Brian Fielkow - Leading People Safely: How to Win On The Business Battlefield

In 3, 2, 1.

Welcome back to Becoming Preferred, the podcast for business professionals and entrepreneurs who want to stand out, level up their game, and become the best version of themselves.

Every leader listening to this wants three flawless operational excellence, absolute team accountability, and a bulletproof culture.

Yet so many organizations get it completely wrong.

They mistake rigid compliance for culture and they mistake punishment for accountability.

Our guest today cracked the code on how to align these elements to drive massive enterprise value.

Brian Falco is a veteran corporate executive, the former CEO of Jetco Delivery, and an organizational performance expert who has spent three decades leading companies in high risk, high hazard industries.

He is the author of the upcoming book Making Safety Happen.

But today we are exploring the universal business principles that apply to any company, from startups to tech giants.

We're talking about how to break down silos, build unshakable employee trust, and design bulletproof processes that eliminate dangerous shortcuts.

Join me now for my conversation with Brian Felko.

Well, hi Brian.

Welcome to the program.

We're delighted to have you, Michael, thank.

You for having me.

I'm excited about our program.

We haven't had someone with your expertise before talking about some of the things which we're going to talk about and Making Safety Happen in the Workplace.

That's your latest book.

And but basically you work on operational efficiency, improve business performance and strengthen culture, but with an emphasis on safety.

And so we're going to unravel that a little bit and unpack it for our listeners.

Let's go back in time though.

You're back in high school, you're deciding what you want to be when you grow up and you got lots of choices ahead of you.

Where are you living at the time and what did Brian want to be when he became an adult?

You know what the nice part about it is?

It's never a roadmap you can plan.

So if I'm sitting in high school, I'm in Appleton, Wisconsin.

That's where I grew up.

Applestone and I always had kind of entrepreneurial itch.

Both my parents had businesses and wound up going to University of Wisconsin for undergrad and then Northwestern for law school.

And I practiced law for about six or seven years in Milwaukee, servicing primarily privately held businesses, entrepreneurial businesses, and wound up going to work as the chief operating officer for one of them very large family held recycling company.

And you know, being in that in the recycling business was the first time where I really sort of understood and learned about taking whatever it is you have, your product or your service and decommoditizing it.

I mean, for the most part, a bale of cardboard, trust me, is a bale of cardboard.

But yet we were selling ours for 20, $30 a ton above the market.

And it was really interesting to learn why.

It's where I started to begin to realize that people buy not necessarily they pay a premium, not necessarily for what you sell, but for how you deliver, for your reliability.

And I became fascinated in that business, learning about how you take an offering that the outside world might perceive as commoditized and decommoditize it.

So we sold pelts to Waste Management.

That brought me from Wisconsin down to Houston where Waste is headquartered.

Worked there for a couple of years as their executive vice president of the recycling business, but still had the entrepreneurial itch.

So I looked for a business to buy and bought a company in Houston called Jetco Delivery.

Bought it, we grew it significantly, turned it into kind of a leading mid sized provider of freight and freight brokerage services in the Gulf coast.

Sold that to a Montreal based company in 2019.

And throughout that period, that's where we come back to safety is.

I really got interested in safety because first of all, when you're in the businesses I was in, it's table stakes, you've got to be focused on it.

But I saw it as a way to decommoditize us too.

It separated us from a lot of the competition and that allowed us to attract and retain better employees and value align customers.

So it was a journey that I never could have predicted back in high school, but that's where we landed.

And now I help companies, you know, with leadership, safety, performance issues.

What a good background, because it teaches you to look at things in an analytical way, I think, anyway.

But let's talk about how you add it to the commodity, because I think that's an interesting part.

I believe that too.

You got three bags of rice, bag of rice, bag of rice, all sell for $10.

How do you add value?

So you kind of touched on it.

You've got a bale of cardboard, what kind of value?

So how, how would you apply safety to it?

Because I think a lot of our listeners have businesses, they're competing in tough marketplaces and kind of unpack that a little bit.

What can we add to the commodity?

And you kind of gave a hint there about the value and mutual value.

How did you do it and what would you do?

Well, in the recycling business, the premium may not have come necessarily from our commitment to safety.

It came from reliability.

Our customers were paper mills and they needed the Recovered paper in order to run.

And if they run out, the mill shuts down.

