed me to go on some weird journeys that are different than other people. Thanks, mom, thanks dad for that. One of them was I got out of the military and I had to take a PE class in community college. I was going through all of my challenges and trying to reintegrate. I was trying to do things as far off of the military as I could. I was looking for balance. The military is highly structured. It’s hyper-masculine. Here was an opportunity to get a PE credit and do something that was much more expressive and much softer. I took a ballet class in a community college. I enjoyed it. It was fun. The teacher said, “I’d be willing to give you some free classes if you come down and do some of the partnering work.”
I was out of the Army. I was twenty years old and strong. It sounded like fun to me. I was taking classes one evening and a bunch of strangers showed up in the class that I hadn’t seen before. I was taking classes with kids. It turned out it was an audition class for the Spokane Ballet Company. There weren’t any tall guys and the prima ballerina of the Spokane Ballet at the time was Rachel Ferrelli, a big six-foot Italian lady. The ballet director said, “Have you ever wanted to be a dancer?” I said, “What does that mean?” “I’m looking for a partner for Rachel Ferrelli and all you got to do is learn how to partner well and look good in tights.” I said, “Let’s do that.” It led me down to Los Angeles. I danced at the Los Angeles Ballet and I danced with a bunch of companies down here. I was never a good dancer. I had done enough martial arts and I looked good in tights.
I know a lot of professional athletes, football players, in particular, do a lot of ballet work to be agile and things. It all fits into your work because you’re working with companies like Sony, DreamWorks and Apple helping them as a high-performance tribe culture coach. Can you tell us what that looks like? Who would hire you? What problem are you solving typically? Give us an example or story of an outcome of someone after working with you.
Stepping back from that, I spent many years doing team building at a local company in Los Angeles. What I was noticing is that it wasn’t changing anybody. I was seeing the same clients that would show up year after year. They were having the same challenges. I realized something that our industry is doing is not creating sustainable results. I’m in my 50s right now. We start looking at legacy. You start thinking about the purpose. What impact did I leave with this? Did I move the conversation forward? I would define that as the transition from passion, which is kindling, it burned hot, fast and easy. It’s me-centric and then transitioning from that passion into purpose, which is like a big log. It’s something that carries a tremendous amount of energy, but it’s hard to get it lit. We get to into this point in our career where we’ve got a lot of skills and we’ve done our 10,000 hours to achieve mastery. We start looking at those bigger purpose conversations of, “What I want to do in the world?” Usually, it’s not about us anymore. It’s about what’s the service component. I eventually started realizing that I had to do a couple of things in my career if I was going to achieve organizational transformation with my clients.
[bctt tweet=”It’s only by going into the shadow that we are able to excavate our gold.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I needed to start understanding strategy. I also needed to start understanding the culture of the organization because it’s easy to change people short-term. If we go out and do something together, there’s going to be an immediate boost in morale, trust and some other fast-burn drivers of energy. We immediately are going to revert back to our baseline of behavior and that baseline is culture. We need to be able to go into a culture and we need to fix that. What is culture? What are the components of it? That was when I got to start growing in my true passion, which beyond healing people is understanding humanity. I studied Paleoanthropology at UCLA. How does our species work? It turns out that journey is a perfect dovetail to upgrading the culture of organizations because the reality is we’re no longer kinship-based animals. We are career-based. Our work teams are the new tribes. That is the anthropological reality.
I’ve studied with the Maasai in Africa and all over the world. When we go in to study these people, there are certain formats about looking at how a culture works. That’s the same thing that business consultants are doing. They’re going in and going, “How was your alignment with vision? Does everybody understand exactly what the mission parameters are? Your strategy? Your tactics? How is morale? How are your values operating?” This is straight anthropology work, but it also allows people to co-create and participate in their culture. This is that time where we get to now have access to all of this tremendous information of humanity and be able to create the cultures that we want to have at work, which is hopefully they’re going to be healthy. More importantly, they’re going to be high-performing. That means we’re going to be able to be competitive, innovative, resilient and have high retention. These are all things that from a business standpoint are the primary profit drivers of the business. Culture does that for them. I work at SpaceX. I do a lot of work with Red Bull. I work at Universal and other industries.