So if we committed to deliver a thousand tons a month, well, that's what we were going to deliver.

People knew they could sleep at night.

And so our reliability, we allowed customers, the paper mills, to sleep at night in a way where other providers, you know, well, I'll sell you a thousand tons if I have them, but if there's a higher bidder, then I might not, you know, I mean, so.

But where safety really came into play in terms of decommoditizing the business was my own Jetco.

Because in, in trucking, safety is everything.

And you know, you're not in the four corners of a, of a plant, you're operating on the public roads, you're operating at your customers docs, your customers warehouses.

And so what safety meant to our customers is again that we were going to be representing them and their product.

Well, that, you know, we cared for their employees when we showed up at their facilities and that we were going to hopefully spend less time cleaning up the mess and more time running the business and what safety allowed us to do.

Because really in trucking, your driver is everything.

It allowed us to retain and attract the best drivers, which was critical to differentiating our service model and for hire trucking in some years, believe it or not, average turnover is 100% or more a year.

Now I don't know with 100% turnover, how you create a stable, predictable offering.

Ours was maybe 20%, which I still wanted to see it lower, but relative to the industry it was significantly less.

But it allowed our drivers to know the customers and visit them repeatedly.

It created for a more certain experience that you couldn't just get by posting availability on the Internet.

So it was core to decommoditizing the business?

No, it's smart.

You know, I've always thought there's five customer values, money being money, the obvious one time, can I get it there faster?

FedEx model, if you will, or hop on an airplane, will pay a premium for expedited service, prestige or status.

But number four is reliability or security.

So you use the currency of reliability and security, probably make sure that they have things when you promise to deliver them.

And then the last one is knowledge and information.

So you probably kept them educated as well.

So it's employing all of those, you know.

Exactly, Michael.

And you have to sort of know who your customers and prospects are and who they're not.

And look, I mean money is important and so to say price is not important.

We know that's disingenuous.

But.

But price can only be important if it's an apples to apples competition.

In other words, if I saw a customer vetting their vendors or vetting their truckers, for example, and they were only going to work with and approve truckers that met their criteria, then price is the next step.

Right, because I'm competing against a group of similarly minded competitors, ones with similar values.

But if it's, hey, just.

I'm going to throw it out there, here's an rfp.

The cheapest guy wins.

We didn't even bid on that kind of stuff because, you know, we want it for a dollar, we would lose it for a dollar.

And we weren't necessarily competing against people that ran the business the same way.

So our feeling was price is critical.

Price is important, but only if it's an apples to apples scenario.

Yeah, 100%.

Well, if they come to you for price, they'll leave you for price.

We always say price is never the issue unless it is the issue.

And when it's the issue, it's the only issue.

So it's about adding all those other things.

So I'd love to hear you do that.

Let's kind of move into culture, accountability, and operational excellence, because those are all fitting into your domain.

Why do most organizations fail to bridge the gap between high ideals and daily execution, in your mind?

I guess a couple different reasons.

First of all, it's culture.

And when we think about culture, if I just oversimplify it, the convergence of the right people and the right process working together, right?

If we can get that part right, then we've got the foundation of a healthy culture.

And to start off, it's gotta be leader driven.

So, you know, leaders have to kind of communicate, embody, articulate the culture.

Where are we going?

What are our values?

What does success look like?

What do we reward?

What do we incentivize?

What do we tolerate?

What do we look the other way on?

And when there's a mismatch between the words and the actions that can kind of start to erode culture.

It can kind of put a crack in the foundation.

So I think a lot of the reasons sometimes that you've got this disconnect is leader intention, what's said versus leader operationalizing it, what is actually done.

Those have to match.

Employees have to see and understand the direction.

If we stay in the safety context.

I was taught earlier in my career that safety is behavior based, meaning that, you know, it happens based on how employees behave.

And I've learned Over the years, that's grossly oversimplified because employees adjust their behavior to the environment in which they work.

So what's paramount is that leaders create the environment that's designed to produce the desired outcome.

If that environment's not there, whatever the leader might want to happen is purely aspirational.

You need the systems, the process.

People need to kind of enter, plug in to an existing system process.

It can't be.

Just go ask Joe down the hall.

He'll tell you how to do it.

It doesn't work that way.

So when you've got the convergence of the right leadership with carefully designed, taught and communicated systems and processes, that's when you bridge that gap.

Without it, again, you've got aspiration over here and the reality our front lines live over there.

And sometimes the two rarely, if ever, meet.

Well, you talk about a direct connection between culture, accountability and operational excellence.

And most leaders I know want all three of those.

But many completely miss the mark when they try and tie them all together.

Where do most organizations get this wrong?

Where do they miss this?

A couple different areas.

First of all, let's stick with systems and process, okay?

You can have the best handbook and process manual or whatever you want to call it in the world, but if it's not understandable by the audience for whom it's intended, you don't have process.

You have words on paper.

So what I saw in our case was we would have.

We would pull a handbook off the shelf.

We'd buy it from a, you know, outside company.

Maybe it was written at a collegiate level.

Our employees may have read at a seventh or eighth grade level.

Well, it's not understandable.

So we had our drivers, our professional drivers write the handbook.

We called it the Jetco Way.

And, you know, did they actually write it with a pen and paper?

Close, but not quite.

What we did is we asked our.

We asked subject matter experts.

Pick a task.

We asked subject matter experts, four or five of them to come in.

We put them in a room with a good writer, and we said, how is this done?

Then the writer wrote it up.

And then the drivers went back and said, yeah, that's right, approved it.

So they told us.

And then we documented the right way of doing these processes.

It created ownership for the process that's so often lacking.

And it was written in a way that people could understand it.

It was written, you know, in the old days, right, with a three ring, so that when you learned a better way of doing something, you pop it out and improve the process.

It can't be set in stone.

So.

So I think that one question is, you may have the processes, you may give somebody the 600 page handbook on day one of their employment, but do they really read it?

You know, probably not.

Do they understand it?

Maybe, maybe not.

It's got to be understandable then.

That's the spec that you have to train for.

You got to trust the process.

So continuous training on the core processes to me is more important than trying to find a new topic every week.

You know, you got to stay stick with the basics.

No, you're right.

I think leaders often treat culture like a slogan on the wall.

Like you said, it's in paper, it looks good.

And accountability is kind of like a hammer when things go wrong and operational excellence fails when there's a mismatch between what they say they value, what they actually reward or tolerate on a daily basis.

So I think you define that well.

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And now back to my conversation with Brian Falko.

Let's talk about accountability.

It's a massive buzzword in the corporate world, but it can easily morph into a culture of fear if handled incorrectly.

How do high performing organizations build a culture of high accountability where people take ownership of outcomes rather than just trying to avoid punishment?

Yeah, the first thing we got to do, Michael, when I speak, what I'll do is I'll put up like a legal disclaimer, just kind of sort of with a half smile saying when we get into accountability, I'm going to get kind of close to what attorneys might say.

But I'm not giving you legal advice.

You got to talk to your lawyer about that.

And then when I talk about accountability, I'm going to talk about how ridiculous progressive discipline is as traditionally practiced.

Right?

Progressive discipline in a lot of cases, you know what it looks like.

But the first strike is a verbal warning and then maybe a written warning and then maybe suspension and then maybe another suspension or termination.

The strike based method of disciplining, it breaks trust.

And I figured that if I held myself to those standards, I would have had to fire myself in the first week because I make a lot of mistakes.

So to me, it's a change in mindset.

And the mindset is just culture.

What just culture says instead of saying you've been trained and if you did, you were trained, you would be okay, you made a mistake, you'll be punished.

That's old school.

Just culture says this mistakes are human, humans make mistakes.

And what it really looks at is was it an honest mistake or was it deliberate, reckless, intentional behavior.

That is what dictates your response.

Now, most mistakes, massive percentage of mistakes we see in the workplace are honest mistakes.

So I don't see why you need to have a culture of punishment.

That so, you know, people equate accountability with punishment.

It's not when somebody makes an honest mistake, you coach, you look for systemic issues.

You look for opportunities for improvement, additional training.

And then if somebody disregards the rules, my blatant disregard in my old world, 50 miles an hour through a, well, Hallmark school zone, one strike might be all I need to see and we're done, right?

Deliberate, intentional, reckless behavior should be addressed one way.

Honest mistakes would be addressed another.

The mistake we make is we address them both the same way.

The other problem with accountability is we always look at the individual, right?

The man or woman whose hands were on the levers or whatever.