What you’re helping them do is create a safe environment where people can express concerns or confusion or even new ideas without being heavily ridiculed or criticized. That healthy feedback loop from working with you on adjusting their culture allows companies to attract and retain top employees and to even be more productive with those that are there.
One of the unique things that myself and some other people are doing is that you cannot decrease safety. It doesn’t work. Creating safe spaces at universities where there’s no hate talking, it’s not ever going to work. At some point, you have to shape an environment where people are either resilient enough to handle pushback or they’re treating each other as extensions of themselves. At which point they can give feedback, but they’re not biting each other. You cannot write trust and safety up on the break room wall and go, “Now we have a safe environment.” It doesn’t change anything. You have to shape the environment so that it’s changing behavior.
You do that by taking people out into nature and doing all these group activities together that build trust and bonds as opposed to being an intellectual concept.
Build Your Tribe: When we make a decision, we’re killing other ideas.
Those big challenging activities, which are my adventure Vision Quest stuff. I do ropes courses and other big epic things. Those are not creating character, they are only revealing it. The creation process happens during reflection and process. This is one of the things that we don’t do well and most organizations don’t because we are over-programmed and we don’t have time to reflect. A lot of the time we are simply jumping right into, “What’s happening in Q2? We need to get those numbers.” There needs to be that moment of breath where we go, “Are we in alignment? Are we creating the outcomes and the experience that we want to have?” This is something that is on a micro level with us and also on the macro level with big industries is there should be at least some breath in between Q1 and Q2 where you go, “Are we in alignment with our vision and values? Are those things correct?”
When we make a decision, we’re killing other ideas. In the business world, if you’re in sales, in particular, you’re asking people to buy what you’re offering. Therefore, you have to have some empathy that if they buy what you’re selling, they’re going to be making some changes and other options or ideas are therefore being killed off. Can you elaborate on that? It also helps people with addictions, which was mind-boggling to me with food. Anything you can talk about around that would be interesting?
When we look at the word decide, it contains the same entomological root as a homicide, suicide. It means in Latin to cut or kill. When I decide something, I’m killing off my other options. In economics, that will be your opportunity cost. If I want to find out how I’m making decisions, I need to pop the hood and take a look at what are my priorities. Even the word ‘priorities’ is a new term. Usually, that’s only a priority. It’s singular. What is the one priority of all those hundreds of things that I want to experience more of in my life? What’s the one that bubbled to the top and I made that decision and killed off all the rest of those things? That one top priority would be my highest operating value. When we’re looking at either individual or organizational decision making, change management. If we want to ever get in the driver’s seat of being able to make intentional directional courses as we move through our world, I need to at some point take a look at what are my values? Those values are driving the decisions of the things that I’m killing off. Organizational values are not simply a fun thing to put on your website in the break room. If they’re correctly implemented, then they are guiding the navigation of your organization.
Philip, you’ve been a great guest. Your website is PhilipFolsom.com. They can sign up for a newsletter. What’s the best place to follow you on social media might be?
I’m Philip Folsom at LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. That’s my website as well. Please jump on my newsletter because there is more of this strange esoteric but hopefully relevant and powerful information coming. In addition, there’s a monthly open program for people who want to spend a day with the wolves and me. There are cool change agents and seekers. I encourage you to stay involved. Keep changing the world and that starts with ourselves. It’s been an absolute honor, John.
[bctt tweet=”People don’t realize that they have the opportunity to heal, expand, grow, connect, and claim the title of the hero of their own story.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Thanks, Philip. It’s been insightful, entertaining and inspiring. I can’t wait to keep up with new ways you are impacting the world with animals and tribes.
Links Mentioned:
- Philip Folsom
- Outward Bound
- SPARTA Project
- SpaceXApexProtectionProject.org
- LinkedIn – Philip Folsom
- Instagram – Philip Folsom
- Facebook – Philip Folsom
- www.wolftribe.life
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