And sometimes that's where you need to look.

But you've also got to look in the mirror and understand that there's individual accountability and organizational accountability.

The organization has to hold itself accountable just as it does its employees.

No, that makes sense.

That's actually a good insight.

We don't see that a lot of the role models list.

I want to say the role models a lot of our leaders today, and the news is full of it, they don't take accountability.

They blame somebody else for what's happening or those outcomes.

And so I like that idea of there's really two parts.

Is it deliberate?

If it's deliberate and intentional, well, Then we got a major, you got a problem, we've got to deal with that.

There's a why is it that way?

Or what?

You know, what was the person thinking?

If it's an accident, we all do that as entrepreneurs.

We make mistakes.

I make mistakes every week.

You know, my team reminds me whatever I remind them.

But it's not a big deal.

Most things are fixable or salvageable or no one up to it.

Let's talk about building teams and building a unified team and breaking silos.

Because it's important to align these different arms of the business to run into a single high performing unit.

And you've done this in many businesses.

You see natural friction between different departments, whether it's compliance versus Sales, operations versus leadership.

How do you break down these deep seated silos to create a unified high performing organization where everybody's on the bus and pulling in the same direction?

You know, sometimes it's as simple as who you invite to the table.

A story I'll tell is that early in my career earlier owning Jetco, Monday morning I would have my operations meeting, operations leaders, and guess what I would hear?

The safety team doesn't get it.

They're not helpful, they're in the way, they understand the business.

Tuesday I'd have a safety meeting.

And you know what I would hear?

I would hear with operations, it's cat and mouse and they're not cooperative and they'll understand the need to comply with our policies, et cetera.

And I deduced only one thing and that was that my life was too short for this to continue.

So I killed those meetings and I had a joint safety and operations meeting.

That one change tore down so many of the silos, right?

We were in the room together.

We weren't leaving until the issues were resolved.

So who you invite to the table and sometimes if you're meeting, things are siloed.

You're going to get exactly what you built.

You built the silos and so don't be surprised when they're there.

Now other ways that we create silos or outcomes that we don't desire, well, what do you incentivize?

I mean again, to my safety example, right?

I mean, if all I paid our operations team on was product production and they didn't own safety, guess what I would get?

I would get speed rush produce.

And safety is not my problem, it's somebody else's problem.

So we made it really clear that as operational leaders, you are responsible for the execution of safety.

And that's taken into account in incentives and Recognition, monetary or non monetary.

But one of the biggest silos I would encourage people to think about is the one not so much departmental, but the one that separates the office or the managers from our front lines.

Too often frontline employees are unfairly left on the outside looking in.

And they're the ones that have the answers.

They are your subject matter experts.

If there's a production problem, a quality problem, a safety problem, whatever it may be, and yet we think we're the smartest guys in the room.

And I think that's a huge mistake.

So we had the same issue that anybody else in our industry had.

Drivers on the outside looking in.

It's even harder when they're a thousand miles away.

So we asked our drivers to elect a driver committee.

And what they did is they elected their leaders.

You know, leaders entitled leaders and positional authority are two different things.

I can't make you a leader.

Leadership is how you show up.

And the more that we were able to capture the power harness, the power of, of our frontline leaders, bringing them in.

And after that driver committee was elected, we didn't make a move on anything.

This isn't just safety.

This is safety.

Operations, pay routes, you name it.

We didn't make a move without consulting at least the chairman of the driver committee.

That broke down the silos, that opened up trust.

Perfect.

Of course not.

But light years different.

And I wish I could prove it to you, but anecdotally I know it that after we formed the driver committee, you give me a metric, whether it's safety, employee retention, service failures, customer satisfaction.

Everything improved because we broke down the silo.

We opened up the lines of communication and built trust.

Well, yeah, and you mentioned it.

Silos happen when departments have competing incentives.

So to break them down, you've got to have these key performance indicators, your KPIs, so that one department's win isn't another department's loss.

I'm reminded of.

I think it was an airline in your neck of the woods.

Continental.

Was Continental based in Houston.

I think they were.

They were.

And I remember Great Airline.

And they got, you know, absorbed with all the.

One of the majors.

I think with U.S. air or somebody or American picked them up.

But I remember if they finished in the top 3 of airlines on time, every single employee this was in the 90s and 2000s would get $100 added to their paycheck.

They get a check for $100 in the mail.

So the pilots, the rampies, the flight attendants, everybody was working at heart, and they were all Measured on, on time.

So if, if they didn't get it, they didn't get, no one got it.

The, the bonuses were off.

And it created that.

That was a simple KPI, just on time performance simple.

But it kept the alignment to.

They're all working together.

So the rampis are working with the flight attendants, working with the pilots and going and that coordination.

So I think that makes sense.

And I think like you say, make sure that you've got aligned key performance indicators that everybody's aware of and everyone benefits or nobody benefits.

So it's a powerful insight.

You spent three decades leading and advising companies in high risk, high hazard industries.

What are the universal real world leadership lessons from those extreme environments that apply to a standard corporate office or a retail chain or say a tech startup?

I really think that a lot of the principles are the same.

Even if you're in a business that doesn't carry with it significant safety risk.

Because people talk about safety culture like it's something special.

The reality is that safety culture and company culture are one and the same.

It's the same thing.

I mean, I could never imagine a company operating consistently, safely if the overall company culture was broken.

So to answer the question, the unifying factors I really do believe are leadership presence, leadership commitment and communication.

Right?

In other words, as leaders we have to be the standard bearers.

We can't just talk about values, we can't just put signs on the wal.

We have to live them.

We have to model what those values look like regardless of the industry.

And then employee engagement, whatever business you're in.

Look, we've all called somewhere for help, a vendor, a phone company, whatever.

And we've been transferred to 12 different departments.

Ain't my problem.

Ain't my problem.

Ain't my problem.

And you start to get really dejected and you gotta remember that your employees are your representatives to your customers and other stakeholders.

So that the more engaged they are, the more they are in line with where the company is going and the company's values.

And this is how we do business.

The more you create a loyal customer relationship and you get employees who stay.

And then we talked already about, about process.

And that's critical I think, especially as you're growing, right.

If your organization is small, you may be able to do this on tribal knowledge.

There's 10 people in the company, we know each other, we work together for years.

But as the company grows and you bring in new people and you simply can't rely on everybody to know the same thing or do things the Same way organically.

And that's where training and process and systems become absolutely critical.

Again, regardless of your business, if you want to deliver a unified, consistent, predictable experience, your customers come in expecting something, and that's what you deliver.

I think sometimes, and I look, I saw this in my own businesses, if, if you grow too fast, sometimes the delivery gets shaky and the customers are like, what the heck happened here?

You know, and.

And the more that you can focus on training, process, integrating properly your new employees, the more you can deliver that seamless experience.

I think that's an important one.

I just went through a major headache with an investment firm where I do all my own stock portfolio management and trading.

And they added a feature which was a security feature, but didn't tell anybody.

And so now I have to enter a PIN number.

So call them up and go, hey, what's my PIN number?

I have no idea.

And they're like, well, you need to call this number.

So I call that number and go through all the process of waiting to talk to a human.

And then they sent me back to the original number.

And I literally played that loop for several hours back and forth, and finally had to go into a branch somewhere and make a travel trip to in order to get it done.

And it's like, again, you got a broken system and a broken process which can make that difference.

So that makes sense.

And you talked about hyper focus on communication, clarity and process.

Let's talk about process design and stopping shortcuts.

These are creating workflows that people actually want to follow.

So we've seen it all.

A company creates a massive, beautifully detailed standard operating procedure, sop and within a month, the team has invented three shortcuts to bypass it or get around it.

How do you design an understandable process that actually works in the real world and that people want to follow?

To start, there has to be a clear understanding that our process is inviolable.

It's not negotiable.

So if it's on the books, that's how we do business.

Now, it doesn't mean that everything on the book is working perfectly right, but it means that there's a better way of doing things, that we keep our minds open and we adjust the process.

But the reason people do a workaround is a couple.

First of all, like I just said, it may be because we have a process on the books that really doesn't work that well.

Okay.

So that needs to be looked at quickly and.

All right, what is the better way of doing this task?

Whatever it is because if the real world doesn't match what the process, you're going to get workarounds.

But sometimes on the other side, people will view the process as too cumbersome.

And, you know, I can do this faster.

But the process exists for a reason.

And there's a saying that processes sometimes are written in blood, meaning that we've already learned this the hard way, we don't need you to teach it to us again.

And at that point, taking time to explain why the process exists, right?

Just do it.

Doesn't really work.

And I don't know if it worked with little kids, doesn't work with employees for sure.

So sometimes it's like, you may think there's a better way.

Okay, but this is what we learned five years ago, right?

We had this massive service failure, this massive issue.

This is why the process exists.

And we expect you to.

Even if there is a faster way to do it, this is what we expect you to do.

Because we need to have those safeguards in place.

So I think that you gotta make sure your process is work, that they match the real world, but that once they're on the books, like I said, they can't be negotiable because otherwise you're going to get 10 people doing 10 different things.

And the scariest thing with shortcuts is they work until they don't.

Meaning you can get away with stuff for a long time.

The best example would be a process that would prohibit this.

Prohibit, you know, driving while I'm on my phone.

Well, I could probably do for the next 100 days and not having anything go wrong.

But on day 101, guess what, you know, it's big.

And so the fact that something didn't go wrong doesn't mean the process is a good one.

It just might mean you're lucky.

So we have to sort of explain to our people why we've got to be open for better ways of doing things so that nothing is set in stone.

But as long as that process exists, we are going to follow it.

What if you were on a flight tomorrow and the pilot said, hey, look, we're running late, man.

So to make up some time, I'm skipping the checklist because this plane's okay.

I think we'd get off the plane, wouldn't we?

Yeah.

Well, it's funny you say that this thought came into mind.

I've been a pilot for about four decades, and I remember one time in Las Vegas, Atlanta, it was hot, it was over 100 degrees.

And I did the quick Version with little quick version.

And I forgot to just reset the trim, which is a small, little tiny adjustment.

And get gas, get everything taken care of, you know, get something cold to drink, started to take off running down the Runway, and the plane starts to porpoise at 30 knots shy of what it should be taking off at.

And all of a sudden I'm starting to bounce up and down and so I had to retard the throttles and bring it back.

And of course, air traffic control, what seems to be the problem?

Oscar, Victor, Mike.

And I pull over and realize I didn't go the check, that I mentally did it at one time and I forgot just to adjust the trim.

And so, you know, I, in confession, I just said, oh, I heard a funny noise.

I check it because I was embarrassed.

But never, I always will check that checklist.

And where we've had incidences is where people fail the checklist.

They take the shortcut, like you said.

So I think it's important.

Now you talked about the committee and bringing in drivers in different departments too.

How often should SOPs should our checklist should our processes should be maybe be examined once a quarter, once a year go through and say, is this still appropriate?

Does it need fixing?

Or keep them fluid, using the different departments to be able to add value to them.

Before I get to that one, I just want to go back to the checklist for a second and just recommend a book you're probably familiar with, but I want to recommend to your audience the Checklist Manifesto, by far one of the best books I've ever read about process, written by Dr. Atul Gwande.

And it's about his experience running a network of operating rooms in New York.

And they had all the process in the world, and they had highly educated people, of course, executing on those processes.

And bad things still happened.

So he took the operating room sops and converted it to a checklist that before every procedure, we follow the checklist.

After every procedure, we followed the checklist because it's about driving error out of the system.

We gotta.

We need to be reminded more than we need to be taught.

Just your example in Vegas.

Exactly right.

You.

You got it all done in your head, except that one thing, and that's just human.

We're human so that the more that we can take the process and design it for humans to drive error out of the system.

And I can think of no better way in any industry than checklists.

And I think pilots in the airline industry sets the standards for that.

So I wanted just to to comment on that real quickly.

No, makes sense.

Let's talk about trust, engagement and retention.

So we're shifting from a top down management style to employee ownership.

You advocate for building trust and engagement so that excellence is owned at every level rather than enforced from the top down.

So for an entrepreneur who feels like they're constantly policing their team, how do you make that transition to employee ownership?

I think first we need to get out of our minds that we police our team, right?

We've got adults and so we need to build our team.

That means look for training opportunities, make sure our team has all the tools they need to do their job.

But if you're busy, if you spend too much time policing, I would argue that maybe either there's something going on in the culture that has to be fixed, or you may have the wrong employees on the team.

And it's why it's so important to harness the power of the people who know how business is done, right?

Your frontline leaders.

Because look, I've never met a person in my life that bats a thousand on hiring and never probably will, right?

We're all going to bring in some people that maybe we later regret.

So to me, if you want to get away from policing, you're going to spend more time on educating, you're going to spend more time being visible, you're going to spend time on integration and orientation.

I get concerned because I see a lot of orientation programs, right?

You only have one chance and only one to make a first impression.

And if you blow it at orientation, you'll never have that chance to make the first impression on your employee again.

So to me, you really want to make sure that your day one is meaningful, that you've got an orientation program that's well designed.

Then you've got to recognize that I don't care how good your orientation program is, that first day, that first week, whatever it is, it takes a full six months to a year for an employee to fully integrate, fully assimilate into the organization.

So you want to be thinking about orientation, but then you want to be thinking about integration.

And so what happens on day 30, what happens on day 60, day 90 of a person's tenure with your organization?

Because what you do in the first couple weeks and then the first year, to me, have a large impact on how that employee will adjust to the culture.

You're sizing them up as much as they're sizing you up.

The integration period is critical in order to get value aligned employees who know how work is done.

You get that part, right?

Less time policing, more time building.

No, that makes sense.

And as you've said, it's bringing the man, invite him to help solve the problems and shape those processes and get their feedback and give them that psychological ownership over the outcome.

And like I said, that makes really, really good sense.

Well, time moves fast.

So last question for you.

For a leader who's listening to this right now and realizing their organizational culture or accountability structure needs a major overhaul, you know, turning things around can feel incredibly daunting.

What is a simple, actionable first step that they can take tomorrow morning to start shifting that needle?

I think the best thing you can do.

And by the way, if you feel like your organization needs a major overhaul, that's really the first step because a lot of people may need it and don't recognize it.

So everybody is a work in process.

Nobody has kind of gotten to that finish line because this is a journey with no finish line.

So the first thing I want to say is that the fact that you recognize it, whether you're doing well and want to raise the bar, whether you're struggling, want to improve, that's the key.

But from there, the first thing I would do that I've done is surround myself with people I trust from different parts of the company, different layers of the company.

And just, I've just put my, I've just laid it on the table that guys, here's why I think we're underperforming.

Here's why I think we've hit a flat spot and recruit allies in the process.

Rarely, I think, are you going to fix it yourself.

Find those people you trust and not just yes people.

You want to find people who are naysayers.

You want to find people that will tell you that, you know, you know, look in the mirror and say that's not pretty, right?

So you want to make sure you surround yourself with a group of rivals, if you will, people that are not afraid to speak their minds and then you recruit them into the process and I think you fix it together.

Now, as the leader, you're still steering the ship, you're still determining the direction.

But the more I think you can do this with your team, the more people are going to be pulling in the same direction as you very hard, and I've tried this very hard to pull out of the weeds on your own.

Much easier with the team.

I think showing that humility, not always showing the bravado, showing the vulnerability will get people on your side and will let you enlist a real team to help you begin that change.

Yeah, I made that mistake early in my entrepreneurial career, brought people who would just say yes and agree with me.

And my brother taught me.

He goes, no, you want a contrarian perspective.

So you want.

You still may end up going down that road, but you want someone to raise the issues and raise the issues and push back a little bit.

Hey Brian, this was fantastic.

Lots of great insights.

The website is brianfilkow.com we'll have all that information.

Brian in the show Notes for everyone.

Thanks for sharing your insights.

The new book is out on Amazon or wherever you get your book, Barnes and Noble, in any format you want it, whether it's on audiobook or ebook or hardcover.

And congratulations on your latest project, book number three.

And they can follow you and get.

If they want to get hold of you for potential consulting or speaking engagements, I'm assuming they can get hold of you directly through the website.

Through the website or just Brian.

Brianfilco.com makes it easy.

Hey Brian, thanks for being our guest today.

Lots of great insights.

Appreciate your time.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

As you are listening to this episode, what is one idea that you've heard that's caught your attention and why does it matter so much to you?

And who is one person who you can share that with, either sharing this episode or just sharing that insight that occurred to you while you were listening?

Perhaps it is that true accountability isn't about punishment.

It's about distinguishing between honest human mistakes that require coaching and reckless behavior that requires consequences.

Or maybe it's that to eliminate operational errors and workarounds, your systems and processes must be designed by and written for the frontline people who actually execute them.

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